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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

Tech workers just discovered that they will be kept only if they are performant, and they are stressed about it. Welcome in the real world.

Most meta employees don't produce any value but are getting well paid because in the past meta has managed to be the most used social network. Produce value for the company and not what you believe is value and yoi will never get fired

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Sweet summer child. Who do you think determines whether you are "productive"? Your manager. If you don't play the political game and get on their side, you get fired, no matter how "productive" you think you are.

Or your entire team gets fired by their manager, because you are collectively considered unproductive. Sucks to be you if you worked on a project that was considered to be Hot New Thing that Saves the Company up until 5 minutes ago.

The average individual contributor in a big company is not able to meaningfully influence whether they produce value or not. They might be stuck in a team or even department with an agenda that produces little value, with no opportunities to make proactive change. It's quite intransparent in the FAANG hiring process if you will end up in such a team after your offer.

If ensuring your part of the company is working on the big picture right things becomes your responsibility, what's even the point of joining an established enterprise over a startup?

In many of these companies the system, process, algorithm, whatever that lays off individuals just informs people from senior manager down, they don't even know who's going away. How do you imagine that correlates with individual performance? The correlation is basically 0, maybe negative sometimes :-)

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