alt.hn

1/14/2025 at 5:06:16 PM

Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

 https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/14/meta-targeting-lowest-performing-employees-in-latest-round-of-layoffs.html

by drchiu

1/14/2025 at 6:45:32 PM

So in the first two weeks of the year Zuck has announced:

- Replacing their global policy chief with the company's highest ranking Republican.

- Appointing Dana White to the company's board.

- Changing content policies to be aligned with the incoming administration.

- Elimination of DEI programs in hiring.

- Removing tampons from men's restrooms.

- Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.

- 5% layoff of low performers. Company needs to get "intense".

Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?

by paxys

1/16/2025 at 1:19:13 AM

It's hilarious. Meta introduced stuff Democrats liked when Democrats were in charge, and it switched to stuff Republicans like precisely on the switchover to Republicans being in charge.

It's so transparent, perhaps part of the point is how nakedly self-serving and obvious it is.

What Meta actually wants to do is hoover up the world's data and sell it, get the world hooked on constant engagement, and erode their privacy until they have none left. To be the middleman getting paid in the entire world's engagement.

The left/right culture war stuff is just so the alien in the human suit can keep getting away with what he actually wants to do.

by amiga386

1/14/2025 at 11:57:42 PM

Related: Meta to move content moderators to Texas as part of plan to end fact-checking program

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/07/texas-meta-content-m...

by DamnInteresting

1/15/2025 at 2:46:26 AM

Is he going to start wearing cowboy hats and buying up land in Texas now ?

by foogazi

1/15/2025 at 3:30:42 PM

I mean, yea, probably.

by cootsnuck

1/16/2025 at 2:56:35 AM

He is trying not to get Nuremberged.

He is a snake. I also live on Kauai and most of the locals don't want him here, he is trying to turn his image around but most people aren't really buying it or haven't really thought about it too deeply.

He, in my view, is desperate to hang onto 'his throne' but all it takes is the right person, with the right vision, at the right time...with enough support.

by rblion

1/15/2025 at 6:28:07 PM

Why not just assume the simplest thing, the positions companies take under Democrats are fake and so are the positions under Republicans.

To imagine that, "the mask is off" is absurd.

None of those bullets points are crises.

by nh23423fefe

1/15/2025 at 6:23:27 PM

> Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.

Was it as excruciatingly cringeworthy as it sounds? I don’t want to give them the view or spend three hours of my time on that, but I’d take a highlight of the weirdest moments.

> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?

It feels like he suddenly became a Musk fanboy and wants to mimic him. Maybe because Zuckerberg completely failed at going into politics when he dipped his toes in it in the past and Musk just got his candidate elected.

by latexr

1/15/2025 at 7:44:22 PM

No not really - it's quite a good interview. Here's the masculine energy bit if you want to judge for yourself. You only have to watch a couple of minutes to get an idea https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=5329 To me "ranting" is not true. He calmly says he was brought up with girls and it's quite nice go get out and do martial arts for a change. To me that's normal and getting upset about 'men' not getting free tampons is kinda weird.

by tim333

1/16/2025 at 2:56:49 AM

> Here's the masculine energy bit if you want to judge for yourself. You only have to watch a couple of minutes to get an idea

Thank you for the link, I did watch it.

> To me "ranting" is not true.

Agreed. That didn’t feel at all like a rant. Though from the little I watched I do disagree with him and think he doesn’t have a good understanding of the zeitgeist. He claims that culture has swung in the direction that “masculinity is bad” and “masculinity is toxic” when that’s not at the argument. The term “toxic masculinity” refers to specific traits of masculinity which promote destructive facets, it doesn’t mean that all masculinity is toxic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity

Note I’m not implying you yourself don’t understand the concept, I’m merely taking this opportunity to add my own comments on the segment, and the reply to the post where you graciously provided a link seems like a good place.

Thank you again for adding the context.

by latexr

1/16/2025 at 3:51:27 AM

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but seeing what seem to me to be colloquial, recently originating informal phrases linked to from Wikipedia seems a bit silly or giving conceited "get educated" vibes.

It reads as though that's somehow where it came from or is an authoritative source required to use or interpret it. In this case, the phrase vaguely associates toxicity with masculinity, and whether it's intended or not, if a more specific nuanced meaning is intended, then it should be articulated concisely with a different choice of language that probably should have been chosen in the first place; the intuitive interpretation is the one that takes hold.

In different contexts in real life, I've had people be outwardly racist, sexist, or otherwise prejudiced toward me, and when responded to in a very calm manner, they scoffed that "oh here's a book to read on why actually that's impossible" when actually nah we're all just using language, and if there's a progressive, genuine intention to create a space that's as equitable and as conflict-free as possible for all, than shit like that isn't going to fly.

by brailsafe

1/15/2025 at 6:33:36 PM

Supposedly he actually talked about both "masculine energy" and "feminine energy" being valuable as opposed to the modern corporate environment being "neutral" or "neutered," so take that for whatever.

by psunavy03

1/15/2025 at 12:44:00 PM

> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?

His whole era of big name tech founders seems to be going through it.

by AbstractH24

1/15/2025 at 4:44:29 PM

> Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.

This one in particular feels very midlife crisis coded; weird insecure masculinity stuff. But, y'know, most men who have issues with that get by with an ill-advised car or something.

by rsynnott

1/15/2025 at 8:13:18 PM

That's just how he's always been. He's an insecure little incel at heart.

Facebook's precursor was a HotOrNot clone that used female classmates' photographs without permission. It takes a certain type of person to build something like that.

by bigfatkitten

1/15/2025 at 10:11:49 PM

??? He met his now wife when he was a sophomore in college and has an extremely normal family life as far as I can tell.

by anthonypasq

1/15/2025 at 5:16:55 PM

This behavior seems much in line with Musk.

The all in podcast has four high net worth people with a similar vibe.

Something disturbing is going on in the ranks of the "elite". I get these people are narcissistic, but the overt displays of contempt combined with authoritarian cowtowing is a bit frightening.

A trade war with China combined with other increasing consequences conflicts seems to be bringing the age of global free trade to an end, or at least a very different one.

The Ukrainian success with naval drones may mean the end of secure seas as well. Drones are cheap, anonymous, and effective.

That implies an disruption to the multinational corporate order, and an emphasis on domestic or near domestic production, and less of the government independence / arbitrage that the super rich have gotten used to.

But the ultras all seem to be going into these maniacal bond villain molds. Is Musk a symptom or a torchleader?

by AtlasBarfed

1/15/2025 at 8:04:07 PM

Are you implying there are no differences between masculine and feminine? If there are differences and you value diversity, you should want masculine to be represented.

Unless you mean masculine == bad, which would be a very bigoted take.

by linuxftw

1/15/2025 at 6:15:53 AM

Feels like the board trying to minimize risks in the new political-cultural climate. It's a pity, really.

by ochronus

1/16/2025 at 1:21:19 AM

It was equally a pity when they minimized them on the left in the last few years, wouldn’t you agree?

by Vaslo

1/17/2025 at 2:44:56 AM

Given that true leftists genuinely want to create a better world and the GOP wants to do harm, I would not agree. I’m no saying it wasn’t fake bullshit then from Zuck. Just that it was fake but still made things a bit better for people rather than causing harm.

by alsetmusic

1/14/2025 at 8:09:02 PM

I know Zuck wasn't super popular on HN, but until these recent events, I saw him as someone generally reasonable and pragmatic.

I can understand that he had to compromise with Trump in order to protect his wealth and company. But it's clearly more than that. I wonder, does he even have values on his owns? will he reinstate the tampons if democrats win in 4 years?

My guess is that he's slowing been adhering to the Trump/Musk ideology (like a lot of people) and now is one of them.

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 9:54:04 PM

I think once he started working out and getting strong, he looked less like an android and more like a human male. His politics may have shifted as a result of building muscle:

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

* https://hbr.org/2013/07/mens-arm-strength-affects-thei

* https://www.psypost.org/strong-men-come-across-as-more-conse...

by Perceval

1/15/2025 at 3:35:30 AM

He was always athletic. I believe he was captain of the fencing team in high school.

by redlock

1/15/2025 at 2:43:18 AM

The bimbofication of society unironically has bad consequences for us all. I believe excess gym makes you less nerdy and more reactive, despite studies saying it 'makes you smarter'.

by t0lo

1/15/2025 at 6:35:42 PM

I'm far from a bodybuilder, but this is certainly . . . a take. Whatever happened to the ideal of a sound mind in a sound body? Why does our society have this stupid "jock/nerd" dichotomy where the smart can't be strong and the strong can't be smart?

by psunavy03

1/15/2025 at 6:48:53 PM

As someone who enjoys lifting weights, I agree with you. However, I can easily imagine an argument based on all of the strange add-on effects you get from being immersed in "gym culture". Working out isn't just working out, it means you start getting fitness posts in your social media algorithms, surrounding yourself with a new group of people with potentially different views on masculinity, shilling supplements, etc.

Aka don't ignore the social side of fitness.

by littlekey

1/17/2025 at 5:24:51 PM

I learn what I can, apply it, and then try to run the hell away from the mostly online strength community at large. It’s a lot of drama, shilling, fragile egos, harmful advice, useless advice, mixed with some gems you can mine from it with some necessary filtering and vigilance. My local community on the other hand is amazing.

by spacemadness

1/15/2025 at 5:24:45 PM

You don't see being friendly to the new US administration being pragmatic ?

by fooker

1/14/2025 at 9:31:44 PM

He's a weak man that detached from reality and has no anchors to the real world anymore. He's just saying whatever shit he thinks will make him money

by downrightmike

1/15/2025 at 8:15:44 PM

He just does what the government tells him to do. Now, before and in the future. I personally dislike any divide and conquer agendas, especially the woke one, and am happy that it bursts now.

by sharpshadow

1/15/2025 at 9:21:32 AM

> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?

He's the definition of a perpetual beta trying to be alpha.

I would love to spar with him in BJJ sometime. After you train for awhile you can lock up with someone and immediately feel who they are. An alpha stays calm and relaxed, never panicking even as they are being put to sleep [1]. He went into BJJ hoping to become alpha and it just highlighted even further he's not.

[1] BTW, this isn't a bullshit masculine/man/woman thing. I roll with plenty of women and many of them are more alpha than many men I know.

by matwood

1/15/2025 at 6:37:02 PM

There's no better way to torch your credibility than to use the terms "beta" and "alpha" unironically.

by psunavy03

1/15/2025 at 7:46:22 PM

The ironic part is that's what he's probably thinking and chasing (he talked at length recently about bringing 'masculine energy' back to Meta). He's literally one of the most powerful people in the world, but always comes across as wishy washy and unconfident.

by matwood

1/14/2025 at 5:47:43 PM

When I was an engineering manager there, engineering leadership described performance reviews as, in a large well run engineering organization, you'll probably be firing 5-10% of your employees every year for low performance. (Well, "non regrettable attrition", which includes people who quit when they get pipped.)

Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.

So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.

by lacker

1/14/2025 at 5:55:57 PM

Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard? Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?

This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.

by psunavy03

1/14/2025 at 6:02:52 PM

> Is your hiring process so flawed that you just accept that you screwed up hiring 5 percent of your people?

if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process

the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires

by hnthrowaway6543

1/14/2025 at 6:09:09 PM

Are these numbers coming out of thin air? Gut feel perhaps? So after you fire 10% and don’t hire, that holds until there is nobody left?

Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?

by spacemadness

1/15/2025 at 1:17:37 AM

The numbers are discussed by upper engineering management. They might change over time depending on the situation the company is in.

Think of a hypothetical organization with 10,000 software engineers. You're the head of engineering. You have ten divisions, each with a VP managing 1000 engineers. Each VP has ten directors, each managing 100 engineers, and each line manager has 10 engineers on the team.

