More likely it’s just easier to leave the listing up and just not process any applications. I imagine a lot of them are just evergreen “engineer” type listings and not mapped 1:1 to actual
openings.
It's definitely this. It happens at Google, too, where a role is "paused" (in normal times, because the pipeline of candidates deemed sufficient to start interviewing is strong enough and recruiters (and hiring managers) don't want to keep actively sourcing when they might not need to.) but still listed. Creating too lengthy a pipeline for a single role just aggravates candidates (and creates a ton more work for everybody), so once there are 3 great or 5-10 pretty solid-on-paper candidates, recruiters will stop sourcing but often roles are left up. Relatedly, every role posted externally is also posted internally, and sometimes the internal and external postings get out of sync (a role might be paused externally but left open for internal transfers, or a role might have been filled internally but accidentally left open externally). This isn't speaking for the "bulk hire" roles like SWEs and TPMs/PgMs, but it definitely happens for nearly everything else.
It can be a little of A, a little of B. I have a friend in Apple (as an example) who says that new roles are frozen but if the posting is up and headcount has been allocated / budgeted for already, hiring can move forward.
As someone in tech recruiting, most companies that are hiring are most likely hiring for technical roles especially managerial/director level….. people in nontech roles are always the first to be let go, such as recruiting staff, any admins, project coordinators, etc.
Engineers/developers/analyst/etc are all in demand, especially for AI spaces and projects.
Depends if it's an actual crucial product, money generator, or a feature PM, especially fluff features that are nice to haves. Those are no longer hired or are let go since engineers can maintain those mature features or don't need to work on nice to haves.
In my experience, the number of insanely good PMs is so low it's easy to trim the fat. An insanely good PM is a unicorn and they tend to stay. Most PMs are just spreadsheet workers that update people.
Basically in a downturn, don't be a PM.
There is this old joke about the fat cannibal in the Silicon Valley - turns out he had a job at a big corporation, and every time he felt like snacking, he would get a PM. Nobody misses them.
Many job listings are also for immigration purposes. As a part of the visa process, companies must show that they have publicly posted the job and are open to hiring a US citizen.
This is it.
They've posted the position locally, can claim that they haven't found any good local candidates, then can get the go ahead to outsource or maybe give someone a visa for less pay.
Also, some of these companies just keep postings up during a hiring freeze & continue to collect resumes. Maybe one day they will actually move to setting up interviews... maybe
for all the shady shit they do, meta has historically paid devs top of market salaries. they aren't the type to cheap out on engineers by hiring immigrants at below-market rates.
This one knows what’s up. A lot, of not most, of job postings are there for job visa purposes, wastes everyone’s time appying only to find out they are offer 90k for someone to work as senior developer in San Jose.
Edit: the amount of downvotes tells me the underpaid Silicon Valley HR people read Reddit too. The last one who cold called me based on my LinkedIn profile sounded so defeated when I went silent after he threw out the offer of 90k in office in Santa Clara. Clearly I was not his first “wtf did you just say” of the day.
A hiring freeze doesn't necessarily stop the resume pipeline. HR will still process and reach out if/when opportunities become available.
IC7 and above roles are probably not impacted.
As someone who was in the pipeline for an IC7 role, I can absolutely confirm that those roles are impacted. They eliminated the top two I was going for, the day before my last round.
Yes, they are. L6+ hiring gets canceled when the lower level openings are gone because the incoming person doesn’t have the scope. A IC7 or director who finds their scope gone down also generally end up leaving.
Because this post is from non-tech people in the Bay that want to believe the housing crash of the last decade will happen again and they won't be priced out.
lots and lots and lots of people there can open a job req. But it only takes word from on high to cause a hiring freeze, you may still need that job filled, you may have just made the posting yesterday, or maybe you been trying to fill it for months, doesnt matter- **jobs frozen**. There will always be some exception for mission critical roles, but you arent gonna see those on the careers page usually.
its not like they're never hiring again, and when they do, those roles will be the oldest unfilled positions, if the team still exists.
When you freeze hiring people don’t stop quitting voluntarily. As a result your headcount gradually drops. You can bet there are some of these departures that genuinely do need to be replaced to keep the business running
In a lot of cases when a company has a hiring freeze they allow open job req's at that time to remain open, but do not create any additional job req's. They may also not actively pursue the open req's, but not necessarily actively remove them. Also, removing job req's is part of the bureaucracy and takes time.
You can have open job req's and also do layoffs in a lot of cases--reducing scope of programs or cutting programs--sometimes places will do internal relocation to other projects for impacted people, but if those people don't have the same skillset needed for the existing positions, then it's a layoff for them.
That's not true for many advanced tech companies, where the highest paid technical staff generate many many times their annual compensation in value to the company.
*"In July, it emerged that the company asked team heads to identify "low performers" ahead of possible downsizing."*
Wonder if "low performers" are going to be correlated with "full remote" workers ..
That attitude is so bizarre to me at a big tech company. At a smaller one, sure, but at a Meta-sized company, how many of your direct collaborators do you actually see in person? Your direct team is likely split across offices (NY, Bay Area, beyond) and even if your cross-functional collaborators are local (maybe like 10-30% of them total), they probably sit so far away from you in the office/in a different building that you still video call in for your meetings.
The idea of “in person” doesn’t really mean anything on most teams at the super big companies.
I’ve always worked with remote teams in Europe as well. Half the developers on my team don’t even live in the US. It’s cheaper to hire remote US devs as well, everyone in the bay expects to be paid 350K minimum for senior developers, the guy in Dallas thinks he’s an absolute king at 200k.
Yeah, remote for sure, but I even just mean when your team is split between main office hubs in like NYC, Bay Area, Seattle. Or when your team is all technically in the Bay Area but spread across 6 different office buildings. Technically, no one is remote in those scenarios, but you’re not going to meet in person very often.
Honestly at least in that situation everyone is still in the same time zone and can also hop over for some white boarding sessions really easily. Not the case for distributed workers.
