Meta's 'Efficiency' Layoffs Take a Toll on Employee Productivity - Slashdot
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Meta's 'Efficiency' Layoffs Take a Toll on Employee Productivity
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The company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said the layoffs were necessary to improve efficiency, after over-hiring during the pandemic. Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year. But employees said some important work and planning has been at a standstill. Notably, Meta is still deciding on its product roadmap for the rest of the year, while it sorts out resources following cuts in the tech group, a person familiar with the matter said. During the limbo, employees have been unsure who to collaborate with, how to shift responsibilities on their teams or who would be cut next, according to current and recently let-go employees, who asked not to be named discussing internal issues.
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Wait, less people to do work means less work gets done? Fear of getting cut any second leads to lower employee moral, which leads to less productivity? Didn't see that one coming a universe away!!
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This seems to be a universal thing that the management never can wrap their head around. Same thing happened at Gateway. They literally sent henchmen in black suits out onto the floor. They'd walk around with clipboards, tap you on the back, and you were marched out ten minutes later by security (time to clean your desk of personal belongings, to be humane, natch). Then they wondered why morale was in the toilet and people spent more time watching the henchmen than doing their work.
I'm sure plenty of other
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When you're a certain size, layoffs gets increasingly difficult. I notice you pointed out a problem, but didn't supply a solution. How did you handle layoffs elegantly at your company?
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Don't worry...AI can do all of that undone busy work that those laid off people used to do./s
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In my experience, and what is taught in MBA classes, morale doesn't mean jack. People are going to work at Meta, because it is that or flip burgers. Same with other companies. Phone companies have had people with bad morale for decade, but they are still highly successful.
It isn't like it matters anyway. In this economy, there are 200+ people banging on the door for any tech job, and you can always offshore for cheap, so people who are at Meta should be happy they are at least drawing a paycheck as oppo
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Not only can you offshore for cheap, but most of the bean-counters in these companies are convinced at this point that the bots are going to replace most desk positions, so we'll soon be competing there whether the bots are ready to run the show or not. Gonna be a fun next decade or so.
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There are not 200+ qualified people banging on the door for any tech job. For boring non-glamorous jobs developing business software for niche markets, it is quite difficult to fill software development positions, and also difficult to retain talent. Competition for tech talent, in these domains, is pretty high.
Sometimes it is possible to bring in low-skilled greenies who can't do the job, but that doesn't do any good since they can't do the job. The same goes for outsourcing: they are there and eager to compete against each other for your business, but they can't actually deliver where it matters most.
Your mileage may vary.
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I highly recommend you take a look at SRE-tier postings at Indeed, you will find hundreds of applications for that one position. Even for L1 phone techs for $17/hour, some of those positions have 100+ people applying to those.
Developers are developers, and are not too hard to replace. As for deliverables, once a project is done and all that is needed is people to maintain it, why bother with the "rockstar" devs. After buying a bunch of airplanes, one doesn't need the engineers who made the engines on the
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Or retire. You can't assume that all of the long-term employees still need a job. When morale suffers enough, the older workers who still remember why things were done in a particular way retire, and suddenly you have a loss of institutional knowledge.
There aren't 200 qualified people, typically, except maybe in the extremely short term because of all the recent layoffs. But once those folks are all working somewhere, you'll be lucky to find more than a handful of qualified people for non-entry-level job
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This is tech. This is a social media company. The amount of useless labor dollars spent is astronomical. I don't doubt they could fire at least 60% of those left without any real impact to productivity.
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nice accounting buzzwords like improving efficiency, productivity, just sizing... at the end of the day, the people you laid off they were doing something, especially if they have been there for a while.
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Well, that's not always true. We've all seen cases where people in large companies do something but nobody would notice if they got hit by a bus.
Is that true for MetaBook? I don't know...-
That strongly suggests the managers should improve their oversight skills. Perhaps certain individual contributors should be let go, but that is the symptom, not the root problem.
These large job cuts in very profitable companies indicate the top level decisionmakers are making big decisions based on emotions. They overhired in the past because of emotions, and now they decided to do something drastic based on their emotions about perceptions of the stock market. Two wrongs might well be right, but I do n
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"Meta promised faster product development and decision-making that sent its shares up more than 100% so far this year."