The engineering team reviews the past year. You notice, overall we fired 500 people last year. Okay, so on average that was 5% of staff. Seems reasonable just as a sanity check. (You ask your buddies at other large tech companies, and the other heads of engineering are reporting similar numbers.)

Now you look through the individual teams. A lot of 10-person teams don't fire anyone. That makes sense. But would you expect a director to fire nobody from their org? From 100 people... well, maybe. I'd be a little suspicious. I'd ask some other directors, does this person have a reputation of a very high quality team, or is it more likely that this director is lax, and their org doesn't manage out its underperformers?

Now imagine a VP fired nobody. 1000 people and they all were high performers. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. That VP is probably letting their team get away with low standards. If you were the head of engineering meeting with your VPs, I think the group would be able to come to a consensus of, there's a problem here. It's based on the 5% target but it's not a hard and fast rule.

In the long run, having a high-performing team is better for morale than firing nobody. It's the difference between working at Meta and working at the DMV.

by lacker

1/16/2025 at 9:12:44 PM

So: You have no measure of performance and go off vibes. You have no scientific basis and go off vibes. You pretend this is all logical and common sense but it's really all just vibes.

You could end up performing way better firing half of your teams. And what about your managers? How is an underperforming manager in the higher positions ever fired?

I get that measuring performance is incredibly difficult, but dressing it up as if 5-10% of people are underperformers anyway is just so tantamount to how baseless and incompetent most businesses are run these days. Especially in software.

by voxl

1/14/2025 at 6:28:34 PM

morale is also adversely affected by people having obvious underperformers on their team that they have to work around, so pick your poison

by hnthrowaway6543

1/14/2025 at 7:51:16 PM

> Maybe we should stop with the gut feel managerial apologies and think about what we’re doing and how it affects company morale, no?

Maybe you can devise a methodology that reduces bad hiring to below 5% across the entire S&P 500 and then share it with us?

by antisthenes

1/14/2025 at 9:23:46 PM

5% of your new hires, doesn't necessarily mean 5% of your company.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

^But let's say you messed up hiring 20% of your company, and then you corrected that (layoffs for the past 2 years). You haven't hired enough people to justify perma-cutting 5%. And the number of functioning employees who stop working in a role isn't going to be as high as 5%.

The reality is that most hires are probably fine in the role they're in. And you don't actually need to be this aggressive in cost-cutting.

by xracy

1/15/2025 at 1:30:32 AM

This specific target being discussed was 5% of all headcount, not just new hires.

You shouldn't think of all firing as a "mistaken hire". Sometimes you hire someone, and they work effectively for years, and then they kind of "check out" and don't do much work any more. It can be a good decision to hire someone, and then later a good decision to fire them.

It's also not a cost-cutting measure per se. Typically when you fire someone you get to replace the headcount with another hire or internal transfer. The point of firing people is to get rid of low performers and replace them with high performers.

by lacker

1/15/2025 at 1:50:12 AM

This is somehow better than exploring ways to improve your existing employees' performance?

by xigency

1/15/2025 at 8:07:15 AM

There are people ready to be hired that aren't checked out

by qwe----3

1/15/2025 at 1:39:15 PM

Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.

If a construction site was sending formerly qualified people away no longer able to work we would definitely investigate their practices. Tech deserves the same scrutiny.

by xigency

1/15/2025 at 3:15:31 PM

I don't think people are getting "destroyed", they are just bored and want to find something else, but there are factors keeping them in the same place. Interviewing is hard, they may have a lot of stock vesting, the economy is bad, or their life situation makes it inconvenient, etc.

by thebigspacefuck

1/15/2025 at 3:23:12 PM

> Sure. This is a great model to adopt if you believe corporations exist to destroy people.

corporations exist to make money, or maximize shareholder returns, depending on how you look at it. corporations don't exist to make people happy or solve the fundamental societal issues with capitalism. there's merit to discussing that as a separate topic, but in the context of "capitalism exists and you are operating a business within it", you want to fire low performers and replace them with high performers

by hnthrowaway6543

1/15/2025 at 5:10:36 PM

Gosh, Okay, we can only criticize corporations in the very limited avenues where we discuss specifically how they're meant to make money. Not in any of the other ways those goals lead to questionable decisions.

by xracy

1/15/2025 at 5:34:53 PM

it's not really a questionable decision though. in the absence of morals, which is what we have in a capitalist society, the way to maximize the success of a corporation is to remove low performers and replace them with high performers. that's common sense. criticizing a company for doing this because it "destroys people" is misplaced anger, as you should be criticizing the system the company operates in, which again, is a whole other discussion

by hnthrowaway6543

1/16/2025 at 2:19:58 AM

You have to remember that it is we the people of society that give corporations permission to exist.

A band of criminals has no protection over their enterprise. They all go to jail.

And why we have these conversations: to build consensus over these rules.

by xigency

1/15/2025 at 8:07:51 PM

"Beatings will continue until morale improves."

by psunavy03

1/14/2025 at 6:18:16 PM

I understand that you made up your 20%, but at that point it feels like you are blaming bad team fit or environment as bad hires, and this fitting can change over time as bad politics or shifts to different goals happen.

by dietr1ch

1/14/2025 at 6:26:55 PM

bad hire doesn't necessarily mean bad/stupid/incompetent person, it just means bad hire. might not be a fit for the role, might not be a fit for the company. for example, i freely admit i was a bad hire at Google because i got demotivated by big corporate/political bullshit getting in my way, it just wasn't for me. then i went to a 20 startup and, in the words of the CEO, "saved the company" and scaled it to 200 people

and no i didn't make up 20%, Gartner did a study on it. and most people with management/hiring experience report the same.

by hnthrowaway6543

1/15/2025 at 12:26:49 AM

But firing people for performance is framed as the person is bad/stupid/incompetent. The problem with the 5% quota is that it doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of 5% bad fits. It often results in arbitrary top down push to fire x number of people in the org, which then translates to people with most political prowess keep their jobs and their headcounts while competent people get gaslighted, overworked and eventually fired because of moving goalposts. These people get put on PIP and eventually fired, often by telling them they are bad/incompetent and criticizing them excessively and pulling apart every single thing they do. Some people don’t care about this treatment, but others often face severe physical and mental health problems due to the excessive stress that is put on them.

by darth_avocado

1/15/2025 at 6:09:18 PM

Also since we are mentioning Google, they had some interesting to say in one of their books [0]:

"Ratings, although an important way to measure performance during a specific period, are not predictive of future performance and should not be used to gauge readiness for a future role or qualify an internal candidate for a different team. (They can, however, be used to evaluate whether an employee is properly or improperly slotted on their current team; therefore, they can provide an opportunity to evaluate how to better support an internal candidate moving forward.)"

[0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch04.html#challeng...

by colin_jack

1/14/2025 at 6:19:48 PM

Other than agreeing with "spacemadness", I wanted to point out a small correction. Original argument was about 5% of total employees, not only new hires.

by tauwauwau

1/15/2025 at 12:05:21 AM

The arbitrariness is a risk. But the general idea is that there is a strong inertial bias against firing “enough”, and this grows exponentially with company size. Doing a PIP is extremely annoying when you are already sure you want to fire someone. So it’s not uncommon for underperformers to get moved around.

Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.

Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.

by theptip

1/14/2025 at 6:05:32 PM

>Why? Why set an arbitrary number of people who need to be fired as opposed to grading people to a standard?

A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.

by ramesh31

1/14/2025 at 10:35:35 PM

I think grading people to a standard is very difficult.

At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.

So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.

Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.

by jaredklewis

1/14/2025 at 11:41:12 PM

Promotions are always going to be subjective because they're a judgement call about how well the person will perform in a more senior role. Firing someone is different; the bar for that is that they are squarely underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable.

The idea that some fixed percentage of people always underperform is possibly Jack Welch's most toxic contribution to management, and with all the BS he spewed over the years, that's saying something. It makes people compete against each other Hunger Games-style as opposed to working as a team.

by psunavy03

1/15/2025 at 12:44:16 AM

Well I guess I don't see how a manager can determine if someone is "underperforming relative to what is reasonably expectable" without the issues I mentioned in my first post, namely that there is no objective way to make that determination. Managers will mostly be incentivized to determine that no one is ever underperforming relative to a firing standard. And maybe it wasn’t clear, but at my previous company, those evaluations were not just used for promotions, but also who to PIP.

There is also the more philosophical question of where that standard would come from in the first place. And what if the business finds that the average applicant meets a much higher standard than the current firing standard of the company? It would seem to then make sense to raise the company's own firing standard.

by jaredklewis

1/15/2025 at 1:59:22 AM

Of course you can always make things so entirely vague as to be completely meaningless while still asserting that you are constantly improving by adopting a slogan like "raising the bar."

by xigency

1/14/2025 at 6:04:57 PM

We've had many years in our industry where funded and public company were in a mad rush to put seats in chairs. It's like storming a field to pick fruit because you fear others will get it all first: you're incentivized to hoard, and not inspect.

by bdcravens

1/14/2025 at 7:00:21 PM

If you are in growth mode, say 20% growth or more -- and you are hiring quickly, your probably gonna have new dynamics form that change the shape of the team (Every hire changes the culture). Some folks may no longer be the right folks. (Could even be a new hire -- I had someone who I had high hopes for leave in 9 months because they weren't able to mesh.)

Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)

To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.

This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.

Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)

by lbotos

1/14/2025 at 7:06:06 PM

Statistically speaking there will be a few percent of bad hires and people whose skills don't match the requirements. Arguably, they could detect that during probation period, possibly extending probation period needed. That's how it's done in more progressist european countries. It gets harder to fire people after that.

Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 6:14:09 PM

Honestly I would be ecstatic if it was possible for a hiring process to have a 95% success rate.

by foobarian

1/14/2025 at 6:28:54 PM

it makes sense that if average tenure at a company is 3-5 years then some percentage yearly firing will cull people who have 'quiet quit' and havent fully quit yet

by vanjajaja1

1/14/2025 at 5:59:35 PM

Isn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do, yet they fire engineer because "ratio"?

Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?

by whynotmaybe

1/14/2025 at 7:09:32 PM

> Isn't this quite paradoxical that those kind of companies have hard interviews where you have to almost prove that P=NP in front of 5 people that judges everything you do

Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.

The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 9:39:22 PM

> With enough preparation

That's quite the qualifier. I could not regularly pass these interviews when I had done 200+ LC problems. It's only when I got to 1000+ LC problems and had done hundreds of technical interviews that I was able to regularly pass a lot of these interviews. Even now, it still requires me to prepare a lot because how often am I really thinking about suffix tries? It's an arms race. It has happened in universities as well. An arms race between the professors trying to make sure a lot of students still fail their classes while every student needs a 4.0 to get an internship/job now.

It will get higher and higher as time goes on because we're mostly focused on H1B candidates who come from a similarly culture of grinding for exams. You can see this lifestyle is very normalized on the LC, 1point3acres, etc. Cheating is also seen as completely fine too. At this point, I feel like it's almost unfair to not be cheating due to how many people are. Your competition doesn't care about some sense of ethics (nor does the hiring manager - they cheated to get in too!).

I've met with multiple folks at FAANG and such where these practices of grinding + a little "magic" get you in. You talk to someone and they'll say, "oh yeah, I have like three guys I went to high school with in [country] in my house. Once one of us got accepted, it was easy for the rest of us."

by bradlys

1/14/2025 at 7:24:27 PM

It's a bit like a sport, you can have the skills and yet still have an off day or perform worse under pressure, so it's not just a matter of preparation.

by fldskfjdslkfj

1/15/2025 at 8:29:53 PM

From my experience on the Meta side of the interview process, the questions are designed to account for "a bad day".