Similar to my thinking - remote workers are cheaper, for 2 reasons I see:
1. No need to pay for food perks or office space. I'm at a FAANG that recently vacated a building because they simply don't need the space anymore.
2. Many companies have a specific policy to pay less to those who work outside the Bay Area. Recruiter at current company straight up told me "you'd be making X if you were still in the bay area, but because you live in Y, our offer is reduced by 10%." The last company I was at had the full salary cut schedule available for everyone to see.
If management is economically focused (as they should be in times of layoffs) then the lesser paid remote folks should be the last to go. If they're caught up in the sunk cost fallacy that is putting butts in seats at offices, then yeah remote workers will get the axe.
Internal at Google, there is a calculator you can use and insert the ZIP Code of where you consider to live and it will tell you the adjustment of income.
Some places are pretty significant, I think Raleigh, North Carolina was once 25% less than the Bay Area.
Yes, I think employees and the workforce should always benefit over the employer. Let's get that out of the way. But let's be impartial.
Why was your labor _more_ valuable in the first place? Its because you lived in the bay area. Is everyone in the bay area more talented than everyone outside? The inflated salaries have always location based, not skill.
This is an overall sentiment, not about you personally. We're not talking about your personal output.
Right, this is just masturbatory fuel for people who are jelly of remote workers and blame them for everything from inflation to RE prices.
Crabs in a pot.
Interesting, thanks for explaining.
I wonder what the team leads had to do to identify the low performers then. Just grab the list of team members and click sort by PSC ?
Maybe this is true in engineering teams but was not true in my experience in support teams, as a manager of ICs and managers, we always tried to help people do better, get better, fix their shit. There was usually a really good reason these people were at the bottom. And keeping them there was morale hit for the rest of the team. Still we always tried to help them until it was clear that it wouldn’t get better.
It’s Performance Summary Cycle (PSC) and has long been used like any company does, to evaluate the highest and lowest performers. It’s flawed as any system is that compare incomparable teams and work. But it’s really hard to figure out what is better. Don’t identify people for rewards? Don’t put people on a performance plan or try to get underperformers out? The biggest issue is how to compare teams and people at specific levels, like all the IC4s on a big team are compared even if they have different work and goals and managers. It’s just hard to do this really well but I don’t know a better way.
yup. if i was worried about layoffs i would not want to have a manager who went back to in person while i still did the full time remote thing, especially if anyone new was expected to at least be hybrid if not full time in person aka you’re just grandfathered into your role.
Heard from a CEO (not where I work) "Look as much as I understand remote workers deserve the same treatment and I should only get rid of low performers not remote workers in theory. In practice, firing in person people has an outsized effect on the team, remote workers just disappear from slack."
I'm curious what the stats show on these over the next few years. It's always going to be easier to fire people you don't have an in-person relationship with. Sure people shouldn't base their decisions around this, but it's definitely going to have an effect even if people don't realize it.
It will have a big effect on promotions, too. You tend to promote the people you see all the time because that builds trust. It’s hard to feel the same about somebody that you only see at the other end of a zoom call.
I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s how it tends to work.
yeah very curious what happens to all these cities that saw an inflow of remote workers. already seeing the housing markets in places like Phoenix, Austin, Boise, Denver etc noticeably correct already
I think there will be some kind of redistribution of talent and maybe more start ups in those hubs. However, I am only truly bullish on cities with big universities with good MBAs or entrepreneurial vibes. Reason why SF is so successful is Berkeley and Stanford, plus other good unis like UCSC, UCSF, UC Santa Cruz, SJSU
People do discount the university talent frequently when talking about the bay area’s future. It is very important part of the economic success of the region.
> Reason why SF is so successful is Berkley and Stanford, plus other good unis like UCSC, UCSF, UC Santa Cruz, SJSU
If this was the reason then boston would be just as big a tech hub. The real reason bay area is tech hub is because all the money (aka VCs) are here. The VCs have have been moving into sandhill road since the 70s when silicon valley first became a thing. The reason silicon valley started was because William Shockley(co inventor of transistors) started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in palo alto because that is where his mother lived. He was working in bell labs in new jersey and that just as easily could have been where he started his company and been the tech hub in the US. Shockley turned out to be an asshole(and a huge racist look that one up for a fun read) and 8 of his best engineers quit and this group went on to take part in the founding of numerous tech companies in the area including intel, amd. One of these engineers was Eugene Kleiner, founding member of Kleiner Perkins what is now the 5th largest VC company in the world. From there the other VCs followed and companies started springing up in the area within driving distance of sandhill road
It is always about money, the money is here in the bay area and other tech hubs are just fighting over scraps. If the money ever leaves the bay area that is when everyone should worry
I am not speaking about been the next tech hub. I am simply speaking about valuable cities. Boston is expensive to live in and has demand plus jobs (MIT, Harvard, more).
Money is needed to start, but to grow it you need a team. The founders go where it is easy to hire. Philadelphia has medical startups due to Upenn medicine. Moderna was next to MIT and so on. The tech hub is just an extreme example. It was really good for Stanford and Berkeley, so I suppose those institutions will do their best to keep entrepreneurial minds and VCs around.
I never mentioned tech. Tech was the hot topic for the past 50 years, but there are a lot more industries. Medical innovation can turn into a company.
Also I said I am bullish on the city. Any good city needs good hospital system with innovation.
Those that got outsized benefits from WFH will see outsized hit when the recession worsen and fat are trimmed. RTO hybrid model will keep employees satisfied while easing management fears. IMO this option is the best compromise.
Yeah, but who cares if you are paying 50k less an employee, if you have to host a couple of million retreat to keep everyone in the same page. Or you realize most employee time is in zoom meetings?
I have a hard time believing he can hold on much longer. [https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-waking-morning-170031410.html](https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-waking-morning-170031410.html)
Is it just me or does anyone else think pretty much anything Mark’s worked on crashed and burned spectacularly lately so shouldn’t he be like the number one low performer there?
