Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews | Hacker News Reader

Meta just gave thousands of employees poor performance reviews

fortune.com

This is one of the reasons so many people do not take management seriously. If your performance qualification depends on how many people the company wants to fire then your performance is not what is being evaluated.

In good companies, jobs have a set of well expectations. Your performance is measure against that expectations. The company may be about to close and yet your performance can be good.

After pulling something like this a company will lose any trust that employees had in its evaluation system.

You can replace almost all performance reviews (and grading in school) with “these people would be fired/fail before you” and anything else is just playing pretend.

That seems a little extreme. I have seen performance reviews used correctly to help engineers to improve on areas that they were lacking. And it works. Some people needs to improve communication skills, or have some blind technical spot. Doing that makes them way better, and I have seen people getting better jobs after improving (inside and outside the company).

But I agree that any tool used wrongly can be replaced by something simpler that cuts to the chase and delivers on what management is really interested in. And in this case has nothing to do with improving employees performance.

Do performance reviews work better than just constructive feedback in 1:1s though?

Reviews seem to be a pathway for the company to get rid of people rather than to help them grow. As a growth pathway, it is very ineffective. Other efforts work better imo - mentoring, 1:1s, 360 degree feedback, learning budgets, workshops, introducing a culture more appreciative of learning, and so on. They can cost less in total work hours spent than performance review weeks too.

For my org the performance review should not be surprising for the employees. Through 1:1 and continuous feedback they should exactly know where they are. This should be the opportunity to formalize the feedback and set goals for the next cycle.

Then they seem kind of superfluous to 1:1s, right? Without 1:1s, performance reviews alone would not be very effective for employee growth. With 1:1s, they are more of a formality - not adding anything new to the conversation.

It's so the middle managers can see that the line managers have done some due diligence. This is to prevent the case where line managers "don't have a good feeling" about an employee but can't point to specific items that have been communicated to the employee. In an ideal world with great line managers you wouldn't need a performance review, it would be handled in 1:1s. That's not our world and we need rigid formal systems to increase the likelihood that basic steps are followed, on average across many managers and employees.

I don’t know… In my experience, managers’ bias can sneak into performance reviews. Sometimes that puts a spotlight on the manager and has consequences, but not always.

Who said anything about grades?

That's basically stack ranking. You can stack rank employees from critical to least important, as well as entire departments. But like with all management systems, it too can be gamed.

People put their friends ahead of others, or they might fire one half of a married couple over a worse employee that's the single wage earner. At a defense contractor I once worked at, we talked about it being highly dangerous to be married to another employee.

I can't see why this is different from married couples in general apart from putting all eggs in one basket.

“ Your performance is measure against that expectations.”

Sure - but it appears that those expectations just changed.

You assume management is competent. Near 99% of them have no management qualification like MBA. Vast majority got it through "experience". Vast majority don't know how to work with VBA excel to even automate those management spreadsheet. They have never taken any HR degrees modules to even know any theory of human resources.

MBAs are more about hustle and networking than about actual management skills.

90% of the folks reading this comment could pick up the management skills via one week's worth of Udemy courses.

"A degree in business is, in most cases, a degree in nothing"

> deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive

Interested in how that turns out. I seriously doubt that it will make the work environment any more pleasant.

That said, the salaries at Meta are pretty crazy. I guess folks are willing to put up with a lot to make that kind of dosh.

Of course, if, as has been speculated, this is a full-court press by all the top tech companies to push down salaries, then even the thought of "sticking with it for the great money" might not matter, anymore.

Soooo glad to be out of the rodent rally.

If you'd earn less going somewhere else, then there's no reason to jump ship till you have to: keep banking the money till the situation becomes untenable.

As if only money counts. There is also somrthing like the fun part of work. Maybe i am spoiled by living in a country where money is not really an issue.

Where is this magical country where money is not really an issue?

He probably meant in his own bubble.

There are definitely countries where money is less of an issue, but I've never heard of a country where it's not an issue. More likely he's referring to the former country. Nevertheless I'm also curious about which country this is.

There are levels of remuneration where you'll put up with a lot though.

You're right, but it's not binary.

You won't feed your family or pay of that house with the "fun part of work". It's great if you get both but there are unfortunately priorities in adult life that might bog down the romanticism.

A high-salary worker (like a Facebook employee) has more than their immediate survival needs covered. It's pretty easy to drop a high-paying job and coast on the inevitable savings (in cash and/or securities) for a good long while. At that point, priorities shift from survival to satisfaction.

Not sure if I buy the fun part of work (sure that is important too) but frankly I'd sacrifice X% for somewhere that is secure, absent political bs and the ensuing stress and damage to mental well being. Heck if this saves me time I can use that time to do fun things/projects outside work. Given big tech has shown it's true colors why bother?