Meta is going to do more with fewer people. That implies that Meta knew exactly which employees were extraneous and could be laid off. However, Meta also acknowledged that it previously didn't know which employees were extraneous, which lead to the overhiring. Going through this process of layoffs has allowed Meta to suddenly acquire the ability to switch from not knowing who was expendable to knowing exactly who was unnecessary.
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> Going through this process of layoffs has allowed Meta to suddenly acquire the ability to switch from not knowing who was expendable to knowing exactly who was unnecessary.
The hard way: yank a random wire and see what breaks.
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the hard way? that's just a fun friday!
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It's not a factory and I don't know how they can objectively measure productivity. I have been in the industry for 25 years and don't know an accurate way of measuring output or productivity? Lines of code?...easy to fool...just write shitty verbose code. Project deliverables?...easy to fool...just make deliverables smaller or create extra deliverables. I'm not saying Meta is on the right track or isn't. I just am skeptical productivity can be measured in any intelligent way for software engineers.
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Productivity is meaningless in the grand scheme. You could probably pick out 1 of 20 employees that really get stuff done in a large organization. The rest of them are just hanging about for the salary and benefits and hoping the rest of the team will keep them from being singled out. I challenge anyone to pick out the correct people to lay off, though. It's always the productive people who leave first and have an easy time getting new work. But claiming productivity is the reason for layoffs is an eas
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You are spot on. This has been a significant issue that I have seen come up again and again in my career. Management really, really wants a simple metric to measure productivity. And they are completely convinced this is possible. But every single thing they try winds up being a terrible measure of productivity and their development process is harmed by them using it.
Anything that can be measured directly is both a poor indicator of productivity AND something that can be gamed to produce a false sense of high productivity. Lines of code? Code bloat is an obvious antipattern. Number of functions? Same deal. Number of features completed? Even worse: some features are naturally much more expensive than others and hastily-written features bring with them a very harmful number of bugs.
How about "points?" As in, you know, those airy and abstract things that agile shops spend so much time obsessing over? Well, points are entirely made-up numbers that mean nothing! Their one and only purpose is to give the product owner a sense of what features are cheap, and what features are expensive, for priority-making decisions. In supremely educated and disciplined shops they can also be used to produce delivery estimates. But in no case does it even make logical sense to track them as a productivity metric (the only thing such attempts actually track, in the best of cases, is estimate accuracy). Points as productivity metric are so easy to game that developers cannot even help themselves from doing so the moment they realize that they are being judged by the size of those numbers.
That last one bugs me because agile shops seem to be full of managers who cannot understand this. "Points" look so much like a productivity metric to them that their capacity to reason simply shuts down when you try to explain why productivity is simply not something this number can measure.
The bottom line is: software developer productivity is too slippery to measure in any precise, metrics-based way. You are better off putting developers in teams and hoping that the bright and honest team members will hold-accountable any other team members that start slacking off. THAT actually works, and saves you a fortune in wasted efforts at gathering misleading metrics.
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Exactly: any metric can be gamed.
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Staff changes of any significance always mean a productivity drop in the sort term at least.
0) Its a morale hit
1) Its scares people, people want to actually leave are going spend a little time calling friends and making sure they HAVE prospects if they are dismissed next
2) it creates confusion - who is in charge of... now. Frank is gone, Bob used to need Frank to sign off on... can Bob sign off now or does it need to go all the way up to Ted or Alice?
everyone stop we need to have a meeting to create new o-
It is *never* better in the long term. If you have good people you can change what the company does overnight and will be fine, but getting rid of the people while maintaining the status quo with the product is just a path to death.
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As a contractor, I have survived all three rounds of Meta layoffs. I have also just finished today the last task I could make progress on, so I'm just sitting around waiting for somebody to review it and waiting for them to give me something else to do. In the past, I once spent an entire week in the "waiting for them to give me something to do" state, because as a contractor, I have strong incentives to not tell them I'm not doing anything.
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It is called fear driven development, never stop working and smile to your manager, otherwise you are next in the next layoff round! It is definitely business antipattern, all needed brutalities are supposed to be done all once and not extended for years, it is well known thing for centuries. Facebook team lacks fundamental business management knowledge.
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