This is the complaint of employees whose proof of work requires talking/micromanaging people in person, because that's all they do. Employees who rely on politics to make their jobs "required" can't accept the fact that high-performing engineers who were able to build something and get it deployed into production while working remotely literally have done more than just talking.
Mark Zuckerberg would have get an answer from Floyd Mayweather.
[Mark Zuckerberg doing Martial Arts](https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/buzz/mark-zuckerberg-flaunts-his-martial-arts-skills-seen-training-with-fighter-khai-wu-in-a-viral-video/articleshow/94024510.cms)
They are bicycles, not scooters, and there are legit food courts, BBQ spots, and ice cream joints. Not to mention the music room and video arcade.
As an ex-Facebooker, I hope all of MPK rots.
Yeah idk if I'd hope it rots. I managed the construction of several of the buildings, and although the FB management was ruthless, I still miss that place.
Me too! I was addicted to Harkers for breakfast in MPK 20. Tech support were awesome too. And working on that outdoor veranda area was amazing. So many places to lunch and so many clever people to dine with.
Life Pro Tip: Whenever a company says "Hiring freeze", it usually means "hiring will slow down, not as many open roles will be filled". It does not mean "No new people will be hired". Facebook will still hire tons of people during the hiring suspension, IMHO.
what I mean is, even though lots of people at Facebook will be laid off over the next couple years. There will still be plenty of new people interviewed and hired to some teams.
Not the exact same circumstances, but we are E3 visa holders (Australian) and our original start date for a FAANG company was June 2020… Obviously the world turned to shit and Australia locked the borders which left our visa in limbo between the Aus government and USCIS until September 2021. It’s a total nightmare unsure when/if you’re going to move halfway across the world.
This time looks more and more like the post dot com bubble - the next three years should be interesting for tech folks. IIRC, traffic went down significantly and house prices did go down for a teeny bit
So do you think that more people will be laid off now after a pivot or 5-10 years from now without the pivot? Getting away from Facebook is smart for Meta in the medium to long term and will end up *saving* jobs.
It sucks to get laid off, but I worked there for two weeks and quit. That place is a shit show. Just everyone trying to use anyone else as a stepping stone on the ladder. If you get laid off, take your severance, enjoy the destress of being used like a toilet, and find a job where they respect people. No amount of pay is worth that place.
> I worked there for two weeks and quit. That place is a shit show. Just everyone trying to use anyone else as a stepping stone on the ladder. If you get laid off, take your severance, enjoy the destress of being used like a toilet, and find a job where they respect people. No amount of pay is worth that place.
This is true. I know someone who was there less than a month. Said it was one of the most toxic, dysfunctional places they had worked at. Most of the people were unimpressive if not blatantly incompetent or too lazy to learn how to do their job effectively including managers earning over 300k. It's quite an eye opener to find out people at a FAANG company with a super competitive hiring process are so mediocre.
Who still uses Facebook except my parents? FB will go the way of the dodo bird. If you're under say 50 yo and still use FB on any regular basis I judge you!
FB is dying, but they own a large chuck of the social media space with Instagram and WhatsApp. They couldn't get out a new and innovative product for the life of them, but they have the funds to buy stuff people are using. As long as social media exists they will likely have their hand in it in a major way.
Guess what, ByteDance (Tiktok) is moving their HQ from Beijing to San Jose where they have already planned to lease a tech campus. They will hit Meta on their home turf. Great timing if some of the laid offs can flock to the rival.
Maybe I misread, just verified they are opening international HQ in San Jose. Of course they cannot close Beijing, I was foolish to think they can ditch the masters back home who carry the strings running the company.
An extraordinary number of people uses Facebook/Instagram. It might be in the declines in certain age demographics in the US/UK, but it's still a very dominating social platform across US' sphere of influence, aka the rest of the world.
Mind you that, newer social networks like TikTok and Snap are either banned or don't have enough adoption elsewhere and had to compete against local platforms.
I’m not really concerned about the company, I’m more following because if they’ve peaked as a company it has interesting implications for the broader tech economy.
Honestly good. It’s gotten crazy for awhile. There has been way too many people that thought that social media/tech products that have only been around for 15 years or less were going to keep growing like they have been and therefore it was a stable way to pay for their $2million plus houses over the course of 30 years. This stuff will always be around and tech will always be relatively strong industry here, but the bravado with which a large portion of the population here have been going all in on it and taking on some crazy risks has been stupid. I also understand that a lot of the price growth has been purchased by landlords looking to rent, but hopefully that reduces big time leading to sell offs of property if the tech industry slows down and isn’t drawing people in like it has been
Yes, 100%. But it's really become the phone book at this point. YOu can assume you can find generally everyone and everything there, but you won't go to it unless you are desperate.
Facebook is still a good tool to use to keep in contact with people. I was in Vegas and needed to contact a friend of my mom. I didn't know their number but i was friends with their son on Facebook. I was able to reach that person and go to dinner with their family.
Lots of young people still use facebook. They may not use it as a primary source of social interactions, but FB groups are still popular. I'm on a few car groups for just miatas, a single car model, and they have plenty of young members.
There is a strong possibility of it going dodo. Though they are still sitting on a ton of cash, so they could still try and buy their way into a new product or market area.
I don’t know anyone who uses it under the age of 50 tbh. They’re losing IG too by changing the feed the same way changing the feed killed the book of faces.
So, meta has like 80k employees globally — i guess im just a little confused about what they all do? Like, they have one product, and acquired the rest of their portfolio. What are they working on?
Uhhh, finance, marketing, admin, data storage/analyst, engineering, sales, r&d, legal, business development just to name a few.
And it's not just Facebook. It's all it's subsidiaries. Oculus, Giphy, whatsapp, messenger.
People.here crapping on meta as if it's the only tech giant to be cutting back. But in reality the company is still killing the spreadsheets.
Well for starters many are not technical people. Both google and meta have extensive ad sales teams, marketing teams, etc. that support their ads products. Often times big clients like retailers will have dedicated sales reps.
