alt Hacker NewsLet's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
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Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!
This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need?
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign