Posted on 02/17/2023 9:24:41 AM PST by thegagline
Thousands of workers at Facebook parent Meta reportedly didn’t get a like from Mark Zuckerberg on their performance reviews — an ominous sign that more layoffs are in the offing.
The tech company, which also owns WhatsApp and Instagram, gave some 7,000 employees, or 10% of Meta’s workforce, subpar reviews, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
Employees who score low on the key performance metrics often leave the company, sources told the paper. Zuckerberg will consider another round of layoffs if not enough depart, the people said.
Last November, Meta culled 11,000 jobs — or roughly 13% of its 87,000 global workforce — from its payroll.
The company on Friday also slashed a key bonus metric — part of Zuckerberg’s overall strategy of making 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency.”
A former Meta employee said the subpar reviews are a sign that “OG Mark” or “old school Zuck” is back.
The CEO is said to have had a reputation for delivering blunt, direct feedback to employees who weren’t meeting expectations, according to the Journal.
“We’ve always had a goal-based culture of high performance, and our review process is intended to incentivize long-term thinking and high-quality work, while helping employees get actionable feedback,” a Meta spokesman told the Journal.
Another round of layoffs would be a dramatic reversal from the company’s hiring policies over the course of the last three years, when the payroll nearly doubled.
But Meta’s stock fell by more than 70% last year as the company lost billions in its metaverse investment.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Facebook is a narcissism incubator.
Full disclosure: Years ago, I had a Facebook account for about a month to see what Robert Earl Keen (singer songwriter) was up to.
That’s news? I worked for a company 30 years ago that had a policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% every year based on performance reviews.
Kids today buy into the Lake Woebegone fallacy that everybody is above average.
Blanket poor performance reviews are often a cover to justify firing employees “for performance” instead of announcing a layoff.
That was a classic Jack Welch policy - one that his acolytes carried with them wherever they went.
My brother absolutely HATED that policy, because he had all high-performers in his group, and he was forced to fire the bottom 10% every year, even though they were probably in the top 25% of all employees company-wide.
Nothing breaks motivation & morale better than policies like that.
A good way to get employees to cover crap up that will eventually blow up later.
Meta brags about its diverse workforce. Which means any layoffs will comprise diverse laid off workers. In which case, won’t Meta be accused of racism?
The longer you work here, diverse it gets.
I found out the hard way in the early 1990s that this is how HR tries to get out of paying unemployment benefits: they think they can claim the firing is for cause. It didn't work since most of the affected employees were long term and older and they had no previous bad reviews. Quite the contrary.
I’ve always found it hard to believe it takes so many people to do such a simple thing.
I thought many companies will lay off bad workers rather than “fire for cause,” because the latter could trigger a lawsuit (e.g., hostile environment, sexual harassment, discrimination).
Getting a subpar performance review is a clear indicator that your head will be on the chopping block on the next round of layoffs and that you ought to either get yourself up to par quickly or freshen up that resume.
Read an article way back, some years ago now, that said that something like 35-45% of high school boys had never been on a date because they did not know HOW to talk to a girl because they never have spoken to one. They are locked up in their room at home, playing video games, watching porn movies. I know, my sister's only child, a boy, screwed around and wasted his life from 18 thru age 36. My sister and brother-in-law both got him jobs, gave him a job working with my BIL as he was a big-time contractor, building malls, parks, etc. My lazy nephew DIED of a heart attack brought on by heroin use. He was 36 years old. My sister REFUSED to talk about his drug use. She would not stand for one of us telling her the kid was a junkie. She refused to believe it, to his dying day. Sadly, I think my sister was in need of help as much as my nephew.
If you have your entire team performing at a high level, you have done your job well as a manager.
Pruning deadweight is one thing but cutting good employees in order to hit a number is a horrible management tactic.
That seems like a normal corporate 10-20-40-20-10 performance curve. I suppose the snowflakes who are accustomed to participation ribbons are going to be angry at merit-based reviews.
-PJ
We did it on a division-wide basis with about 200 people in the division under the Division VP. We had a high-performing company, but there was definitely a group of under-performers. All the Program Managers and Directors were requested to rank everybody in the division which was weird because we didn’t know the other people that well. But we had seen everybody give presentations and knew of their achievements, so it actually worked quite well. It was surprising how little disagreement we had in our rankings, even of our own people. People would argue where a person should be in his or her quintile, but rarely would people argue to move somebody up a quintile or two.
I was very skeptical when the program was introduced, but it worked well for us and I became a believer. Of course, the bottom performers knew who they were and usually left voluntarily rather than wait to get fired and have to deal with that stigma.
“Getting a subpar performance review is a clear indicator that your head will be on the chopping block on the next round of layoffs”
Exactly. Those who we ranked in the bottom quintile got the message and usually departed voluntarily. Performance Improvement Plans rarely made people improve their performance.
See my comment in #15.
Only 10%? In any large organization there’s always more than 10% that are not pulling their weight.
The company I work for always did this the Tuesday before year end— we called it Black Tuesday.
With ownership and leadership changes, this has almost gone away.
It takes a special kind of stupid to apply a bell curve to a population that is not randomly selected.
And doing so is management admitting that their interviewing and hiring process puts them in the bottom 10%.
“Yeah, we’re going to interview these guys, look at their grades and job history, but we suck so bad at it that you might as well pick people off the street at random. We’ll just fire the ones that don’t work out.”
Yeah, but this is woke Meta. I'd love to know what metrics they employ for determining competence. I suspect that being too white/heterosexual/normal results in a "poor performance" review.
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