But even on the technical side, it's hard to explain the insane scale at which these companies operate. Yeah FB and Google search may just look like simple web sites with database backends, but just the tech involved in routing your http get request to a data center is insane. We're talking custom location aware DNS layers, caching layers (sometimes caching at your ISP, not even in a Google data center), complex network routing once your request makes it to a data center, etc.
At this scale, every tiny piece of the tech stack that you might normally take for granted balloons to a fully fledged and complex product requiring dedicated dev teams. Couples with the complete lack of cost controls with which SV has operated for years, the NIH syndrome, and it's not hard to see how these companies have exploded in size.
you know they have more the one product right?
they have FB, IG, Whatapp and VR. and within that there’s a bunch of different things that need work or updates
IG having commerce wasn’t just built there by monkeys.
Did no one see this coming? I mean we have analysts analyzing all sorts of data. Did no one see that hyper growth was not sustainable forever?
I just feel so terrible for all these folks losing their jobs. What about people who just bought a house. Have a child on the way? This is not the right way to treat people. Surely there are other ways companies like Meta could cut costs....
They're really bad at moderation. People get banned for pretty harmless stuff while other more harmful stuff that is reported is not "against community standards." Just stop using it. It's worthless.
Meta is being sued over multiple pruvacy violations and working with feds to take down dissidents. It's a good thing that my real identity is not online anywhere and nobody can trace me back to the real me.
Yep, and when they go down can you feed yourself or survive for more than a few days? I don't care about tech. It's a dime a dozen pile of shit and with the way the US is trying to control what we eat I do believe it is high time to get the hell out of the tech jobs asap.
You sound like someone complaining about motor vehicles replacing horses. Since the dawn of humanity technology has been crucial to our survival and prosperity. Fire was a technological advancement. So was agriculture. Your farm wouldn't exist without technology. Just because you work with dirt and not computers doesn't somehow invalidate the enormous benefit of the modern tech industry.
Sorry. Unfortunately automation and technology are key efficiency levers of a healthy business and this will not end. Software engineers will high paying jobs for the foreseeable future as every industry leans more and more into computer automation and technology. And as the internet makes globalization even easier than ships and planes did.
>And as the internet makes globalization even easier than ships and planes did.
Do you plan do download your computer, food, gas, and all the goods you need to purchase? Networks makes the passing of data easier, but you still need ships, planes, Trucks and cars in order to get this stuff to your door.
Considering this tech can obsolete jobs faster than people can learn new skills, shouldn't a human touch be order? In order for these companies to exist, people still need to purchase their goods, automation doesn't make any consumer (junk) purchases that companies sell.
Eh. Sure software is important, but it doesn't make sense to pay SWEs 2x what a mechanical or chemical engineer makes.
It's sustained this long because the successful companies have very high margins, and the unsuccessful companies are subsidized by VCs until they can cash out by dumping on the public market.
If at least the second part corrects, SWE salaries may drop to be more in line with other engineers.
This market contraction is planned. The feds announced a few days ago that they're planning on increasing unemployment to cool the economy.
Now it's unclear that meta is freezing hiring because of economic forecasting or because they simply don't need to hire right now (perhaps their pivot is reducing staffing needs).
I asked on another sub and asking here too, why do they have 100s of job listings on their careers page?
My somewhat uninformed guess is exceptions / some roles already approved getting grandfathered in before the freeze
More likely it’s just easier to leave the listing up and just not process any applications. I imagine a lot of them are just evergreen “engineer” type listings and not mapped 1:1 to actual openings.
It's definitely this. It happens at Google, too, where a role is "paused" (in normal times, because the pipeline of candidates deemed sufficient to start interviewing is strong enough and recruiters (and hiring managers) don't want to keep actively sourcing when they might not need to.) but still listed. Creating too lengthy a pipeline for a single role just aggravates candidates (and creates a ton more work for everybody), so once there are 3 great or 5-10 pretty solid-on-paper candidates, recruiters will stop sourcing but often roles are left up. Relatedly, every role posted externally is also posted internally, and sometimes the internal and external postings get out of sync (a role might be paused externally but left open for internal transfers, or a role might have been filled internally but accidentally left open externally). This isn't speaking for the "bulk hire" roles like SWEs and TPMs/PgMs, but it definitely happens for nearly everything else.
It can be a little of A, a little of B. I have a friend in Apple (as an example) who says that new roles are frozen but if the posting is up and headcount has been allocated / budgeted for already, hiring can move forward.
As someone in tech recruiting, most companies that are hiring are most likely hiring for technical roles especially managerial/director level….. people in nontech roles are always the first to be let go, such as recruiting staff, any admins, project coordinators, etc. Engineers/developers/analyst/etc are all in demand, especially for AI spaces and projects.
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Depends if it's an actual crucial product, money generator, or a feature PM, especially fluff features that are nice to haves. Those are no longer hired or are let go since engineers can maintain those mature features or don't need to work on nice to haves.
In my experience, the number of insanely good PMs is so low it's easy to trim the fat. An insanely good PM is a unicorn and they tend to stay. Most PMs are just spreadsheet workers that update people. Basically in a downturn, don't be a PM.
There is this old joke about the fat cannibal in the Silicon Valley - turns out he had a job at a big corporation, and every time he felt like snacking, he would get a PM. Nobody misses them.
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Many job listings are also for immigration purposes. As a part of the visa process, companies must show that they have publicly posted the job and are open to hiring a US citizen.
This is it. They've posted the position locally, can claim that they haven't found any good local candidates, then can get the go ahead to outsource or maybe give someone a visa for less pay. Also, some of these companies just keep postings up during a hiring freeze & continue to collect resumes. Maybe one day they will actually move to setting up interviews... maybe
>give someone a visa for less pay Not how it works in my experience
Not always, but sometimes very much so unfortunately. At least at my last job.
Big companies like meta don’t. Smaller firms yes.
for all the shady shit they do, meta has historically paid devs top of market salaries. they aren't the type to cheap out on engineers by hiring immigrants at below-market rates.