Also, the follow ups are designed to eventually lock the candidate, since is not enough to pass the low bar, they want to know what your high bar is too.

by pbalau

1/14/2025 at 11:09:56 PM

It is harder now. They are steering away from 2 LC med each round

by aprilthird2021

1/15/2025 at 12:01:45 AM

Do you have any more info? I what manner are they changing things?

by heromal

1/14/2025 at 6:47:55 PM

The firing is not motivated by the ratio. It's not a handcuff saying you must find x% of the workforce to fire.

It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.

But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.

by Kilenaitor

1/14/2025 at 6:10:28 PM

These interview practices are probably in part because of the huge number of applicants trying to get into Meta, which allows them to rachet up the difficulty to the highest level.

My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)

[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...

[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...

by supriyo-biswas

1/14/2025 at 6:21:53 PM

As a former interviewer at Meta who did hundreds of technical interviews, I can tell you that the people that I hardly expected "Djikstra or Knuth". Honestly I gave pretty reasonable questions that were similar to the types of things I would do in my work (with some modifications to work as an interview question). And still the majority of people didn't do great. It's even worse at the "screen" stage, where I've had people that, e.g. didn't know what "function" means or couldn't write a loop to find the max number in an array.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 6:43:10 PM

Yup, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy where you hire extra, possibly not top candidates, just so you have something to shed when the time comes without affecting your existing team.

by matsemann

1/14/2025 at 6:08:35 PM

It's understandable that in an organization that hasn't tightened its screws on employees, you will be able to find 5% low performers. But do you expect to find 5% low performers even after 5 iterations of these firings? Like eventually you are left only with medium to high performers, and you are just making their lives miserable by turning work into a meaningless Hunger Games season.

by elevatedastalt

1/14/2025 at 6:17:19 PM

I would imagine a lot of the firings are new hires, or people being replaced by new people who are a better fit; so it really depends on the rate your company is growing.

If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.

So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.

by jerojero

1/14/2025 at 6:13:13 PM

Isn't the average tenure low enough that after five years, most of your workforce has turned over?

by senordevnyc

1/14/2025 at 9:23:00 PM

Varies. What I have seen happening often is that many teams end up with a mix of very tenured people (who are strong contributors and who are sticking around for whatever reasons), and new hires who are too early in the role to be properly evaluated or to be thrown the lowest rating at.

by elevatedastalt

1/16/2025 at 2:05:49 PM

It sounds like you missed the fun that was stack ranking in the ‘90s. Combine that with “360 reviews” like we had at GE where team members rank each other and the only sensible thing was to “defect” and rank everyone low in the hopes someone wouldn’t understand the game and rank you higher.

by dugmartin

1/15/2025 at 6:37:28 PM

Isn’t performance relative?

by dambi0

1/14/2025 at 6:10:56 PM

I am lukewarm about unions, but if that shit would be the new work norm I would go hard left.

Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?

by ralfd

1/14/2025 at 8:21:48 PM

Indeed. If you're on a team where the bottom 5% are always getting culled, eventually you're going to find yourself in the bottom 5%. That's just math.

Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.

by ryandvm

1/14/2025 at 6:30:20 PM

It's not like the firing is random. "Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. Most people are average or above so they will be completely unaffected, it's not likely you would drop from 50th percentile to 5th.

On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 8:17:42 PM

I love how so many on HN have embraced “low performers” as an unbending metric that isn’t gamed by management to fire people without paying severance. I’ve seen this happen.

by spacemadness

1/14/2025 at 7:15:59 PM

It's not the perception of "randomness" that is a problem, it's the arbitrary figure attributed to getting fired with no comment on methodology or the attributes that will get you fired.

We assume there would probably be PIP for those individuals in this hypothetical scenario. However even then, saying "10 percent of our workforce will guaranteed be subject to PIP and or firing as a matter of our staffing methodology" instantly turns much of your working time into fluffing your work and backstabbing colleagues.

OR running away at great speed.

OR telling investorts "We do not grow, we abritrarilly trim regardless of market forces."

AKA, GE.

by Reubachi

1/14/2025 at 7:22:38 PM

This is quite disingenuous. “Low performers” in many of these companies aren’t low performers. It’s often whoever the boss likes the least due to whatever reason.

I’ve rarely seen anyone let go and thought the person was a low performer. Most of the time the person was fired because they questioned authority.

by bradlys

1/15/2025 at 9:15:16 AM

I haven't worked in FAANG, but have seen and personally fired people before. All were justified, and in times where I had to do the firing I was always late. And I knew I was late because the team would say, 'about time'.

by matwood

1/16/2025 at 5:21:55 PM

""Low performers" get a lot of warnings throughout the year. "

oh you sweet summer child. No, in many cases they absolutely do not.

by par

1/14/2025 at 9:24:50 PM

Every coworker (and each person outside your company with similar skills) is a competitor in a global marketplace for various skills. It's just not very useful or helpful to think about it only in that way. Day to day it's much more helpful to think of my coworkers as fellow travelers, wrenching on the same big distributed machine in the cloud, generally just trying to get shit done and be useful.

Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.

10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.

by dnissley

1/15/2025 at 3:13:49 PM

Not that I think firing 5% makes any sense but unions are a far worse evil, had to walk past almost 20 people in a tiny train station pretending to be ticket inspectors when the gate for ticket checks is automated and within view of them all so it's a completely fake job but they can't fire them so they have them do this "job" till they retire on a excellent pension which to make matters worse along with their salary are negotiated via the threat of striking crippling the capitals transport network.

If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.

by whywhywhywhy

1/14/2025 at 6:14:52 PM

I am very much opposed to unions,I think in general , with time unions workers are just trading one oppressing power structure where they have not much control for another. However, i think with the way things go, it's inevitable that IT/Knowledge worker with start unionizing. The same things happens for starbucks the coffee : As the company grew, the margin improvement came at the expense of the employee working conditions until unions start forming

by soulbadguy

1/14/2025 at 6:53:22 PM

What's noteworthy is that there isn't going to be a PIP process this year. The day the review cycle is over the bottom 5% of employees will be shown the door.

by paxys

1/14/2025 at 10:00:55 PM

So as a manager you get to fire 5% without you being affected then in turn the other 95% work harder to make you look better. Sounds like a win win. I can see why you are in favor of this insane policy.

by kingbiz

1/14/2025 at 6:50:06 PM

Viewed in isolation, the number of redundancies might not be unusual, but how it's being presented to the employees is.

Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.

He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.

by stg22

1/14/2025 at 9:30:08 PM

This is pretty stupid, you hire the best and the brightest, arbitrarily firing any of them 'just because' seems like a good way to burn moral for no real gain.

by downrightmike

1/14/2025 at 7:00:56 PM

> But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.

I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 6:06:32 PM

Level and start/end year of tenure if you don't mind sharing. As meta grew in employee number things definitly worsen on that front

by soulbadguy

1/14/2025 at 6:59:08 PM

Canadian tycoon Jim Pattison (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Pattison) was known for firing the lowest performing car salesman each month.

by kazinator

1/14/2025 at 8:13:18 PM

Let's not glorify this people and state what it is: toxic behavior and abuse.

by siva7

1/15/2025 at 5:05:44 AM

it was cute, perhaps, in Glengarry Glen Ross (coffee is for closers!), it's abhorrent when seeing it used here.

by riffic

1/15/2025 at 2:56:31 PM

It wasn't cute there, either, it was explicitly a device to stage the desperation that catalyzed the rest of the plot.

by deciduously

1/14/2025 at 9:18:08 PM

I call bullshit on this.

What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.

In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.

by surgical_fire

1/14/2025 at 6:11:22 PM

that's such a mad, fear-based way to run shop.

by riffic

1/14/2025 at 5:52:56 PM

Yeah 5% is a very weird number. Why not just stop over hiring?

by tqi

1/14/2025 at 6:07:49 PM

The goal is to always be bringing in new talent and cutting lowest performers to increase productivity. They want the new talent and don’t care about the low performers at a personal level.

by nateglims

1/14/2025 at 8:03:38 PM

Metas philosophy (based on what an ex Meta person told me) is “up or out”

So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to

by mingus88

1/14/2025 at 8:24:57 PM

it's only up or out until you reach a terminal career level (E5)

by tqi

1/15/2025 at 10:26:15 PM

That sounds again like Huawei and those China companies

by taikocat

1/14/2025 at 7:04:36 PM

I'm confused. The article specifically states that Meta cut 25% of its workforce since 2022 (that's not counting the 5% that are being reported). What overhiring?

by drillsteps5

1/15/2025 at 3:57:39 PM

A lot of companies doubled in size due to the Covid surge, for questionable strategic reasons

by Redoubts

1/14/2025 at 6:31:20 PM

The goal is to replace that 5% with new hires, resulting in higher average performance. It has nothing to do with total hiring amount.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 6:50:52 PM

... and correspondingly lower salaries.

by zhengyi13

1/14/2025 at 7:17:44 PM

That is the definition of higher performance. Greater contribute output for less input

by Reubachi

1/14/2025 at 6:07:00 PM

Fear. Effects on stock price during when talent is a hot commodity.

Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.

by bdcravens

1/14/2025 at 5:29:08 PM

It seems Zuck is turning into Elon. What's next? closing the European offices? forcing people to return to the office? relocating HQ to Texas?

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 5:39:15 PM

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal".

The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

by voidfunc

1/14/2025 at 6:02:37 PM

Freedom of speech is a liberal concept, the application of “liberal” as a derogatory term for one side of the political spectrum was a propaganda move. Don’t give in to it.

The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).

These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.

by bee_rider

1/14/2025 at 6:17:07 PM

Actual liberals aren't really a prominent political force at this point. The culture war is between conservatives and progressives, and, contrary to popular opinion, the latter is not synonymous with liberalism - indeed, on some issues (freedom of speech being a prominent one) they are in opposition.

by int_19h

1/14/2025 at 6:35:21 PM

I think most people in the US are, on some practical level, actual liberals. We can’t see it in the way a fish doesn’t see water. But I think mostly people think of themselves as accepting of others (while not wanting their own freedom of association impinged on). I think a lot of political disagreement shows up where liberal principles collide, like two people’s freedom of expression bumping into each other. Then it becomes a wrestling match for each side to get their position seen as the liberal one.

by bee_rider

1/14/2025 at 8:30:48 PM

If people on the US were really liberal (in the original "capitalism of the free" sense), racism wouldn't even be an issue. People wouldn't care so much about race, and your genetics would be more as a "fun fact" rather than some central piece of your identity.

Also, they wouldn't care about atheists so much. Liberals may not be atheists themselves but they would be very detached from religion and "who whorships who". People wouldn't take religion so seriously.

The US is more like a bunch of conservatives trying to be liberal until their own beliefs trump liberal theory.

by leidenfrost

1/14/2025 at 9:33:56 PM

Which is why we say that we hope you get everything you voted for. Because it will back fire on you first. It always has, and it always will, not our fault you can't learn from your mistakes.

by downrightmike

1/14/2025 at 9:51:09 PM

Is that a quote? I'm not American.

by leidenfrost

1/14/2025 at 11:34:55 PM

It isn’t a quote really, just a somewhat common sentiment. People are really frustrated with some of the voting patterns in the US.

by bee_rider

1/15/2025 at 5:56:20 PM

They voted for a bunch of horrible people to do horrible stuff, which consequentially will negatively affect those voters the most.

by downrightmike

1/15/2025 at 1:42:34 PM

> If people on the US were really liberal (in the original "capitalism of the free" sense), racism wouldn't even be an issue.

These labels dont matter when your jobs are going away though.

by sumedh

1/15/2025 at 3:39:19 PM

But that's a consequence of the global market, not because of immigration. Your wage is competing with the rest of the world.

