Time to print out your commit history and show Zuck how many lines of code you wrote last month!
Google announced that something like 25% of their code is AI generated now, and it’d be hilarious how much these companies have enshittified themselves into a cycle of constant self-owns except that we keep suffering for it too.
Like every google app and service is bad now. Search sucks. YouTube apps are bloated, have been crashing, and the algorithm is serving up just random stuff now. G Maps won’t stay open on my phone, and randomly minimizes itself. Gmail is out of space, full of newsletters, and also degrading in search.
Facebook is the same deal. I’ve been on it more recently because I need to track events and it’s all anyone in this city uses. Searching for the name of an event, which you’ve stated you’re going to, by it’s exact name, will find nothing, or an older version of the event from 4 years ago. The feed is 90% ads and sponsored posts, mostly videos. And the videos aren’t ads, they’re just random tiktok-wannabes about paint mixing or machining stuff. It’s utterly bizarre to be inundated with clickbait that desperately wants your attention for no reason.
I consider myself a pretty good engineer and it’s amazing how little these companies can accomplish with literally tens of thousands of developers. Its another of the great paradoxes of our times: individually, software devs must be among the least productive workers of all time, and yet as a group the profession (the computer itself really) has realized such astronomical productivity gains that we’re probably already past the point where anyone really needs to work full-time ever again.
I guess it will impact heavily those who took days off in a protest to the new community guidelines…
Show me the lowest 5% of performers at Meta and I’ll show you people doing God’s work.
i show you mark zuckerberg
Please dont
Now, now, I know its human costume is not perfect yet, but just don’t look into its eyes and you should be OK.
Meta has workers? Thought everything is attached to that shitty hub system they’ve been leaning on for years now.
Then the ones just above the lowest 5% become the newest lowest 5%.
Is he gonna cut them next ?
First they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for the lowest 5%,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a lowest 5%.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to cut below me.What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The “bottom 5%” is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next “bottom 5%”.
Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that’s producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.
There’s a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.
This is the typical Jack Welch stack-ranking nonsent. The theory is that there will always be a bell curve or similar distribution that requires a certain percent (Welch said 10%, but it’s all over the map) be cut while new hires are constantly brought on.
It kills morale and forces employees into short-term impact patterns to avoid the constant churn of cuts. It also means that performative work rather than actual substantive work is encouraged, since the appearance of productivity in whatever metric is stack-ranked is all that matters.
Finally, it encourages people to do the minimum, because the alternative is to compete for bonuses that are only going to the people who meet the highest appearance of productivity metrics, which doesn’t correlate strongly with actual productivity, just as actual productivity (in terms of “producing” output) is also not strongly correlated with value (such as by knowing enough to efficiently complete tasks such that you are not appearing to “produce,” due to being extremely efficient).
i worked at fb a long time ago, it was already exactly like how you describe. everyone was optimizing for their performance review—juicing metrics and prioritizing for the short term. accountability only existed in a 6-month cycle.
Finally, it encourages people to do the minimum, because the alternative is to compete for bonuses that are only going to the people who meet the highest appearance of productivity metrics
Oh yeah they called them “STAR awards” or something to try and make it look like some great achievement.
This kind of system is how you get the consistency and excellence that microsoft are known for.
Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.
who is going to be the next CEO?
I heard vice president Donald Trump might be interested if president Musk will let him
Ohh look big tech is doing veneric corpo shit now…
Tech workers deff dont need a Union 🤡
What even counts as “performing” there?
Number of likes.
Somehow i doubt this’ll affect anyone with “manager”, “head”, “chief” or “officer” in the name…
They may inadvertently focus on people who spoke against the new “pro free speech” of Facebook…
Its most aggressive at the higher tiers, because promotions are a tool of employee retention and “flattening” the management stack is a good way of pushing out the experienced, expensive older employees. You’ll also see a lot more outsourcing of department rolls, as C-levels opt for lowest-bidder contractors you can hire/fire inside a business cycle than big teams of veteran staffers who sit on the payroll thick or thin. That means fewer mid-level managers, as the actual process of team management is sent overseas or subcontracted out to temporary management firms.
McDonald Douglas and Yahoo both executed on this strategy back in the 90s to great effect. Stock valuations boomed, because they were able to create the illusion of cost cutting without impacting quarterly revenue. All it cost them was mountains of technical debt. And then nothing bad happened to either company.
I’m not sure if you’re up to date on how layoffs have been done lately in tech, but management has been primary targets in layoffs. Full layers of management have been removed, and middle managers have often been expected to take on twice as many reports for no increase in compensation.
No comments on the C-level part which is largely correct
Oh no, poor Zuckerberg, what is going to do after he’s fired? He has no marketable skills at all.
Unless they’re axing the top 5% of the org chart, they’re not cutting the lowest performers.