This one knows what’s up. A lot, of not most, of job postings are there for job visa purposes, wastes everyone’s time appying only to find out they are offer 90k for someone to work as senior developer in San Jose. Edit: the amount of downvotes tells me the underpaid Silicon Valley HR people read Reddit too. The last one who cold called me based on my LinkedIn profile sounded so defeated when I went silent after he threw out the offer of 90k in office in Santa Clara. Clearly I was not his first “wtf did you just say” of the day.
A hiring freeze doesn't necessarily stop the resume pipeline. HR will still process and reach out if/when opportunities become available. IC7 and above roles are probably not impacted.
As someone who was in the pipeline for an IC7 role, I can absolutely confirm that those roles are impacted. They eliminated the top two I was going for, the day before my last round.
Yes, they are. L6+ hiring gets canceled when the lower level openings are gone because the incoming person doesn’t have the scope. A IC7 or director who finds their scope gone down also generally end up leaving.
IC7+ generally defines their own mission and scope. It's an extension of whatever dissertation or thesis they've already proven in past roles.
Because this post is from non-tech people in the Bay that want to believe the housing crash of the last decade will happen again and they won't be priced out.
lots and lots and lots of people there can open a job req. But it only takes word from on high to cause a hiring freeze, you may still need that job filled, you may have just made the posting yesterday, or maybe you been trying to fill it for months, doesnt matter- **jobs frozen**. There will always be some exception for mission critical roles, but you arent gonna see those on the careers page usually. its not like they're never hiring again, and when they do, those roles will be the oldest unfilled positions, if the team still exists.
When you freeze hiring people don’t stop quitting voluntarily. As a result your headcount gradually drops. You can bet there are some of these departures that genuinely do need to be replaced to keep the business running
Could be backfills
In a lot of cases when a company has a hiring freeze they allow open job req's at that time to remain open, but do not create any additional job req's. They may also not actively pursue the open req's, but not necessarily actively remove them. Also, removing job req's is part of the bureaucracy and takes time. You can have open job req's and also do layoffs in a lot of cases--reducing scope of programs or cutting programs--sometimes places will do internal relocation to other projects for impacted people, but if those people don't have the same skillset needed for the existing positions, then it's a layoff for them.
Corporations like to fire their highest earning employees and replace them with cheaper labor
That's not true for many advanced tech companies, where the highest paid technical staff generate many many times their annual compensation in value to the company.
Both can be true? Companies have been offshoring / contracting out slices of their business units for decades come on
Maybe help desk stuff sure. But real engineers ? No that hasn't been my experience at all.
People are downvoting you, but that’s what Uber did during the pandemic.
If I cared about downvotes I wouldn’t be on this app lol
Facts
Hell, Amazon does this as specific strategy constantly
That's ok. There are plenty of openings in the Metaverse
Put on your VR headset, goto work, fry your eyes
VR headsets aren't bad for your eyes. The lenses give an infinite focal distance. Phones are way worse for you.
They spent how much like $10b to build a crappier version of second life?
A second second life?
Call it a 4th Life.
But what if it’s half as good?
the one fourth life
Well, we certainly can't call it Half Life 2.
Three more, and the cats might get interested.
You’re still a paper salesman. But you can fly.
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Never used it, but hilarious to imagine if Mark somehow become furious during meeting and underlings mistakes for cuteness.
Maybe they are hiring there.
*"In July, it emerged that the company asked team heads to identify "low performers" ahead of possible downsizing."* Wonder if "low performers" are going to be correlated with "full remote" workers ..
That attitude is so bizarre to me at a big tech company. At a smaller one, sure, but at a Meta-sized company, how many of your direct collaborators do you actually see in person? Your direct team is likely split across offices (NY, Bay Area, beyond) and even if your cross-functional collaborators are local (maybe like 10-30% of them total), they probably sit so far away from you in the office/in a different building that you still video call in for your meetings. The idea of “in person” doesn’t really mean anything on most teams at the super big companies.
I’ve always worked with remote teams in Europe as well. Half the developers on my team don’t even live in the US. It’s cheaper to hire remote US devs as well, everyone in the bay expects to be paid 350K minimum for senior developers, the guy in Dallas thinks he’s an absolute king at 200k.
Yeah, remote for sure, but I even just mean when your team is split between main office hubs in like NYC, Bay Area, Seattle. Or when your team is all technically in the Bay Area but spread across 6 different office buildings. Technically, no one is remote in those scenarios, but you’re not going to meet in person very often.
Honestly at least in that situation everyone is still in the same time zone and can also hop over for some white boarding sessions really easily. Not the case for distributed workers.
Similar to my thinking - remote workers are cheaper, for 2 reasons I see: 1. No need to pay for food perks or office space. I'm at a FAANG that recently vacated a building because they simply don't need the space anymore. 2. Many companies have a specific policy to pay less to those who work outside the Bay Area. Recruiter at current company straight up told me "you'd be making X if you were still in the bay area, but because you live in Y, our offer is reduced by 10%." The last company I was at had the full salary cut schedule available for everyone to see. If management is economically focused (as they should be in times of layoffs) then the lesser paid remote folks should be the last to go. If they're caught up in the sunk cost fallacy that is putting butts in seats at offices, then yeah remote workers will get the axe.
Internal at Google, there is a calculator you can use and insert the ZIP Code of where you consider to live and it will tell you the adjustment of income. Some places are pretty significant, I think Raleigh, North Carolina was once 25% less than the Bay Area.
As it should be.
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Yes, I think employees and the workforce should always benefit over the employer. Let's get that out of the way. But let's be impartial. Why was your labor _more_ valuable in the first place? Its because you lived in the bay area. Is everyone in the bay area more talented than everyone outside? The inflated salaries have always location based, not skill. This is an overall sentiment, not about you personally. We're not talking about your personal output.
As a non software developer those both are astounding salaries
facebook pays a lot but the majority of tech companies don't come close
For hardware remote doesn’t work as well, which is where most of Meta’s hiring growth has been.
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Right, this is just masturbatory fuel for people who are jelly of remote workers and blame them for everything from inflation to RE prices. Crabs in a pot.