And if there's a country capable of the same productivity with cheaper salaries, then it's expected for the company to expand overseas.

by leidenfrost

1/15/2025 at 8:50:39 AM

As opposed to say the former who are on a book banning spree and openly threatening the media for simply making fun of their dear leader? This idea that those shouting loudest about “free speech” actually give a shit about it is really one of the most nakedly disingenuous things I’ve seen in a long time.

by mdhb

1/15/2025 at 9:52:25 AM

I think it's a false dichotomy: both sides pretend to care about free speech and other "classic liberal" values, and both sides' actions usually aren't aligned with this at all.

The side that has the largest gap between stated goals and actual policies then proceeds to lose the election.

by animuchan

1/14/2025 at 6:13:40 PM

Exactly, and expecting every position needs to be clubbed together as left or right wing is also a big issue. eg I am politically liberal on most of the issues, but if I mention one thing for which I am not on their camp I suddenly become far right.

by YetAnotherNick

1/14/2025 at 7:09:22 PM

Really kinda depends on what that one thing is though don't you think.

by giraffe_lady

1/15/2025 at 2:28:53 AM

Every time I see someone mention this sort of enlightened centrism online, that everyone assumes they’re far right all of a sudden for that one unmentionable idea they had, they always just leave it at “trust me bro.”

by spacemadness

1/14/2025 at 7:21:02 PM

Yeah, we’re being abstract, but it is a sort of important detail, haha.

by bee_rider

1/14/2025 at 5:56:42 PM

This feels a little off. I think those who stand to financially benefit the most are taking advantage of the opportunity to do so while they can.

Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.

I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.

by alpha_squared

1/14/2025 at 6:05:09 PM

> I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections

People often vote against their interests. They may not understand that alternatives are possible or even exist, and they can be brainwashed into thinking the other candidate is dangerous and so on... Also, the decline in quality of education isn't helping. So I don't know if there will be a backlash. Even worse, as a European, I'm afraid Musk's propaganda crosses the Atlantic and that we'll get the same fate and will vote to give up our social benefits.

by yodsanklai

1/14/2025 at 6:21:14 PM

> Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative.

We are getting more culturally conservative though - you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically.

Support for which specific policies that translates to obviously varies, but I think that's a separate question from the overall zeitgeist.

by int_19h

1/14/2025 at 8:09:19 PM

> you can see that in the polls that ask people to self-identify politically

I don't trust these because I don't think most people can self-identify in away that accurately describes their beliefs. It usually just boils down to a binary "left vs right".

There are many people who identify as "conservative", express their disdain for "leftists" over some rage-bait culture war topic of the week, but demand better workers' rights, support unionization, single payer healthcare, and other very leftist ideas.

by dns_snek

1/14/2025 at 8:29:17 PM

That's not contradictory, though - such people are cultural conservatives, not economic ones, but cultural conservatism is precisely what people are talking about when they say that it's becoming more popular.

by int_19h

1/14/2025 at 6:15:38 PM

> I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling .... the debt ceiling ...

You lost me here, because the debt ceiling is a recent political construct with the only outcome being to add friction to an already high friction process and to threaten the faith and credit of the United States.

It is neither conservative nor liberal, but obstructionist

by smileysteve

1/14/2025 at 6:03:45 PM

> Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative.

Agreed. I'm pretty sure normal folks never actually shifted left, not as much as the far-left ideology people imagined. Folks would use any plausible excuse to end the insanity progressive politics has caused. Mind you the reverse is also true of ultra conservative politics. The world is elastic in this sense, and we see corrections from time to time.

by parasense

1/14/2025 at 6:33:28 PM

The majority of people are in the center. That's kind of how distributions work.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 5:55:33 PM

I wouldn't call it a cultural reset. It's more of a revolution.

We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.

by mywittyname

1/14/2025 at 5:57:54 PM

Seeing as many of them site dystopian sci-fi novels as their inspiration you're probably not far off.

by yoyohello13

1/15/2025 at 4:37:48 AM

In a way it's only power that we're giving them. Stop using Facebook, Twitter, stop buying teslas and shopping on Amazon and these people become slowly irrelevant when the companies do bad at earnings

by tayo42

1/14/2025 at 6:07:25 PM

I mean, in an Oligarchy, you need powerful oligarchs. We no longer have any semblance of being a democracy, possible haven't for a while.

by r00fus

1/14/2025 at 5:57:58 PM

I think this is actually a misread of long term trends. Not sure when it will be, but there will be backlash to the reset.

It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.

by asveikau

1/14/2025 at 6:02:18 PM

Yes. Reminds me of this conversation in Shogun:

Yabushige: “How does it feel to shape the wind to your will?”

Toranaga: “I don’t control the wind. I only study it.”

by gordon_freeman

1/14/2025 at 6:02:33 PM

I know people love to describe future events in terms of past events but am afraid America is heading in a direction entirely orthogonal to its history.

by varjag

1/14/2025 at 8:16:51 PM

Agreed, if you could show Americans from the 1950s what’s going on today with MAGA etc, I imagine most of it would consider it very alien.

by qgin

1/14/2025 at 10:07:12 PM

Senator McCarthy/Roy Cohn and the John Birch Society might like a word. Just replace commie with liberal/progressive/marxist/socialist.

Roy Cohn was Don's business mentor.

by hindsightbias

1/14/2025 at 6:11:40 PM

i read a lot of history especially US, i don't think so at all. the reawakening? prohibition? you should definitely see the Reagan admin as a parallel

by ineedaj0b

1/14/2025 at 6:39:57 PM

There are so many striking dissimilarities with Reagan admin on all but a handful policy directions that it can't serve as a parallel.

by varjag

1/14/2025 at 6:11:55 PM

In terms of a cultural moment it feels like the 80s. Millions of his voters weren’t ideological conservatives but didn’t fully disagree and like the strength Reagan projected after the turmoil of the mid 60s through the 70s.

They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.

by nateglims

1/14/2025 at 6:35:11 PM

The 80s were a reaction to the "liberal" 70s. It's just the natural cycle of history, the majority of people are in the center so when culture shifts too far to one side they start pushing it back.

by blsapologist42

1/15/2025 at 12:52:40 PM

Sounds like the increase in the amount of information people have access to and the speed of the news cycle, the speed at which the pendulum swings may just be accelerating.

by AbstractH24

1/14/2025 at 7:17:42 PM

There’s definitely an element of rubber banding and I think this time some of it is built up resentment about how liberals dominated big cultural institutions like TV and movies. That said I don’t think everyone who voted for trump cares about this, but the malaise of the Biden presidency was a powerful proximate factor

by nateglims

1/14/2025 at 6:00:21 PM

Perhaps a smidgen earlier, to the gilded age

by morkalork

1/15/2025 at 3:06:13 AM

What period are you referring to?

1930-1980 were marked by much higher levels of taxation and wealth redistribution than we have today.

1980-Present are the neo-liberal experiment resulting in massive income inequality.

by danny_codes

1/15/2025 at 12:54:40 PM

When is your baseline for when equality was ideal?

Was the 19th century a time of utopian equality?

by AbstractH24

1/14/2025 at 10:58:09 PM

> Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal".

Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).

> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.

by seanmcdirmid

1/14/2025 at 6:03:30 PM

this is the correct answer.

by misiti3780

1/14/2025 at 5:50:26 PM

[dead]

by malermeister

1/14/2025 at 5:49:49 PM

Is the 30's "mid-century"?

by SketchySeaBeast

1/14/2025 at 5:57:04 PM

I dont think we're heading for the 30's and arguably the 1910-40s were probably more progressive than the mid-century both artistically and culturally compared to their preceding years. I think a lot of people don't remember how conservative the US was between the 50s and 90s. A lot of the stuff we consider acceptable or OK today was really not tolerated at all in public. See, for example, LGBTQ acceptance, minorities and women in positions of power, welfare state etc.

by voidfunc

1/14/2025 at 6:22:19 PM

1910-40s is peak Jim Crow, though.

by int_19h

1/14/2025 at 5:43:24 PM

As critical as I am of Zuckerbergs recent turn a 5% performance determined cut that will be backfilled is hardly the same as what Elon did

by laidoffamazon

1/14/2025 at 6:10:27 PM

Zuck is cosplaying as Logan Paul and adopting more conservative rhetoric because he saw which way the political winds were blowing, just like everyone else who needs the help of our former and next president.

by quickthrowman

1/14/2025 at 5:39:34 PM

Yup. That sort of grandstanding is exactly what will be needed to thrive in comming years. Rules-based decisionmaking is out. We now enter the domain of meme-based corporate decisions.

by sandworm101

1/14/2025 at 6:28:53 PM

Closing the Western European offices, possibly. The Eastern ones still provide a lot of value for money and much less pushback.

by biztos

1/14/2025 at 5:39:24 PM

> closing the European offices?

This is already in progress, they're closing UK offices extremely quickly.

by iLoveOncall

1/14/2025 at 5:40:47 PM

Does anybody know why that is? I was under the impression UK staff are cheaper than US staff.

by sefrost

1/14/2025 at 5:43:56 PM

Peacocking for the new President’s agenda. No need to overthink it.

by highwaylights

1/14/2025 at 5:48:45 PM

Could you explain what that means in layman's terms?

by sefrost

1/14/2025 at 6:04:57 PM

Basically pulling jobs out of other territories and concentrating on being all-American where possible is going to sell to President Shart & chums more than the multinational aspect.

As an aside from that though, recent & planned changes in UK regulation are trying to put more onus on social media companies to police their dungeons, and they don't like that. I'm sure this aggravation has a causal relationship with Musk getting very anti-UK-government ATM (spreading “facts” about them that range from somewhat dubious down to outright lies & calls for vigilantism) – trying to push attention away from SM and its role in various problems. Pulling out of the UK will reduce their legal (and financial) risk exposure with regard to these regulation changes.

by dspillett

1/15/2025 at 12:44:21 AM

> being all-American where possible

How much of Meta's staff is H1B?

by nyarlathotep_

1/15/2025 at 10:52:40 AM

I should have been a bit more specific: as all-GOP-American as possible.

Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.

But work being done in non-American jurisdictions where the regulatory demands of other governments might affect how an American company can gouge out a profit is what causes upset. That and other regulatory demands suggesting SM companies make effort to crack down on some of the “free to speak hate” problems, which the current powers-that-be that side of the pond don't actually see as problems. Or simply that work being done elsewhere is money going into someone else's economy ‑ while many H1B workers will be sending some money back to family elsewhere, they won't be sending most of it as they need to clothe themselves, eat, pay rent, have a few luxuries, etc.

by dspillett

1/15/2025 at 3:19:17 PM

> Imported workers are just fine, even though that is not something you'd derive from many a campaign speech, particularly for specialist workers as vaguely defined by the H1B system which have an indirect benefit of adding a bit of brain-drain friction to potentially competing companies in other economies, as well as shoring up the effect of temporary local skills deficiencies.

I and others did interpret this, and recalled what they said about that matter.

Wasn't part of the campaign directly but Trump and Elon both made this very apparent.

by nyarlathotep_

1/14/2025 at 5:55:09 PM

The next president will have significant sway over decisions that will likely impact the tech sector’s direction. If the pendulum swings the “wrong” way, companies like Meta will face increased scrutiny, anti-trust investigations, regulatory oversight, and the like. If the pendulum swings the “right” way, companies will continue to enjoy free rein over their business practices.

Moving jobs back to the US (or appearing to), cancelling DEI programmes which are not approved of by the incoming administration, etc all lines up with this.

The more difficult question is whether Meta is the chicken or the egg. OP suggests Meta are courting Trump’s approval. I’m not so sure that Meta didn’t help put him there in the first place.

by d1sxeyes

1/14/2025 at 6:00:31 PM

Making a display to signal one’s willingness to mate and intended to impress a target audience, in this case the incoming administration.