There’s no evidence that “all the top tech companies” are trying to push down salaries. I’ve neither seen nor heard any evidence of this at Netflix or Apple. Google?

Salary ranges for open positions in California are public.

Welp, they've done it before ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You must have missed that time they all colluded together with anti-poaching agreements to minimize liquidity in the job market then turned around and used that as an excuse to demand higher H1B quotas for more guest serfs.

> they all colluded together with anti-poaching agreements to minimize

Meta explicitly refused to join that agreement. See https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/shery...

Are Mark and co. incapable of changing their minds?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... in which "top tech companies" (including Apple and Google) were successfully sued for trying to push down salaries.

I actually got a few thousand dollar settlement from a settlement around 2005-2006.

So… I stand corrected. Netflix plays its own game, and is the exception to the rule?

> Salary ranges for open positions in California are public.

It seems that they've figured out how to get around that: https://news.yahoo.com/90000-to-900000-pay-transparency-laws...

My work environment has been improved by AI tools so far. I do hope it never gets to the point where the expectation is that devs are just full time code reviewers. Feel like it would get boring at that point.

Which tools are you using for code reviews?

> help our engineers be more productive

That’s the phrase that makes me think that it won’t make the work environment any more pleasant for the worker.

“Productivity” is a rather loaded term. Amazon has found ways to make their drivers and warehouse staff “more productive.”

Pee bottles.

I understand there's problems with the way the gains from bonus productivity are allocated today, but I find it hard to root against bonus productivity.

All these big companies give grade employees on a curve. So, in Meta parlance, only 5-10% of employees can be "Strongly Exceeds Expectations". This is measured across the director level, so units of 100-200 employees.

Here's the problem: at Meta 10-15% of employees in these buckets has to get a subpar rating. This includes Meets Most Expectations (2 MMs in a row probably means you're on a PIP), Meets Some (probably auto PIP), Meets None (fired) and Non Regrettable Loss. This last one applies to rating employees who leave.

NRL in this bucket may have changed. For one thing there was talk that HR not management was responsible for NRL designations because otherwise orgs made up their quota of subpar ratings by using leaving employees as ablative shielding.

Don't believe me about these quotas? Two words: "tbgs genTargetPercentage".

I personally don't have issue with avoiding ratings inflation in principle. While I was Google I don't believe subpar ratings had a quota like FB/Meta has (or at least had).

This is classic "up or out" GE nonsense. And I can tell you from experience that this is incredibly toxic. The entire calibration process devolves into a popularity contest and rewards those who are good at politics. While in a growth period, these problems didn't tend to matter.

I said it when the layoffs were announced: those who were laid off were largely the lucky ones. More layoffs would be coming and those would be with forced attrition. This is what this is. Subpar ratings hurt your bonus and equity refreshes and and will make it more difficult to transfer teams. All of this is by design. You're in that (now increasingly wider) band of employees they want to quit rather than fire.

Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.

Can you explain where "tbgs genTargetPercentage" comes from? Googling it just brings up your own comment.

I took it as the GP playing inside baseball. As in, some people currently at Meta may be able to use this information to learn something about this situation.

Hope that don't violate an NDA...

tbgs is internal code search for Facebook: https://codesearchguide.org/story/facebook

This is great news, it helps establish performance reviews are a legitimate business tool and are not abused to achieve predetermined results. I’m sure that when managers have to make tough future decisions without enough evidence, I’ll be able to trust their judgment as much then as I can now.

Odd though how burnout is skyrocketing. Weird coincidence, I’m sure.

I am sure all they have to do is follow the performance improvement plan and then everything will be alright /s

Nowhere is it mentioned that that this is an atypically high number. This could be the normal amount of low performers.

https://archive.is/dOrAf

Thanks for the archive link.

It is strange when a single-paragraph article is behind a paywall like this. Shallow reporting is a wholly uninspiring incentive to provide any support whatsoever to a publication.

Just months after Meta laid off 11,000 employees, there are signs the company could be preparing for another wave of cuts.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram has reportedly ranked thousands of employees as “subpar” in a recent wave of performance reviews. And that’s raising fears among workers that more belt-tightening is on the way.

Those concerns come after CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 a “year of efficiency” at the company on an earnings call at the beginning of February. Meta also did away with a bonus metric, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Managers gave about 10% of the company’s workers poor reviews. It is, in some ways, a return to Meta’s pre-pandemic review process, where Zuckerberg was said to be less than gentle with his assessments of workers.

The threat of additional layoffs comes just days after the company delayed finalizing budgets. Zuckerberg, in a Facebook post earlier this month, wrote “We’re working on flattening our org structure and removing some layers of middle management to make decisions faster, as well as deploying AI tools to help our engineers be more productive. As part of this, we’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial.”

Seemingly safe from the cuts is Meta’s metaverse division. While Horizon Worlds has failed to engage users, including some who work at the company, and the Reality Labs division was responsible for $13.7 billion in losses last year, Zuckerberg remains committed to it.