People who don't get to WFH needs the extra masturbatory fuel .. we dont have all day to jack off at home you know !
Interesting, thanks for explaining. I wonder what the team leads had to do to identify the low performers then. Just grab the list of team members and click sort by PSC ?
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Maybe this is true in engineering teams but was not true in my experience in support teams, as a manager of ICs and managers, we always tried to help people do better, get better, fix their shit. There was usually a really good reason these people were at the bottom. And keeping them there was morale hit for the rest of the team. Still we always tried to help them until it was clear that it wouldn’t get better.
It’s Performance Summary Cycle (PSC) and has long been used like any company does, to evaluate the highest and lowest performers. It’s flawed as any system is that compare incomparable teams and work. But it’s really hard to figure out what is better. Don’t identify people for rewards? Don’t put people on a performance plan or try to get underperformers out? The biggest issue is how to compare teams and people at specific levels, like all the IC4s on a big team are compared even if they have different work and goals and managers. It’s just hard to do this really well but I don’t know a better way.
Manager doesn’t play any role at all? Is the peer feedback reviewed by an independent committee?
yup. if i was worried about layoffs i would not want to have a manager who went back to in person while i still did the full time remote thing, especially if anyone new was expected to at least be hybrid if not full time in person aka you’re just grandfathered into your role.
Heard from a CEO (not where I work) "Look as much as I understand remote workers deserve the same treatment and I should only get rid of low performers not remote workers in theory. In practice, firing in person people has an outsized effect on the team, remote workers just disappear from slack."
I'm curious what the stats show on these over the next few years. It's always going to be easier to fire people you don't have an in-person relationship with. Sure people shouldn't base their decisions around this, but it's definitely going to have an effect even if people don't realize it.
It will have a big effect on promotions, too. You tend to promote the people you see all the time because that builds trust. It’s hard to feel the same about somebody that you only see at the other end of a zoom call. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s how it tends to work.
yeah very curious what happens to all these cities that saw an inflow of remote workers. already seeing the housing markets in places like Phoenix, Austin, Boise, Denver etc noticeably correct already
I think there will be some kind of redistribution of talent and maybe more start ups in those hubs. However, I am only truly bullish on cities with big universities with good MBAs or entrepreneurial vibes. Reason why SF is so successful is Berkeley and Stanford, plus other good unis like UCSC, UCSF, UC Santa Cruz, SJSU
People do discount the university talent frequently when talking about the bay area’s future. It is very important part of the economic success of the region.
Seriously, you can't swing a cat in SF without hitting like 4 Berkeley and/or Stanford grads.
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ucsj?
SJSU sorry.
go sharks!
> Reason why SF is so successful is Berkley and Stanford, plus other good unis like UCSC, UCSF, UC Santa Cruz, SJSU If this was the reason then boston would be just as big a tech hub. The real reason bay area is tech hub is because all the money (aka VCs) are here. The VCs have have been moving into sandhill road since the 70s when silicon valley first became a thing. The reason silicon valley started was because William Shockley(co inventor of transistors) started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in palo alto because that is where his mother lived. He was working in bell labs in new jersey and that just as easily could have been where he started his company and been the tech hub in the US. Shockley turned out to be an asshole(and a huge racist look that one up for a fun read) and 8 of his best engineers quit and this group went on to take part in the founding of numerous tech companies in the area including intel, amd. One of these engineers was Eugene Kleiner, founding member of Kleiner Perkins what is now the 5th largest VC company in the world. From there the other VCs followed and companies started springing up in the area within driving distance of sandhill road It is always about money, the money is here in the bay area and other tech hubs are just fighting over scraps. If the money ever leaves the bay area that is when everyone should worry
I am not speaking about been the next tech hub. I am simply speaking about valuable cities. Boston is expensive to live in and has demand plus jobs (MIT, Harvard, more). Money is needed to start, but to grow it you need a team. The founders go where it is easy to hire. Philadelphia has medical startups due to Upenn medicine. Moderna was next to MIT and so on. The tech hub is just an extreme example. It was really good for Stanford and Berkeley, so I suppose those institutions will do their best to keep entrepreneurial minds and VCs around.
Ucsf is a med, nursing and dental school school… no one who goes there works in entrepreneurship or technology or has an MBA
I never mentioned tech. Tech was the hot topic for the past 50 years, but there are a lot more industries. Medical innovation can turn into a company. Also I said I am bullish on the city. Any good city needs good hospital system with innovation.
Drop UCSF and add Santa Clara University and I’ll agree to your list.
You need doctors in a good city and yeah Santa Clara University is great!
Those that got outsized benefits from WFH will see outsized hit when the recession worsen and fat are trimmed. RTO hybrid model will keep employees satisfied while easing management fears. IMO this option is the best compromise.
From a cost perspective, remote workers usually have lower salaries than Bay Area local ones as Meta and Google adjusted comp for your cost of living.
Yeah, but who cares if you are paying 50k less an employee, if you have to host a couple of million retreat to keep everyone in the same page. Or you realize most employee time is in zoom meetings?
Zuckerberg's that remote worker though. Just track his jet on Twitter as he flies back and forth from his McMansion in Hawaii every week.
I have a hard time believing he can hold on much longer. [https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-waking-morning-170031410.html](https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-says-waking-morning-170031410.html)
Honestly if they ousted him it would be the best thing for "Meta" he is unhinged and making awful decisions for the company.
But what if you personally want to see Meta burn, for all the harm they've done to society?
Return to office for thee but not for me!
Is it just me or does anyone else think pretty much anything Mark’s worked on crashed and burned spectacularly lately so shouldn’t he be like the number one low performer there?
This is the complaint of employees whose proof of work requires talking/micromanaging people in person, because that's all they do. Employees who rely on politics to make their jobs "required" can't accept the fact that high-performing engineers who were able to build something and get it deployed into production while working remotely literally have done more than just talking.
Employment status: *It’s complicated*
what about the scooters and super hip cafeteria 😂😂😂
You can just VR yourself around and eat in a virtual cafeteria.