It’ll absolutely work, too. The new President loves to hear how good his ideas are.

He’s been speaking lately (on JRE just a few days back too if I’m not mistaken) about the responsibility of the US government to protect US companies abroad rather than hurting them at home. This was targeted specifically at Trump, and trying to encourage him to get on Meta’s side with regulators.

He also said on JRE that the Biden administration would yell down the phone at his staff for not censoring facts, this is to rile up the GOP in Congress to pressure Trump to be seen doing the opposite and standing up for free speech (as Meta defines it).

by highwaylights

1/14/2025 at 6:04:36 PM

It has been in progress for around a year, long before there was any indication that Trump would win the election, or even be out of jail for it.

by iLoveOncall

1/14/2025 at 8:11:46 PM

Do you happen to know why? The other replies are all providing a narrative that it is related to the new US administration, but as you say it wasn't very clear who would win until the results were counted. So if it's been happening for a year it couldn't be related to that.

by sefrost

1/15/2025 at 9:50:43 AM

Speculation. Brexit (one of the greatest self-owns in political history, though the US is trying to top it) and the UK continue to tighten general travel/immigration rules. London used to be a great spot to have a companies EU presence. Brexit has only amplified London as primarily a bank for world criminals. Companies eventually wonder what's the point of being in the UK when they still need EU presence anyway.

by matwood

1/14/2025 at 9:51:47 PM

I only have second hand accounts but I've heard the Instagram CEO just hated having employees in London (/ outside of the US) and therefore started with closing Instagram positions there. Then the rest is following.

And to be clear I'm not sure a UK employee is that much cheaper than a US one. The salary is not THAT far off between the two, especially when converting from GBP to USD, and employers have a lot more social charges to pay on top of salaries in the UK and Europe.

If you add the cost of collaborating across very spread timezones, I really don't think hiring outside of the US is that much cheaper.

by iLoveOncall

1/14/2025 at 6:42:16 PM

Elon had a great year.Him weaponizing Twitter to go all-in on Trump has earned him so much political capital that those perky 50billion he paid for it look like a still now. I bet Zuck is feeling the heat, now with the government gunning for TikTok and looking at monopolies

by michaeljx

1/14/2025 at 5:43:15 PM

Trump's publicly proposed policies will have huge detrimental short-term economic impacts, so it's wise to prepare for a difficult time, IMO. If that's what's motivating the cuts, I think that's pretty rational.

by AlexCoventry

1/14/2025 at 6:01:04 PM

[dead]

by draw_down

1/14/2025 at 5:56:57 PM

Closing European offices? Gee... why would any international tech company want to do that? Hrm....

by parasense

1/14/2025 at 5:43:43 PM

It sounds like they're laying off 5% of the company, but are also firing the lowest 5% of employees without eliminating the role.

> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday. > Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.

And a direct quote from Zucky:

> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.

by tedivm

1/14/2025 at 5:48:11 PM

last quote is the key point and tracks with the other Vibe Shift press releases Mark has been on about. i read this as, there was a fear that laying off underperformers without very long PIP processes would be dangerous to the company, now he thinks it's less likely given the political landscape, so let's fire them ASAP rather than drawing it out.

by hnthrowaway6543

1/14/2025 at 5:52:30 PM

"political landscape" was the reason he gave for ending the various DEI programs.

Taken together, one could read it as getting rid of people those programs had been protecting?

by silisili

1/14/2025 at 6:33:39 PM

I'm not really clear on how the "Vibe Shift" thing is going to make this easier, but doesn't it seem like now is a great time to be doing "backfills" if you pay FAANG money?

Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.

by biztos

1/14/2025 at 5:08:53 PM

Putting all of the employees on notice to keep their heads down and do their jobs without comment or complaint.

by htrp

1/14/2025 at 5:20:35 PM

Should make all those people complaining about the DEI change shut up, the timing of the announcement is so close it is hard not to think they're related.

by reginald78

1/14/2025 at 5:37:32 PM

Missing those days when post lunch walks by Meta employees could turn into walkouts on issue of the day.

by geodel

1/14/2025 at 5:32:38 PM

Or maybe the idea was to give those people an incentive to leave on their own, so you don't have to fire them.

by this_user

1/14/2025 at 5:34:09 PM

Meta is embracing free speech while suppressing it!

by gedpeck

1/14/2025 at 5:40:30 PM

That's paid speech. Speaking about Meta at large while being paid by it. However if they leave Meta and then speak about Meta I think that would be free speech.

by geodel

1/14/2025 at 6:32:33 PM

You miss a very important point. In the U.S. freedom of speech specifically refers to limits that the government can impose on stifling speech. It does not apply to Facebook, Meta, Twitter or any other such platform.

My point stands. Meta is suppressing speech while embracing it. It just happens that the suppression is welcomed by the group whose speech is being embraced.

by gedpeck

1/14/2025 at 5:51:28 PM

> Below is Zuckeberg’s[sic] internal memo, which CNBC obtained.

  Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media.
It's very funny that he included the Ray-Bans here. Maybe it will be the next iPhone, but along with Meta Worlds (or whatever it's called), Zuckerberg simply goes all-in on dumb sci-fi toys. Considering this is pure childish impulse - VR itself didn't make the top 3 in the memo - I wonder if he'll rename the company to Specs Technologies.

by aithrowawaycomm

1/14/2025 at 5:55:37 PM

And he criticized apple for not innovating past the iPhone.

by yellow_lead

1/15/2025 at 5:59:38 AM

I agree. The glasses would be useful if they weren't tied so much to Facebook properties. Which also happen to be very buggy. I bought mine last month and will probably return them this week.

by lostmsu

1/14/2025 at 5:24:01 PM

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

by GiorgioG

1/14/2025 at 5:56:29 PM

People joke about this, but when I was in a POW camp this actually DID work.

About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.

Why doesn’t Huberman talk about this?

by next_xibalba

1/14/2025 at 6:00:42 PM

Nice try, Zuck.

by daxfohl

1/14/2025 at 5:53:02 PM

Being stuck carrying coworkers that don't perform sucks. Firing under-performers is what healthy businesses do.

by brink

1/14/2025 at 6:05:01 PM

That wouldn't require a quota (5%) nor an announcement.

by GiorgioG

1/14/2025 at 6:21:30 PM

I’m amazed at how some engineers cheer for layoffs thinking they’re safe. The naivety really is something to behold. Or maybe they’re bots. Unclear.

by spacemadness

1/14/2025 at 7:00:14 PM

Nobody here is cheering. Layoffs suck too.

by brink

1/14/2025 at 7:10:51 PM

These are layoffs. See what he did there?

by GiorgioG

1/15/2025 at 10:03:07 AM

It is all relative though. If the team average performance is 50%, one can easily identify the very low and very high performers. The very low performers will barely deliver anything at all, while the very high performers will deliver multiples of the average.

Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.

Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.

And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.

by TrackerFF

1/15/2025 at 10:26:05 PM

This is true in theory. In practice, most managers either do not understand what "performing well" for an engineer means, or willfully go against what they know to be true due to internal incentive structures. For example, favoring those whose contributions are more visible in the short-term, even if net negative over time. Through such a lens, someone who is competent at executing a longer term vision, or refuses to do only those tasks that are visible, is a low performer.

I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.

by laboratorymice

1/14/2025 at 6:17:14 PM

Firing an arbitrary percentage as opposed to grading to a standard is not.

by psunavy03

1/14/2025 at 6:37:23 PM

You're absolutely right. However, 5% is so low that it's hard to believe that there isn't at least that many underperoformers.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 9:34:25 PM

Underperforming relative to what? If they're doing their job in good faith and overall making money for the company, is it "underperforming" if they're less productive than 95% of their peers? This notion of underperformance leaves no room for adequate performance.

I am sure there are some people getting laid off who genuinely don't do any work, though not 5% of the company - and certainly not the bottom 5% according to Meta's metrics! A lot of "mid-range" performers probably get by with pure schmoozing and mooching. And in more general sense, I don't think it's okay - either morally or strategically - to lay people off simply because you want to roll the dice on hiring more productive workers. (For a company of Meta's size this doesn't even make sense; clearly this move is about cracking the whip for the remaining 95%.)

by aithrowawaycomm

1/15/2025 at 4:43:14 AM

Relative to your competition.

Performance is only adequate if it’s at least as good as the engineers of the other players in your industry. Otherwise, you’re losing ground. As long as anyone in your market space is actively trying to manage their engineering talent (recruiting your top performers, releasing low performers, being more selective in hiring) so must you just to keep pace. An “adequate” engineer may make the company money, but the opportunity cost of not hiring someone better who could make even more money can be higher still.

by narnarpapadaddy

1/15/2025 at 4:07:53 PM

The sorts of decisions and results that make a company the size of Meta succeed or fail happen above the levels of the folks who will get cut. Most of the net value produced by individual engineers is determined by which projects they're on, rather than whether they're good at their job. A savy entrepreneur with a few engineers worth of openai credits can create more value in a week than a median FAANG middle management career maxxer with 10-100 engineers in their subtree of the org creates in a month.

by psb217

1/15/2025 at 6:01:38 PM

Personally, I think it’s both. Yes, the strategy is important but it’s nothing without the ability to execute. And we’ve all worked with the god-tier engineer who creates never-ending boondoggles because they can. And, yes, the larger the org the harder it is to get both strategy and execution aligned at once.

by narnarpapadaddy

1/16/2025 at 9:01:15 PM

My point was that the scope/impact/value/etc of the contributions made by individual engineers will be determined more by the projects they're working on than by their inherent ability to contribute. So, if we go through the org and cut the bottom 5% of engineers by how much value they added to the company, most cuts will be determined by the context in which an individual was operating rather than their inherent ability to contribute. Ie, the cuts will mostly just punish people for getting stuck with bad managers or lackluster projects.

Of course, some people are obviously great in any context and some are obviously useless (or worse) in any context, but those folks should already be handled appropriately even without the "cut 5%" mandate.

by psb217

1/14/2025 at 8:23:15 PM

You still wouldn't need a quota so it's not really about underperformers in general but rather an easy excuse.

by siva7

1/14/2025 at 6:15:02 PM

Did Facebook not do performance reviews until now?

by nateglims

1/16/2025 at 2:49:48 AM

Your coworkers performance is management’s problem, not yours. Complain if you have to pick up extra work but otherwise what’s the issue?

by asdf6969

1/14/2025 at 5:50:43 PM

Is the person who though it was a great idea to spend billions of dollars on the metaverse gonna be put on a performance plan or are performance reviews only meant for the peasants?

by wnevets

1/14/2025 at 5:32:04 PM

This must be the "masculine energy" Zuckerberg was referring to.

by ks2048

1/14/2025 at 5:53:56 PM

I really don't see Meta's social media products being able to compete with new challengers without lobbying to have them banned, even less so if they keep driving away talent.

The migration of US TikTok users to Xiaohongshu this week, to the point where it is #1 on the US app store while still having half of its UI in Mandarin has been particularly eye opening.

by bsnnkv

1/14/2025 at 6:23:37 PM

The same way people migrated from Twitter to... mastodon to ultimately settle on bluesky or go back to twitter.

This reaction is very rushed and I don't think it's going to be very lasting, I'd expect people to go to reels/shorts until maybe another (western, american probably but could be european) alternative appears.

These people are up for grabs, they're not going to stay in Xiaohongshu.

by jerojero

1/14/2025 at 6:39:23 PM

I think the stickiness of the FYP algorithm is not to be underestimated. Xiaohongshu's FYP algorithm is at least as good as TikTok's, and American social media companies (until now) have shown that they either cannot replicate an FYP algorithm of this quality or refuse to for business reasons.

