Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah, "we hired people we shouldn't have so now we're going to make it increasingly unpleasant to work here" doesn't work.

But that's not what Meta is saying. The goal isn't just to make it miserable. The goal is to raise the expectations and hold people accountable throughout the company.

The exact quote "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here" is hard to argue with. Every company that went on a hiring spree during the last bull run has collected some percentage of people who aren't performing or aren't qualified. Raising expectations and holding people accountable is a reasonable approach, IMO. Much better than just firing people.

Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations and fair warning when they're not. Remove people who can't or won't catch up.

View on HN

Like I said, I've been through this first hand.

I was exceeding expectations, and given a big promotion in the middle of it. But people I worked with and interacted with every day were feeling extremely stressed and worried about their ability to meet the new bar. Now, in many cases, they didn't need to be worried, but it's natural to question these things in an environment where you're seeing people get PIP'd and unceremoniously shitcanned regularly.

Morale was through the floor, it was an absolutely miserable environment to work in – even though I was personally doing quite well. So I said "fuck this" and was the first person out the door on my team. The second highest performer quit a week later.

The least technically capable person on the team was there for another year.

Frankly I think that's a naive take. I suspect in reality it'll come down to managers being told to cut some percentage of staff, and in many cases that'll come down to everybody feeling the pressure of swords hanging over their necks.

That is not a formula for the "worst performers" leaving or getting fired, it's more like a formula for chaos, nasty office politics, and people leaving just because they don't need that shit in their life.

The problem isn't what they are saying, it is how it is implemented and how it is read. Then there is the issue of how it affects company culture. The tech industry seems to view culture as the type of people they want to work with. That is not the whole picture. If having a job with the company (or receiving promotions) becomes some sort of survivalist game, there will be people who employ survivalist tactics to protect themselves and those close to them. The goal may not involve making people miserable, yet the outcome will be.

> Give people a chance to meet very clear expectations

"Impact" is not a clear expectation. its not really that actionable either.

The biggest problem with Meta is that there is no real pedigree for making new products. Everything successful has been bought in.

I'm still not sure why Meta decided to double the number of employees, there was no clear goal, and it appears that teams were making up bullshit metrics to prove that they needed more staff.

Yeah, I thought 35k (when I left) was too much. 70k definitely feels insane.

One of the great things about FB before that was that it was small and had ambitious goals, so you'd tend to work on important stuff, as would everyone else.

But they kept making more money and hiring more people, and the culture got murdered (again) due to external senior management hiring.

And the last four to five years have hollowed out the original core of competent execs. Their replacements are less good, which cascades downhill and causes more problems.

> very clear expectations

Unfortunately, this is beyond most companies when it comes to software developers.

This is just a factory owner telling the workers the expected output increased by 20%. Nothing more. This thinking belongs in 1872.

The problem is that the "very clear expectations" end up being lines of code written, tickets closed, bugs fixed, or whatever, then your employees optimize for that, rather than doing what is right.

the people that shouldn't be there are the ones that approved the hiring spree

Reply on news.ycombinator.com