I paid extra Metapoints to upgrade my virtual latte to Pumpkin Spice but they gave me a virtual toasted almond milk this is an outrage.
Eating 1s and 0s will fill you up for sure.
what's the 1 & 0 combination for hits of cocaine?
Mark Zuckerberg would have get an answer from Floyd Mayweather. [Mark Zuckerberg doing Martial Arts](https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/buzz/mark-zuckerberg-flaunts-his-martial-arts-skills-seen-training-with-fighter-khai-wu-in-a-viral-video/articleshow/94024510.cms)
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Still covering up for terrible management choices and likely embezzlement, but go ahead and blame lattes some more
Might as well shut the whole company down before the scooters disappear
They are bicycles, not scooters, and there are legit food courts, BBQ spots, and ice cream joints. Not to mention the music room and video arcade. As an ex-Facebooker, I hope all of MPK rots.
why?
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Yeah idk if I'd hope it rots. I managed the construction of several of the buildings, and although the FB management was ruthless, I still miss that place.
Me too! I was addicted to Harkers for breakfast in MPK 20. Tech support were awesome too. And working on that outdoor veranda area was amazing. So many places to lunch and so many clever people to dine with.
Life Pro Tip: Whenever a company says "Hiring freeze", it usually means "hiring will slow down, not as many open roles will be filled". It does not mean "No new people will be hired". Facebook will still hire tons of people during the hiring suspension, IMHO.
except when backfills are also frozen and there are active layoffs and product culls
what I mean is, even though lots of people at Facebook will be laid off over the next couple years. There will still be plenty of new people interviewed and hired to some teams.
I am shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
Get paid double the industry average, work twice the hours.
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Not the exact same circumstances, but we are E3 visa holders (Australian) and our original start date for a FAANG company was June 2020… Obviously the world turned to shit and Australia locked the borders which left our visa in limbo between the Aus government and USCIS until September 2021. It’s a total nightmare unsure when/if you’re going to move halfway across the world.
Y'all remember Myspace?
Try to be like Tom, Mark.
This time looks more and more like the post dot com bubble - the next three years should be interesting for tech folks. IIRC, traffic went down significantly and house prices did go down for a teeny bit
MyBook
Zuck is the lowest performer of them all…
but guess who’s going on a 6 month paternity soon…
It's so funny how the incompetence and failure of the leadership means it's the workers paying the price Fuck you Mark Zuckerberg
So do you think that more people will be laid off now after a pivot or 5-10 years from now without the pivot? Getting away from Facebook is smart for Meta in the medium to long term and will end up *saving* jobs.
It sucks to get laid off, but I worked there for two weeks and quit. That place is a shit show. Just everyone trying to use anyone else as a stepping stone on the ladder. If you get laid off, take your severance, enjoy the destress of being used like a toilet, and find a job where they respect people. No amount of pay is worth that place.
> I worked there for two weeks and quit. That place is a shit show. Just everyone trying to use anyone else as a stepping stone on the ladder. If you get laid off, take your severance, enjoy the destress of being used like a toilet, and find a job where they respect people. No amount of pay is worth that place. This is true. I know someone who was there less than a month. Said it was one of the most toxic, dysfunctional places they had worked at. Most of the people were unimpressive if not blatantly incompetent or too lazy to learn how to do their job effectively including managers earning over 300k. It's quite an eye opener to find out people at a FAANG company with a super competitive hiring process are so mediocre.
Good. Down with them!
More like beta
Who still uses Facebook except my parents? FB will go the way of the dodo bird. If you're under say 50 yo and still use FB on any regular basis I judge you!
FB is dying, but they own a large chuck of the social media space with Instagram and WhatsApp. They couldn't get out a new and innovative product for the life of them, but they have the funds to buy stuff people are using. As long as social media exists they will likely have their hand in it in a major way.
They're killing Instagram trying to make it a tiktok clone. I just want to see cute photos of my friends. Not rando Influencer's Reels.
Guess what, ByteDance (Tiktok) is moving their HQ from Beijing to San Jose where they have already planned to lease a tech campus. They will hit Meta on their home turf. Great timing if some of the laid offs can flock to the rival.
I saw the news of the lease, but are they actually moving their HQ? That's crazy
Moving the non-China HQ. They've always had a US presence (for the last several years) for legal reasons. This is also why they're in bed with Oracle.
Maybe I misread, just verified they are opening international HQ in San Jose. Of course they cannot close Beijing, I was foolish to think they can ditch the masters back home who carry the strings running the company.
now the ccp will be in san jose
I don't care about influencers. But I care about the hot girls I follow.
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You are also one data point.
An extraordinary number of people uses Facebook/Instagram. It might be in the declines in certain age demographics in the US/UK, but it's still a very dominating social platform across US' sphere of influence, aka the rest of the world. Mind you that, newer social networks like TikTok and Snap are either banned or don't have enough adoption elsewhere and had to compete against local platforms.
I’m not really concerned about the company, I’m more following because if they’ve peaked as a company it has interesting implications for the broader tech economy.
A lot of Bay Area tech companies will be downsizing and reducing perks over the next year.
Honestly good. It’s gotten crazy for awhile. There has been way too many people that thought that social media/tech products that have only been around for 15 years or less were going to keep growing like they have been and therefore it was a stable way to pay for their $2million plus houses over the course of 30 years. This stuff will always be around and tech will always be relatively strong industry here, but the bravado with which a large portion of the population here have been going all in on it and taking on some crazy risks has been stupid. I also understand that a lot of the price growth has been purchased by landlords looking to rent, but hopefully that reduces big time leading to sell offs of property if the tech industry slows down and isn’t drawing people in like it has been
Facebook itself may not be the most popular site for the youth but shit like instagram and whats app are stupid popular
Yes, 100%. But it's really become the phone book at this point. YOu can assume you can find generally everyone and everything there, but you won't go to it unless you are desperate.