It's very hard to go back to an app with a poor FYP algorithm (ie. Reels, Shorts) after using an app with a good FYP algorithm, and this, along with a knee-jerk reaction against Meta for its perceived role in lobbying for the "TikTok ban" will make capturing ex-TikTok users an uphill struggle for Meta's products.

by bsnnkv

1/14/2025 at 11:19:02 PM

I don't think this is driving away talent, tbh. They have scooped up tons of experienced big tech devs during the layoffs of the past year, and now they can replace expensive, seasoned devs with the fresh blood

by aprilthird2021

1/14/2025 at 5:47:01 PM

I feel like people are missing part of the memo where he said they will backfill all the roles.

You can say it's not fair or cruel but this isn't a layoff. They want to churn (maybe for cheaper talent? Maybe for H1-Bs?)

by VirusNewbie

1/14/2025 at 5:55:20 PM

I would think Zuck is smart enough to read the room regarding H1-b.

by declan_roberts

1/15/2025 at 9:03:52 AM

Isn't the room saying H1Bs are going to be protected from the very top regardless what a few malcontents have to say?

by trog

1/15/2025 at 12:07:45 AM

Backfill (with cheaper eng) the roles.

Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.

by aprilthird2021

1/15/2025 at 12:51:54 AM

uhhhhhh.. Ok, they’re from two countries, but mostly one.

by dinobones

1/15/2025 at 1:14:56 AM

No they're not. You clearly don't work at Meta or haven't. My team is all H1Bs, not a single one from the two countries you're referring to.

Also those two countries make up half the world population so if you're truly hiring global talent they should make up half that group

by aprilthird2021

1/15/2025 at 4:44:10 AM

That assumes talent is distributed evenly amongst populations, and isn’t affected by things like culture or nutrition

by VirusNewbie

1/15/2025 at 6:07:56 AM

It's not distributed wildly unevenly

by aprilthird2021

1/14/2025 at 6:32:28 PM

Why would you trust what Zuckerberg says?

by int_19h

1/14/2025 at 5:33:16 PM

This is clearly to cull the "wrong thinking" employees.

by yoyohello13

1/14/2025 at 6:06:22 PM

Which is odd considering the "wrong thinking" people could never get hired there in the last two decades, so what's really going on here?

by burningChrome

1/14/2025 at 6:09:47 PM

You seem to be under the impression that "wrong think" is in some way consistent or unchanging.

by r00fus

1/14/2025 at 5:22:26 PM

Next up: We need you to come in 5 days a week. Think of our culture!

by Bluecobra

1/14/2025 at 5:31:39 PM

Wasn't that the previous one?

by marcosdumay

1/14/2025 at 5:57:57 PM

Wrong company

by n144q

1/15/2025 at 3:35:43 AM

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

by ndesaulniers

1/15/2025 at 3:42:07 AM

Yeah, but, next years VR will be better . . .

( Adding legs will make it easier at least )

by defrost

1/15/2025 at 4:18:18 AM

Keep nailing legs to a dog until you can claim it's a spider.

by ndesaulniers

1/15/2025 at 4:47:37 PM

Indeed. It's Amazon that has been making all the noise about it, not Meta.

But this thread has become quite interesting.

by marcosdumay

1/15/2025 at 2:12:48 AM

What about the dead wood managers?

I'd like to see 5% of engineering managers get cut every year, since they're either selecting for, or I suspect creating, disengaged employees.

by Over2Chars

1/15/2025 at 8:29:35 AM

If the manager's neck was on the line for poor candidate hiring and low morale, I suspect they mire hire more carefully and manage more effectively.

by Over2Chars

1/16/2025 at 1:25:29 AM

Netflix has the "would we rehire this person?" Every year, but people are smart and game the system.

The story of Sun Tzu using the emperor's concubines to demonstrate military discipline is one of the most famous anecdotes from The Art of War.

When Sun Tzu was summoned by King Helü of Wu to prove his military theories, the king challenged him to demonstrate his strategies using the palace concubines as soldiers. Sun Tzu divided the concubines into two groups and appointed the king's two favorite concubines as their leaders. He then explained the orders clearly and ensured they were understood.

When the exercise began, the concubines laughed and did not follow the orders. Sun Tzu stopped the exercise and said that if instructions are not clear, it is the fault of the commander. He repeated the instructions, ensuring they were understood again. However, when the concubines laughed and failed to obey a second time, Sun Tzu stated that if orders are clear and not followed, it is the fault of the leaders.

He then executed the two leaders, despite them being the king's favorites. This shocked the king, but Sun Tzu insisted that discipline was essential in any army. After the execution, the remaining concubines obeyed his commands with perfect discipline, demonstrating the effectiveness of his methods.

by whattheheckheck

1/14/2025 at 5:59:53 PM

Gave my notice yesterday, last day of work is Feb 3... 7 days before the layoff.

by canttestthis

1/14/2025 at 6:34:31 PM

I'm surprised your manager let you resign. Giving you a low rating and firing you would have helped them meet their quota and gotten you a severance.

by paxys

1/14/2025 at 6:39:35 PM

Why wouldn't you wait until the vest?

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 8:37:23 PM

(Vest is on 2/15). Honestly, quitting before the vest and your bonus payout is just silly… curious what happened

by laweijfmvo

1/14/2025 at 6:30:46 PM

The noteworthy part here is that low performers won't be put on a PIP (which happens every year at this time). Come February the bottom 5% of the list will be given a severance and shown the door.

by paxys

1/15/2025 at 2:07:41 AM

Well that's an improvement. I hate when companies gamify their firings.

by xigency

1/14/2025 at 5:29:18 PM

Part of Zucks plan to stop hiring mid-level engineers this year (as he said on JRE)?

I am very very skeptical of this idea - what do you all think?

by TypingOutBugs

1/14/2025 at 5:31:28 PM

Who are we to doubt Zuckerbergs judgement when his last big pivot to the Metaverse was such a success? Let him cook.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/22/mark-zuckerberg-envisions-1-...

by jsheard

1/14/2025 at 5:41:24 PM

You mean the one he took "personal responsibility" for, while laying off >10000 people and conveniently still having a job for himself?

by chaosharmonic

1/14/2025 at 5:49:11 PM

"But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure." ~GB

by sadjad

1/15/2025 at 3:10:03 AM

"Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make." - Lord Farquad

by danny_codes

1/14/2025 at 6:31:14 PM

Imagine if avatar Gavin Belson had done the "metaverse legs" product reveal, with the animation running at 10 frames/second and a few legless avatars in the audience throwing up confetti. It would be almost too ridiculous to put in the show because the show itself would look like it was being cheap with the effects. But Meta had spent $36 billion on the metaverse at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njvp-E8gzqA

by desertrider12

1/14/2025 at 8:04:35 PM

Who do you think foreshadowed masculine energy coming back to tech?

GB, with the Box 3 Gavin Belson Signature Edition?

Or Russ Hanneman, with... everything?

(Or was it Jared, with Russ being right about him?)

by chaosharmonic

1/15/2025 at 7:51:47 PM

Ed Chambers (before he was fired, of course)

by PyWoody

1/14/2025 at 8:14:44 PM

This guy fucks

by TypingOutBugs

1/14/2025 at 5:55:54 PM

The "Silicon Valley" show had many brilliant moments.

by neilv

1/14/2025 at 5:44:21 PM

Zuck will demand accountibility from his employees while being subject to none himself because of the ownership structure of meta.

by __loam

1/14/2025 at 5:40:24 PM

I think that if they truly go through with this (and others follow suit), consulting is going to be eating good for the next 5-10 years. So much slop to be called in to clean up.

by diob

1/14/2025 at 5:36:24 PM

It's 100% absolute bullshit. We've seen the tests, it can barely replace a low skilled job. Who's going to prompt these AI tools to do stuff and who's going to correct the bugs AI introduces? Zuck is high on steroids.

by bastardoperator

1/14/2025 at 5:53:40 PM

I assume that it's just the standard line that is fed to shareholders.

Shareholders like "we're cutting labor because of AI adoption" much more than "we're cutting labor to save costs and cull some deadend r&d". While both are fiscally positive, one gives off vibes of growth and innovation while the other doesn't.

by hellojesus

1/14/2025 at 5:35:41 PM

the 5% who didn't watch enough MMA or improve their PR in the deadlift

by shombaboor

1/14/2025 at 5:50:50 PM

Dont bring deadlifts into this

by robobob

1/14/2025 at 5:37:51 PM

I have a strong suspicion that recent pivots are intended to drive attrition, and this just confirms my thinking.

by cbsmith

1/14/2025 at 5:51:47 PM

> “I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the memo

Doesn't this beg the question of why the bar wasn't higher the whole time?

by tqi

1/14/2025 at 6:12:14 PM

Translation: our move to force everyone back to office didn't cause as much attrition as we'd have liked. We will need to turn the screws in a different way.

by r00fus

1/14/2025 at 6:04:04 PM

I'm not trying to apologize for Meta here, but sometimes companies make bad hiring decisions, or good workers get lazy/apathetic.

by mywittyname

1/14/2025 at 10:17:52 PM

I can imagine also that in some situations where there's a large volume of work to be done and you don't need a high performer to get some of it done, you'd rather have the low performer than nobody in that position so you can make progress.

by allenu

1/14/2025 at 6:21:53 PM

Or have children causing distractions, or get injured etc.

by sixothree

1/14/2025 at 7:12:28 PM

Or having their house burned down with not enough PTO remaining..

by yard2010

1/14/2025 at 6:40:14 PM

They used to have a higher bar before 2020, but since then it's been a bit soft. I think this is mostly a return to that earlier time.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 5:49:06 PM

Watching Meta's downfall unfolding in real-time wasn't something I had on my 2025 bingo card.

by jhack

1/15/2025 at 7:21:56 PM

Lol record high stock price, fiercest competitor banned, and cutting 5% of under performers. They're thriving from a business vitality perspective.

by gopher2000

1/14/2025 at 6:38:12 PM

I think most companies would be jealous of this sort of "downfall".

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 5:52:56 PM

Seems like they're doing pretty well by capitalistic standards, no?

by barbazoo

1/14/2025 at 6:36:39 PM

what are you talking about?

by misiti3780

1/14/2025 at 5:34:10 PM

You're not getting fired now, you're getting "moved out" or "exited"

by anothername12

1/15/2025 at 12:50:00 AM

“intense” in the corporate world means grind our employees to dust.

by taimurkazmi

1/14/2025 at 5:59:05 PM

Can anyone from FB explain the user hostile UI? Reading comments or posts is an exercise in futility. Resizing or moving a page will result in a refresh where you lose your place or can no longer find what you were reading. Is this an accidental side affect of design or do you guys sit in a conference room conjuring up ways to make user experience miserable?

by m348e912

1/14/2025 at 6:07:07 PM

Some people use FB like phpBB, despite the massive shit of a UI. Maybe it's because reading comments don't earn them ad-revenue? "Quick, annoy the user so they'll move away!".

Maybe if they replaced every 5th comment with an ad (like how every 5th or so post/story/reel on Instagram is an ad).

by netsharc

1/14/2025 at 6:39:25 PM

If you are a Meta employee and got sizable RSU grants around 2022-23 when the stock price was 1/5 what it is now, you should probably start packing your bags. Whatever your performance is, there's zero chance it can justify those upcoming paychecks.

by paxys

1/14/2025 at 8:35:56 PM

Meta makes an incredible amount of money. Laying off employees who are otherwise doing fine just because their compensation is a bit higher than you thought would be stupid and petty.

by laweijfmvo

1/15/2025 at 3:11:08 AM

And your point is?

by danny_codes

1/15/2025 at 1:34:54 PM

Usually it’s the engineers that go at the bottom. Yet most of the inefficiencies come at management layer having a long chain of command.

by nojvek

1/14/2025 at 5:52:42 PM

2025 is going to be the year the metaverse really takes off. I can feel it. People definitely want Zuck's shitty VR 3D walled garden with worse graphics than a Nintendo Wii.

by henning

1/14/2025 at 5:42:55 PM

Why do people still have accounts on Twitter and Facebook already? Those reactionary billionaires are clearly offensive to humans and we should collectively tell them to f*ck off

by forty

1/14/2025 at 6:17:11 PM

The internet was once made up of curious, ambitious, discerning types. Early adopters. We have to put that mental model behind us.

