They’re laying off because Zuck is a horrible leader. He went all-in on metaverse that didn’t work out. They could’ve done so much more in AI/ML space with all the resources they had. Now they’re experiencing brain drain and no one wants to work for a guy with bad vision for the future.
Zucks responses are incredibly out of touch, holy shit.<p>I can absolutely see why staffers are losing trust. Mark is treating this as if everyone already agrees with the idea.<p>Just, unbelievably callous.
I don’t care much for Facebook, but I miss the days when my Facebook feed is all my friends & family. I don’t mind ads here or there or if they have a paid model, I would pay that as well. It’s funny that our family’s main sharing is shared album on iphoto now.
Meta pushed up pay for the whole industry. They also created the most important frameworks:<p>React and PyTorch.<p>For everyone hating on the company, they did more for software engineers than any other company. The most meritocratic and highly compensated
> In a show of support, Zuckerberg said he understood that workers are feeling uncertain as they wait for the possibility that they could be laid off. He added, however, that “it’s not like we can just pause working while we are figuring this out.”<p>Why should a worker be motivated to do work if by the next day they could be gone?
In my opinion, they should rip off the bandaid and conduct one big round of layoffs.<p>While I understand that gradual layoffs are less risky and easier for the organization to absorb, it seems short-sighted.<p>Delaying the inevitable will only cause more pain and damage in the long term.
I know they'll survive in some form, but companies doing multiple rounds of layoffs feel like they are in a death spiral, most especially for culture and employee trust. And fear only motivates for a short time.<p>If this is some attempt to squeeze people back to to office, well they can forget about it. I'd leave tech before I move my family for a company that has a record of cutting people.
The original story is here: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/16/zuckerberg-meta-townhall/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/16/zuckerb...</a>
Would still having Sheryl Sandberg be around make things better or worse?<p>I’m thinking that as she went more and more into background, Facebook lost more and more focus. But maybe it’s just me.
I think there's a big gulf in our industry between people who lived through 2008-2010, and people who didn't.<p>We might not go back to that dire of a situation, but I imagine it will be closer than we have been for quite some time. A lot of people see Zuckerberg as being an asshole, where really he is going above and beyond by being this communicative.<p>To be a CEO, you have to be a bastard sometimes. You don't have a choice. The trick is in the execution.
I guess these employees failed to heed this story.<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back-of-facebooks-sign-2014-12" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...</a>
> “I would guess that the way people would evaluate whether you trust me and want to work at this company in whether we are succeeding in making progress toward the overall stated goals,” Zuckerberg said, according to the Post. “I think a lot of this is about the results we are able to deliver.”<p>Great answer for shareholders.<p>Not the answer employees are looking for when trying to understand if their job will continue to exist. Especially when front-line engineers don’t have as much control over whether or not their project succeeds in the market as the execs and product people do.
Loss of your top performers trust (and creativity/productivity) is cited why layoffs cost more than they save<p>> short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation<p>1 - <a href="https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about-layoffs" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...</a>
By "spar" they mean "ask questions at the first all-hands since the 2nd round of layoffs were announced." Which, sure? But there's not a lot of additional detail in this story.
This is the right time for tech workers to finally unionize. Too long have we believed tales of exceptionalism and of evil union overlords in the way of meritocracy.<p>An injury to one is an injury to all.
Meta staffers were sparring all the time when I was at then called Facebook company. It was during the last elections and it was excruciating. People would be very agressive during Q&A and internally in posts and groups. We should do this, we should do that, this is wrong, no THIS is wrong. Everybody had their righteous opinions on how the company and specific teams were supposed to work. I remember Mark becoming red with anger during some of these weekly Q&As, and the CTO looking like he was about to cry. Yet they still kept on going and continued to give these weekly Q&A (I think a lot of people respected them for that, even with the divisions I believe trust in mgmt was the highest metric at fb)<p>I remember fighting against Chinese groups criticizing western medias and talking about how tiananmen massacre is a hoax while Mark was publicly reprimanding the people who would scratch the “black” of “black lives matter” from some of the walls of the office to overwrite it with “all”.<p>During all that time the American people hated fb. HN couldn’t comprehend how engineers could accept to join and work at facebook. The social dilemma came out on Netflix.<p>As someone who really liked the facebook app and thought it would continue to change the world in a good way, it was really hard to read about the company externally and to see employees destroying it from the inside.<p>I think my opinion now is that 1) any type of organization becomes problematic once it gets too large/accumulates too much power (religion and the government are much more of a problem than Meta though) and 2) politics shouldn’t be allowed internally. People shouldn’t “come to work as themselves”. People really suck and they should keep a lot of things to themselves.