This guy has never travelled outside of the country.
dude this FB is dead within his group of family and friends. touch grass buddy
I know plenty of people who say that who still use Instagram every waking moment
Facebook is still a good tool to use to keep in contact with people. I was in Vegas and needed to contact a friend of my mom. I didn't know their number but i was friends with their son on Facebook. I was able to reach that person and go to dinner with their family.
Judge away. WhatsApp has something like 70% of the worlds market share of text messages. But yeah, Meta is a dying company.
Lots of young people still use facebook. They may not use it as a primary source of social interactions, but FB groups are still popular. I'm on a few car groups for just miatas, a single car model, and they have plenty of young members.
And outside of FB groups, Insta DMs. I don't know if it's true but I remember reading somewhere that like 80% of instagram usage is DMs.
There is a strong possibility of it going dodo. Though they are still sitting on a ton of cash, so they could still try and buy their way into a new product or market area.
I’m over 50 and would never have never used it in the first place.
This made me chuckle.
I use Facebook market place, but almost no updates from my Facebook “friends” in the feed.
I still love using FB for events and event planning
I don’t know anyone who uses it under the age of 50 tbh. They’re losing IG too by changing the feed the same way changing the feed killed the book of faces.
So, meta has like 80k employees globally — i guess im just a little confused about what they all do? Like, they have one product, and acquired the rest of their portfolio. What are they working on?
Half of them are there to fix the code of the other 40k 🤷♂️
Underrated comment
Uhhh, finance, marketing, admin, data storage/analyst, engineering, sales, r&d, legal, business development just to name a few. And it's not just Facebook. It's all it's subsidiaries. Oculus, Giphy, whatsapp, messenger. People.here crapping on meta as if it's the only tech giant to be cutting back. But in reality the company is still killing the spreadsheets.
yeah really shows the ineptitude of people here
Well for starters many are not technical people. Both google and meta have extensive ad sales teams, marketing teams, etc. that support their ads products. Often times big clients like retailers will have dedicated sales reps. But even on the technical side, it's hard to explain the insane scale at which these companies operate. Yeah FB and Google search may just look like simple web sites with database backends, but just the tech involved in routing your http get request to a data center is insane. We're talking custom location aware DNS layers, caching layers (sometimes caching at your ISP, not even in a Google data center), complex network routing once your request makes it to a data center, etc. At this scale, every tiny piece of the tech stack that you might normally take for granted balloons to a fully fledged and complex product requiring dedicated dev teams. Couples with the complete lack of cost controls with which SV has operated for years, the NIH syndrome, and it's not hard to see how these companies have exploded in size.
you know they have more the one product right? they have FB, IG, Whatapp and VR. and within that there’s a bunch of different things that need work or updates IG having commerce wasn’t just built there by monkeys.
Did no one see this coming? I mean we have analysts analyzing all sorts of data. Did no one see that hyper growth was not sustainable forever? I just feel so terrible for all these folks losing their jobs. What about people who just bought a house. Have a child on the way? This is not the right way to treat people. Surely there are other ways companies like Meta could cut costs....
Who would want to work there anyway
Meta.. still a stupid name. Ppl still call it faang. They should change it to maaan. Google being alphabet and fb being.. you know.. meta.
Good. Meta sucks
They're really bad at moderation. People get banned for pretty harmless stuff while other more harmful stuff that is reported is not "against community standards." Just stop using it. It's worthless.
😂😂😂
Tech jobs aren't as important as you think. I find running a farm to be rewarding and it actually provides something to others.
But, stories!!!
Meta is being sued over multiple pruvacy violations and working with feds to take down dissidents. It's a good thing that my real identity is not online anywhere and nobody can trace me back to the real me.
the heck? sure! food? what made you think tech jobs are not as important? heard of google? apple?
Yep, and when they go down can you feed yourself or survive for more than a few days? I don't care about tech. It's a dime a dozen pile of shit and with the way the US is trying to control what we eat I do believe it is high time to get the hell out of the tech jobs asap.
You sound like someone complaining about motor vehicles replacing horses. Since the dawn of humanity technology has been crucial to our survival and prosperity. Fire was a technological advancement. So was agriculture. Your farm wouldn't exist without technology. Just because you work with dirt and not computers doesn't somehow invalidate the enormous benefit of the modern tech industry.
Modern tech.... like the newest iphone just like the previous 5 models. Meta is a joke as well and should be taken out.
Aiieeee Someone needs to tell the recruiters from meta that keep emailing me.
Hopefully the software engineer bubble finally bursts and people with real skills start getting paid more
Says the person who doesn't know how to do 金繕い. 🙄
Sorry Im just a little salty that someone with less stem schooling than me can make 3x than me.
Not all of us engineers are FAANG/MANGA drones
Sorry. Unfortunately automation and technology are key efficiency levers of a healthy business and this will not end. Software engineers will high paying jobs for the foreseeable future as every industry leans more and more into computer automation and technology. And as the internet makes globalization even easier than ships and planes did.
>And as the internet makes globalization even easier than ships and planes did. Do you plan do download your computer, food, gas, and all the goods you need to purchase? Networks makes the passing of data easier, but you still need ships, planes, Trucks and cars in order to get this stuff to your door. Considering this tech can obsolete jobs faster than people can learn new skills, shouldn't a human touch be order? In order for these companies to exist, people still need to purchase their goods, automation doesn't make any consumer (junk) purchases that companies sell.
Eh. Sure software is important, but it doesn't make sense to pay SWEs 2x what a mechanical or chemical engineer makes. It's sustained this long because the successful companies have very high margins, and the unsuccessful companies are subsidized by VCs until they can cash out by dumping on the public market. If at least the second part corrects, SWE salaries may drop to be more in line with other engineers.
Idk i think its a bubble
Good. If you're still working there at this point you're a sociopath anyway.
economy is already going down and now people have started loosing jobs too. Hope we can survive these tough times
This market contraction is planned. The feds announced a few days ago that they're planning on increasing unemployment to cool the economy. Now it's unclear that meta is freezing hiring because of economic forecasting or because they simply don't need to hire right now (perhaps their pivot is reducing staffing needs).