As more of the world came online, the population of the internet has become made up of mostly passive and mediocre people. The MySpace to Facebook type of migration won't happen anymore. Too many people aren't aware or don't care.

by add-sub-mul-div

1/15/2025 at 12:32:58 AM

Why do people still visit a dealer for their next hit? Those reactionary pushers are clearly offensive to humans and we should collectively tell them to fuck off.

by tjpnz

1/14/2025 at 5:52:18 PM

People either aren't aware or they just don't care.

by barbazoo

1/16/2025 at 2:58:41 AM

Or maybe they just disagree...

by senordevnyc

1/14/2025 at 6:28:38 PM

without freespeech we wouldn't have had the gay movement when we did.

you should put freespeech above of a lot of things, weigh it much higher than you think and i'm sad to see liberal friends ignorant to US history.

on top of that, your premise suggests billionaires should be recalcitrant forces and billionaires should go along with the masses. most of the them made their money1 seeing opportunities no one else did and executing on them. they are more likely to have an 'edge' in seeing the future even if we removed their fortunes.

to be in the top 5% of global income you need to make more 30k a year. you are likely part of the rich. eat the rich etc. should i listen to you?

1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made

by ineedaj0b

1/14/2025 at 6:33:06 PM

Who spoke of having a problem with free speech? I just think they are obvious a*holes and don't want to have anything to do with them, and I'm just wondering why people are still tolerating them when they don't really have to.

by forty

1/14/2025 at 5:52:54 PM

> We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.

Are they effectively saying that anyone terminated this year is probably for poor performance?

Usually there's more ambiguity, like changing business priorities.

by neilv

1/16/2025 at 11:50:59 AM

Oh, he is cutting the „low performers“. I’m glad that he isn’t kicking the guy who wasted BILLIONS on the metaverse though. :)

by magxnta

1/14/2025 at 5:45:07 PM

That is 5% of 67,317, around 3700 people, folks.

by orsenthil

1/15/2025 at 7:22:28 PM

Yeah, so around 50-100 small companies equivalent.

by linotype

1/14/2025 at 5:55:52 PM

5% is nothing. Any FANG could lose 30% at least and all metrics would only improve. People working there know this. There's an unbelievable amount of fat in these companies. The main issue is that often during these cuts it's not the fat but the "muscle" that gets cut. The "fat" is good at sticking around.

by ein0p

1/14/2025 at 9:00:04 PM

I worked for one of the FAANGS. My experience (or I might say impression) is that any project could still be on "Keeping the Lights On" mode with a fraction of the engineers there, to an acceptable level.

Over time some cracks might show. Bugs that take longer to fix, issues that take longer to figure out, delayed releases, etc.

New features being implemented would be severely impacted, especially if those need integration from multiple teams.

Does this mean that there's fat? Maybe. Any company I worked for has a level of fat - and that might be a good thing, as demand quite often is not stable over time, you may need to ramp up initiatives without necessarily hiring/training new employees.

by surgical_fire

1/14/2025 at 11:09:06 PM

There's a flaw in your reasoning: you did not consider that a lot of the projects at FANGS are completely unnecessary and exist only because these companies massively over-hire. Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc. That's how Google was 15+ years ago. That is absolutely not how it is now, at any of these companies. There are way too many people and not enough work. The less ambitious employees deal with this by hiding and doing next to nothing. The more ambitious ones fight each other for scraps of meaningful work that are not yet being done by someone they can't fight. It's not a dignified place to be either way.

by ein0p

1/15/2025 at 1:42:55 AM

> There's a flaw in your reasoning: you did not consider that a lot of the projects at FANGS are completely unnecessary and exist only because these companies massively over-hire.

Maybe? Companies of all shapes and size do poor decisions. On the other hand, the nature of some projects require some time of R&D to find out whether something is worthwhile or not.

> Ideal working environment is when there are a lot of worthwhile projects and not enough people. That's when you get a choice of what to work on, that's when the company really values the employees, etc.

I am not sure I agree with this. Ideally you have resources to pursue all projects considered worthwhile.

> That is absolutely not how it is now, at any of these companies. There are way too many people and not enough work. The less ambitious employees deal with this by hiding and doing next to nothing. The more ambitious ones fight each other for scraps of meaningful work that are not yet being done by someone they can't fight. It's not a dignified place to be either way.

That was really not my experience there, although I did not work for Google specifically (perhaps reality there was different). There was actually a lot of work to be done, although a plenty of that work was, in my opinion, overhead due to how things were structured and how decisions were made, many times from the top down.

I left because of it. I felt like it was the place I worked the hardest and I was at the same time the least productive.

by surgical_fire

1/15/2025 at 8:52:27 AM

Whether something is worthwhile or not is usually up for debate - not all projects are equally worthwhile. Having more "worthwhile" projects than engineering resources gives engineers a choice of work. That too is a good signal for whether or not something is worthwhile, because then you get motivated people to work on those things, rather than people doing things because they have nothing better available to them. Idk about others, but I feel trapped when I don't have a good degree of autonomy/choice. And when I feel trapped, I leave.

by ein0p

1/15/2025 at 10:16:37 AM

> Having more "worthwhile" projects than engineering resources gives engineers a choice of work.

This is pure fantasy, except maybe if you work on a startup environment where engineers have a lot of autonomy.

In any sufficiently large organization, you will be assigned to a team, and the scope of work will be sort of defined in some level of hierarchy above you as an individual engineer.

You may have some autonomy to pick up some initiative here and there, but that will be somewhat limited. You may also try to switch to different teams where work may be more attractive to you.

by surgical_fire

1/15/2025 at 10:01:41 PM

It's not a "fantasy" at all. That's how Google was for me circa 2008-2009 when I joined it and until I left in 2015. In fact this made it difficult for me to accept anything less than that. There was so much opportunity, it took me about 6 months to get used to working there - I came from a rather rigid, large company where everyone just stabs each other in the back for scraps all the time.

by ein0p

1/14/2025 at 5:18:38 PM

Performance reviews are bullshit. Being a "low performer" at Meta might mean you are not a suck-up, or that you have a sense of ethics.

by asveikau

1/14/2025 at 5:23:29 PM

Performance reviews aren't bullshit - it's crucial to have an objective (as objective as possible) system for measuring performance both to reward your high performers and to understand your low performers whether to provide support or to document reasons for firing them.

Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management of some sort any organization with more than 3 people will fail.

by Arainach

1/14/2025 at 5:33:24 PM

There isn't any real objective way to measure performance though - there are things you can quantify (lines of code written, code reviews performed, etc) but those don't encompass the entire job, and once it becomes clear the metrics you use people will work to optimize their numbers at the expense of the other aspects of the job that are harder to quantify/measure. Who has time to mentor junior colleagues when you gotta bump your LoC count for the quarter?

I think we need to embrace the idea that whether you are given raises, promotions, continued employment, etc is largely a function of whether your manager likes you, likes having you on their team, and wants to reward you. And if they don't like you, it doesn't matter how good your numbers are now they will find a way to get rid of you sooner or later. It's better to just get it over with, give the employee a generous severance package, and part ways (or transfer them to another team that's interested in them).

by kylec

1/14/2025 at 5:56:40 PM

Bad ways to measure performance are still objective ways of measuring performance, which can lead to bad management policies such as stack ranking.

by minimaxir

1/14/2025 at 5:37:18 PM

Those are not the metrics used in said performance reviews though - whether you mentored a junior engineer is.

by stepanhruda

1/14/2025 at 5:52:41 PM

These metrics can be used in performance reviews at Facebook.

by javierhonduco

1/14/2025 at 5:25:41 PM

You failed the moment you said objective. Any such system needs to acknowledge right off the bat that these assessments are subjective, subject to human error and re-enforcing bias etc. Otherwise you're just high on your own supply.

by asveikau

1/14/2025 at 5:52:46 PM

This is a strawman. While a fully objective evaluation is hard or impossible in most cases, it doesn't mean that it can't be somewhat objective. The extremes are pretty easy to identify - amazing performers who implement lots of features with few bugs and who are easy to work with vs the asshole who gets nothing done. The difficulty is in the middle, and while subjectivity is unavoidable, you can use objective metrics as data points.

Also, a well built subjective review process is better than no process, for instance, using peers and customer opinions as input.

by glimshe

1/14/2025 at 6:29:35 PM

false

by ineedaj0b

1/14/2025 at 5:37:36 PM

Indeed, the objective from your manager is to launch X feature (as designed by the design and product teams and in collaboration with three other teams) and achieve Y% usage within the quarter of Z.

However, if the company’s priorities change, significant on-call issues arise, the design team experiences a layoff, the front-end team undergoes an exodus, and the product team abandons the project, you will not meet your objective. Any one of these, or more could happen.

Consequently, you will be considered a low performer. You could have kept the ship afloat, kept the trains running on time, and deployed your part of the project on time and under budget, but still be a low performer on paper.

by haliskerbas

1/14/2025 at 5:34:19 PM

They aren't, in the platonic form.

But what I think most of us have experienced, in most companies, is that instead of driving compensation and promotion/firing the middle-management decisions around those things are made and then post-hoc justified via the performance system.

Which is another symptom of HR not having real power and instead simply being used to implement decisions made by other leadership.

by ethbr1

1/14/2025 at 5:49:34 PM

We have no idea how to measure management performance at scale, at basically any level, in any kind of reliable way. It takes PhDs and rare datasets to even start to make any kind of serious data-backed statements about what works and what doesn’t in management, and how to hire, train, and promote effectively. It’s basically all a black box that’s so hard to measure that the most any company does is pretend they’re using objective and relevant data for it, when in reality they’re mostly looking at noise.

Keep that in mind when anyone talks about how vital performance evaluations are. Management can’t even figure out non-bullshit ways to evaluate their own work.

by spokaneplumb

1/14/2025 at 5:33:20 PM

In reality, "objective" could be a fairly subjective target that depends on your relationship with your manager in a company with bad culture. Just spend 10 minutes browsing on Blind.

by n144q

1/14/2025 at 5:26:48 PM

> it's crucial to have an objective (as objective as possible) system for measuring performance both to reward your high performers and to understand your low performers whether to provide support or to document reasons for firing them.

This isn't how it ever, ever plays out.

Also, most companies implementing this clearly are doing so out of some sort of compliance, whether it be SOC or otherwise. So yea, lots of times it actually is total performative bullshit. Congrats on finding the .000000000001% of cases where it isn't, if you are being serious here.

by JohnMakin

1/14/2025 at 5:48:35 PM

The alternative of not having a performance review problem involves having all of those problems with even more confusion, less visibility, and people trying to guess what will get them rewarded and usually guessing wrong.

by Arainach

1/14/2025 at 5:36:09 PM

You’ve articulated, correctly, a need for performance reviews. We have a need to measure performance, but we don’t have reasonably objective ways to do it that simultaneously measure what we actually care about.

There’s a kind of tradeoff here, where on one end you have the most useful performance measurements, and on the other end you have the most objective performance measurements. When you’re doing things well, the best you can do is fall somewhere on that line. The entire line is bullshit, you just get to choose what kind of bullshit you have.