Other divisions do not seem to have that protected status.

“We closed last year with some difficult layoffs and restructuring some teams.,” Zuckerberg said in his post. “When we did this, I said clearly that this was the beginning of our focus on efficiency and not the end.”

I've been trying to upvote you all day. It finally went through this time.

Thanks for mirroring TentireFA here, no block of text has more than 2 sentences. What is the boundary between copy/pasta soup and journalism? >:-)

> Managers gave about 10% of the company’s workers poor reviews

The article didn't manage to get a quote on what the guidance/orders for the reviews was.

For example, were managers given a target on how many of their reports were to receive poor reviews?

Or did the evaluation criteria change besides the target distribution?

I'm confused, is 10% basically the stack ranking that we see at Microsoft/Amazon anyway? Did Facebook not have a "poor performer" bin when evaluating an organization before?

Maybe they are grading on a bell curve like they did in my youth?

10% get excellent reviews, 10% get poor reviews and everyone else falls somewhere in the middle.

It was yet another way to stretch that 80-20 rule's mileage. I remember when the idea of a bell curve was new, and you saw it applied to absolutely everything, even if it was only a superficial (or sometimes completely bogus) fit.

I've even seen it applied to the Kinsey Scale. Presumably 10% of the population is totally straight, 10% totally gay, and 80% are varying degrees of total party animals after dark. Or something like that. That might have actually been where I first heard of the Bell Curve, but I've seen it applied in a lot of places since.

The worst place I've seen it applied is for DST daylight hours.

Bell curves exist, but it's strange that people only see it as a variation of the 80-20 rule.

Technically a bell curve can only be 80/20 of you slice things several standard deviations from the mean. Anything that truly falls on a curve will not end up being 80/20.

It’s just called stack ranking now. And it doesn’t make sense. A company can be full of high performers or low performers, but the stack ranking principle itself would make management blind to that.

Also keep in mind that this is the first year-long perform cycle, so % of ratings is not directly comparable to previous cycles.

A lot of people cruise, even in my scale-up, there's a mentality sometimes of 'I'll get to it later' or 'meh bug, I'll fix it next week', hustle is hard to maintain.

I have no doubt that there are thousands of people at Meta doing jack-all and FB won't feel the loss - if at all - and probably gain a lot of operational efficiency not having to manage the dead weight.

I worked at a company where you could only get a raise when you scored high on the performance appraisal. I was young and really worked my ass off, really went for it.

Never got a good appraisal.

Years later I work at another company, and my previous manager is now my team colleague. He eventually tells me: Yeah, we where not allowed to give more then two people, in our department of sixty, a high appraisal. Since we did not want to give people a raise.

He agreed it was shitty, but he was just middle management and had to play ball.

I was naive; working hard does not get noticed, it does not matter. Learning what the managers actually want and making them dependent on you is what gets noticed and rewarded.

It's just sickening. So I went freelance.

Meanwhile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34843615

$14m in security. Where does that money even go, high-tech weapons?

The Internet tells me executive protection bodyguards run about $150/hr, so let's presume Zuck springs for that. There are about 8760 hours in a year, so a single bodyguard 24/7 runs $1.3m/year. $14m sounds like half a dozen people plus expenses and overhead.

Zuck needs protection from foreign governments, spy agencies and prying hedge funds or just from anyone that could profit/benefit from harming or spying on him.

All the companies are using the same playbook. Depending on the country you are employed in (I'd imagine), the employer will have to be more careful about it though - if the facts don't line up (which they probably won't in many cases) they are opening themselves to wrongful dismissal lawsuits. I would say it's safe to assume many performance reviews have been falsified compared to prior feedback employees have received.

You don't have to lie about it. If you want to give more bad reviews of employees, you can genuinely raise expectations so they won't be met instead of lying about missing expectations that were met. Especially if the new expectations are low enough that some employees meet them.

Facebook’s history and the current stock price explains everything about this news. If you are about short-term self-preservation this is one of the things that you need to do.

This is what poorly run companies do. In the process of evaluating people to support an agenda, whether layoffs, top ranking, salary/bonus allocations, etc., it destroys any credibility that performance reviews may have had. Granted, in most companies, the credibility of the performance system isn’t that high to start with. In my time managing, the team members knew who was performing well and who wasn’t. And it was/is incumbent upon the manager to have similar insights. Such insights don’t come from semi-annual reviews. They come from frequent team interaction and engagement. Reviews are a substitute for good management, mostly to make HR teams happy.

You guys need to crunch harder. The Lord MZ isn't happy, look at his face expression.

Does Zuck get a perf review too?

I think already knows what current and former employees think of his performance, and increased his security allowance as a result:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/16/meta-to-p...

How does losing $100 billion sound?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-27/mark-zuck...

This does not seem newsworthy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com