Large orgs tend to skew towards objectivity because it minimizes liability, and large orgs are full of people trying to avoid being liable for mistakes.

by klodolph

1/14/2025 at 5:47:03 PM

LLMs wrote this

by __loam

1/15/2025 at 3:40:26 AM

The prompt was "lick boots."

by ndesaulniers

1/14/2025 at 5:56:46 PM

The underlying goal behind performance reviews is noble and admirable.

But performance reviews are still bullshit. You could replace them with 'vote off the island' style votes every quarter instead and we wouldn't be any worse off.

by nisegami

1/14/2025 at 5:43:44 PM

[dead]

by yyyyz

1/14/2025 at 5:16:13 PM

As AI is everything right now, did they asked to Llama how to solve the situation...?

by LucidLynx

1/14/2025 at 5:17:28 PM

"Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'h1b workers'".

by avgDev

1/14/2025 at 5:33:41 PM

Just when I thought maybe I could give Meta kudos for some respectable VR/game engineering and some open AI research, they seem to bend over backwards to keep a terrible reputation.

by jayd16

1/14/2025 at 8:18:18 PM

This definitely cuts costs, but I’m still unclear what Meta’s long term business plan is. They’re giving away Llama to get open source contributions to help them… do what?

by qgin

1/14/2025 at 11:21:49 PM

Giving away llama neutralizes upstarts by taking away a lot of customers who are willing to save money with a cheaper, less useful AI.

It also democratizes making AI content to get eyeballs to sell ads.

And lastly Llama breakthroughs help ads ML

by aprilthird2021

1/14/2025 at 5:26:52 PM

how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

by asdev

1/14/2025 at 5:31:05 PM

Thankfully, big tech hiring whims have very little to do with the 'real' economy. Job growth remains strong, GDP is still very much positive, inflation is low..

by mikeyouse

1/14/2025 at 5:41:46 PM

> how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?

by chollida1

1/14/2025 at 5:57:11 PM

lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.

by harvodex

1/14/2025 at 6:24:45 PM

I don't understand the confidence behind this. Is a good economy only based on having a job?

Average people are struggling to make ends meet and racking up debt. The gap between pay and the cost of goods has only grown in recent years. How is that good for anyone?

by webdood90

1/14/2025 at 6:09:36 PM

>> lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

Which ones? The ones they released or the ones they re-released after overstating the numbers several times?

by burningChrome

1/14/2025 at 6:21:33 PM

October and November were revised up actually. October’s is still pretty bad though w.r.t. expectations

by nateglims

1/15/2025 at 12:33:05 AM

Not sure why you're being downvoted for saying something correct. Most of the "jobs reports" seem to be revised after the fact. I fully do not trust any government (Dem or Rep) to tell us the actual truth about the economy. Why would they tell us if things are bad? It doesn't benefit them politically.

by bigtex88

1/14/2025 at 6:11:45 PM

>how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.

Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.

by ramesh31

1/15/2025 at 11:54:39 AM

This is also my take on this.

Tech became tighter to join 2 years ago and for the next years are going to play music chairs on the open seats as lay offs continue, executives think that AI can replace anyone and younger generation (with lower wages) joins the tech workforce.

It's not recession per se, these companies will continue to be crazy profitable, it's just a change in mindset. See also the famous "founder-mode" that came up recently for startups and scaleups.

by higeorge13

1/14/2025 at 5:29:26 PM

It says that they’re back filling the roles… you know that doesn’t happen in a recession right?

by laidoffamazon

1/14/2025 at 5:41:31 PM

Two or more quarters of negative GDP growth

by duped

1/14/2025 at 6:19:20 PM

...has never been the rule (at least for the US), just a layman rule-of-thumb that kind of sort of works a lot of the time. It's actually determined by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They started relying on NBER back in the 80s, IIRC.

by Izkata

1/14/2025 at 5:31:28 PM

I remember when we were in a recession post 9/11 prices were dropping left and right, but right now prices continue to increase and people seem to be paying them. Can we really say that's a notable decline in economic activity?

by prettyblocks

1/14/2025 at 5:34:02 PM

My experience is that prices are increasing in required goods (food, housing, healthcare, education) so some people can't decrease spending. I know a lot of people who have cut spending for non-essential things but it's just that the cost of essential things have increased to keep their spending constant

by tdb7893

1/14/2025 at 5:40:00 PM

This is the reason for the disparity. Low income people will swear on their life that we are in a recession, because they literally can't buy as much food as they used to be able to. But Middle-class -> rich people just point to the stock market and tell them they are wrong.

This is a great time to be wealthy. All that juicy human labor is ripe for the taking.

by yoyohello13

1/14/2025 at 5:46:19 PM

The word 'recession' means something though, and it's neutral on whether or not any particular humans have more income or cheaper goods. If you get a raise at work, it doesn't mean we're not in an economic recession as a country, and if you get fired or the price of gas goes up, it doesn't mean we are.

by mechagodzilla

1/14/2025 at 5:54:44 PM

Yeah I understand recession is a technical term. I'm just trying to explain why we keep hearing people say we are in a recession. Most people don't care what the term technically means. They just know their buying power is decreasing while wealthy people are doubling their net worth.

People just want to be able to afford to live and affluent people keep pointing to the chart and saying it's not a problem, but it is a problem. We probably need a new name for it.

by yoyohello13

1/14/2025 at 6:18:53 PM

Someone I was talking to made up the term "targeted recession" to describe it as some communities are definitely experiencing negative growth while overall metrics seem positive.

by tdb7893

1/14/2025 at 5:54:16 PM

if you use a more reasonable calculation of inflation and calculate real GDP according to that, you'll see we've been in recession almost half of the years for the last 25 years.

Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.

by tomcar288

1/14/2025 at 6:42:58 PM

You might be confused by the CPI. The GDP is actually adjusted using a different measure of inflation (the "GDP deflator"), which looks at the actual purchases made in the country over that period. There's not really any "reasonable" alternative calculations to be made there.

by blsapologist42

1/14/2025 at 5:27:35 PM

more like unchecked greed to me

by webdood90

1/14/2025 at 5:29:14 PM

Facebook is trying to cozy up to Donald Trump, someone that a large portion of their employees hate. Could just as easily be to keep them in line

by thatguy0900

1/14/2025 at 5:36:01 PM

After the made up AI revolution we now have the made up recession, I can't keep track anymore. Actually did the AI revolution end yet? I still see the grifters out there.

by stefan_

1/14/2025 at 5:29:54 PM

What are you talking about? The Oligarchs are doing great!

by yoyohello13

1/14/2025 at 6:03:05 PM

The government will never again acknowledge a recession because of the political implications. This is the world we live in now.

by bigtex88

1/14/2025 at 6:16:15 PM

Recession has a clear cut, metric-based formal definition. Governments acknowledge them when they happen because it's a black and white situation.

GPD growth is good, personal consumption is up, and businesses are continuing their extremely large investments in durable goods. The economy is, by the numbers, doing extremely well. Inflation is down to normal.

Even economic sentiment is okay. People rate their personal financial situation as roughly as good as it was pre-pandemic as well.

by mywittyname

1/14/2025 at 6:24:39 PM

Your points are orthogonal to my original point. We live in a world where the governments will never acknowledge bad news because of how our media environment operates. The NBRE even basically changed their own definition of a recession two years ago when we clearly had two negative consecutive quarters of economic growth yet somehow we miraculously we not in a recession.

by bigtex88

1/14/2025 at 9:22:23 PM

Well it was already admitted by Zuck, wasn't it? [0]

Also Microsoft was the first large domino to announce cutting "underperforming" staff and now Meta is doing the same. [1]

Unfortunately, there will be copycats taking notes to use "AI" as an excuse to accelerate more layoffs for AI or cheaper labor.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42687606

[1] https://archive.ph/NZT1w

by rvz

1/14/2025 at 8:08:08 PM

Could it be this isn't really about low-performing folks but about employees and teams who don't fit his new political agenda?

by siva7

1/15/2025 at 6:24:06 PM

Meta is a great China company but I won't use it anymore.

by taikocat

1/14/2025 at 6:08:38 PM

those who have not increased their neck size in the last year will be first to go

by philk10

1/14/2025 at 6:47:09 PM

Can someone explain why there is so much porn on fb/ig these days?

by Ancalagon

1/15/2025 at 4:33:40 AM

They ran out of respectable ways to increase engagement, and they can't stop trying to increase it.

by esafak

1/14/2025 at 7:17:34 PM

Why not? Is there a way they can get more money if there wasn't any?

by yard2010

1/14/2025 at 5:43:04 PM

Zuck is doing great things over there!

by k33n

1/15/2025 at 7:25:28 AM

It'd be nice if the contract was just for a year with extensions, not this at-will BS which doesn't even hold true (the way it's perceived as "having" a job) for some randomly selected people judged by one random manager as "low performers".

by sloroo

1/14/2025 at 5:57:07 PM

What Meta has been publishing on reasoning recently is very impressive -- I imagine they have internal product that is even further ahead

Senior engineers can now get answers in seconds to questions it might have taken a junior a couple days to figure out ... agents are starting to do comparable workflows to low/mid-skilled ops/support teams in some verticals at a fraction of cost

If Meta, and others pushing on AI, are not reducing heads in 2025 -- it would kind of undermine the value of the massive investments they are making

HN commentariat coupling this to anything else is a bit disingenuous as most engineers I know are talking about this a lot right now as nobody really knows where it leads -- with some discussion about whether it is comparable to horses being replaced by cars in 1920s and employment redeploying elsewhere over time

by mtkd

1/16/2025 at 12:59:06 PM

> If Meta, and others pushing on AI, are not reducing heads in 2025 -- it would kind of undermine the value of the massive investments they are making

If we take Zuckerberg at face value, then they aren’t cutting headcount, but instead replacing ‘low performers’ with new blood.

by dragon-hn

1/14/2025 at 5:41:45 PM

This is your regular reminder that tech is essentially a fiefdom. Just because you aren't a serf doesn't mean you aren't a peasant.

by crowcroft

1/14/2025 at 5:56:51 PM

This is reminder only for those who thought berating employer, questioning policies above their remit all while keeping employment at that pure evil employer is just how the world works.

by geodel

1/15/2025 at 2:00:36 AM

I think it's more likely people think their companies are /mostly evil/ and intend to improve them in some fashion.

by xigency

1/14/2025 at 5:55:25 PM

You sure aren't a lord. But many have been tricked into thinking that they are.

by grajaganDev

1/14/2025 at 5:47:54 PM

Ah yes, the peasants who are free to leave at any time, get nice salaries and a nice severance at the end, plus a ton of benefits. Oh and at FB many can still WFH.

Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.

by dgrin91

1/14/2025 at 5:56:48 PM

Sure, I'd rather be a peasant in big tech than a king in almost any other era.

Especially in companies like Meta with dual class shareholders though, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say the CEOs are essentially kings.

That doesn't mean the work environment or lifestyle you get working at these places is good or bad, people just need to have a realistic expectations about the governance behind these things though.

by crowcroft

1/14/2025 at 9:40:43 PM

This argument was used by southern slave holders to argue their system treated people better than the north. That their workers were treated better because they were property while the north could cast people aside and replace them once they were done with them.

Slavery is still slavery no matter how nice you arrange their conditions. Serfs are still serfs if they sit in bean bag chairs.

by mempko

1/14/2025 at 6:02:36 PM

At least the peasants got their own offices

by Apocryphon

1/14/2025 at 5:42:50 PM

[dead]

by artistic_regard

1/14/2025 at 5:38:28 PM

[dead]

by artistic_regard

1/14/2025 at 5:36:31 PM

It's all cool. Zuck is just riffin'

/s

by jamesblonde

1/14/2025 at 5:08:15 PM

[flagged]

by toe666nail

1/14/2025 at 5:42:48 PM

[flagged]

by IRNHan

1/14/2025 at 5:41:53 PM

[flagged]

by akmarinov