- Replacing their global policy chief with the company's highest ranking Republican.
- Appointing Dana White to the company's board.
- Changing content policies to be aligned with the incoming administration.
- Elimination of DEI programs in hiring.
- Removing tampons from men's restrooms.
- Defending all this in a 3 hour Joe Rogan interview. Ranting about the lack of "masculine energy" at the company.
- 5% layoff of low performers. Company needs to get "intense".
Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It's so transparent, perhaps part of the point is how nakedly self-serving and obvious it is.
What Meta actually wants to do is hoover up the world's data and sell it, get the world hooked on constant engagement, and erode their privacy until they have none left. To be the middleman getting paid in the entire world's engagement.
The left/right culture war stuff is just so the alien in the human suit can keep getting away with what he actually wants to do.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/07/texas-meta-content-m...
He is a snake. I also live on Kauai and most of the locals don't want him here, he is trying to turn his image around but most people aren't really buying it or haven't really thought about it too deeply.
He, in my view, is desperate to hang onto 'his throne' but all it takes is the right person, with the right vision, at the right time...with enough support.
To imagine that, "the mask is off" is absurd.
None of those bullets points are crises.
Was it as excruciatingly cringeworthy as it sounds? I don’t want to give them the view or spend three hours of my time on that, but I’d take a highlight of the weirdest moments.
> Is this history's most bizarre midlife crisis? What is going on with this man?
It feels like he suddenly became a Musk fanboy and wants to mimic him. Maybe because Zuckerberg completely failed at going into politics when he dipped his toes in it in the past and Musk just got his candidate elected.
His whole era of big name tech founders seems to be going through it.
This one in particular feels very midlife crisis coded; weird insecure masculinity stuff. But, y'know, most men who have issues with that get by with an ill-advised car or something.
Facebook's precursor was a HotOrNot clone that used female classmates' photographs without permission. It takes a certain type of person to build something like that.
The all in podcast has four high net worth people with a similar vibe.
Something disturbing is going on in the ranks of the "elite". I get these people are narcissistic, but the overt displays of contempt combined with authoritarian cowtowing is a bit frightening.
A trade war with China combined with other increasing consequences conflicts seems to be bringing the age of global free trade to an end, or at least a very different one.
The Ukrainian success with naval drones may mean the end of secure seas as well. Drones are cheap, anonymous, and effective.
That implies an disruption to the multinational corporate order, and an emphasis on domestic or near domestic production, and less of the government independence / arbitrage that the super rich have gotten used to.
But the ultras all seem to be going into these maniacal bond villain molds. Is Musk a symptom or a torchleader?
Unless you mean masculine == bad, which would be a very bigoted take.
I can understand that he had to compromise with Trump in order to protect his wealth and company. But it's clearly more than that. I wonder, does he even have values on his owns? will he reinstate the tampons if democrats win in 4 years?
My guess is that he's slowing been adhering to the Trump/Musk ideology (like a lot of people) and now is one of them.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
* https://hbr.org/2013/07/mens-arm-strength-affects-thei
* https://www.psypost.org/strong-men-come-across-as-more-conse...
He's the definition of a perpetual beta trying to be alpha.
I would love to spar with him in BJJ sometime. After you train for awhile you can lock up with someone and immediately feel who they are. An alpha stays calm and relaxed, never panicking even as they are being put to sleep [1]. He went into BJJ hoping to become alpha and it just highlighted even further he's not.
[1] BTW, this isn't a bullshit masculine/man/woman thing. I roll with plenty of women and many of them are more alpha than many men I know.
Lower than 5% at scale would be a red flag, not necessarily wrong, you don't want to "stack rank" with a quota and force managers to fire people who shouldn't want to be fired, but if you have 100 engineers in a department and only one of them gets fired in a year, probably the director is making a mistake.
So, I'm sure this won't be the only firing for the year at Meta. But this doesn't really seem like it's very far away from normal practices.
This smells like the Welchian nonsense that drove GE into the ground.
if you only messed up 5% of your hires you'd be a goddamn genius and every company in the world would want to put you in charge of their hiring process
the "standard" is more like 20% of hires end up being bad hires
A person, individually, indeed must always be judged by themselves objectively. But people, in aggregate, can generally be understood stochastically. And in any group of people there will always be the obvious slackers who everyone knows aren't pulling their weight. Good management clears these people out rather than allowing them to fester and lower morale. It doesn't matter if it's high paid SWEs or minimum wage workers, the dynamic is the same.
Essentially the individual incentives for managers are naturally to avoid making the tough decision, the idea is to put some more pressure to make the right call.
Your value of X% will vary but you hope it’s tuned by some research within the org.
At the last place I worked I was managing people and we were given a set of "standards" to rate employees on, used to determine raises, promotions, and so on. I tried my best fairly evaluate my reports, but obviously the standards are inherently imprecise and so the evaluations are mostly qualitative. I found that other managers, wanting to do well by their reports, more leniently interpreted the standards and their reports were promoted more and treated better than my own.
So, wanting to do well by my reports, I re-calibrated my own evaluations to be more lenient. The other managers responded in kind. This arms race continued until upper management found it to have essentially broken the whole system. So then we were asked to rank the performance of reports on our team. I liked everyone on my team and wanted the best for all of them, but also had no difficulty putting them in order from most productive to least productive, with maybe the occasional tie here or there.
Anyway, the whole experience kind of highlighted to me some of the issues with "objective" standards and some of the benefits of relative standards.
Businesses are people but business is cogs. (In both senses of the word)
To be a manager in a large org, you need to constantly be refocusing the team on the goal. Drift happens. When you have 100 brains, you get 100 ideas.
This "rule of thumb" reason is to make sure leaders are not languishing. It's very easy to see the people, and lose sight of the business goal.
Are all 100 people aligned and driving towards the goal? (If so, amazing and you should fight to keep all of them.)
Note that they also routinely fire perfectly capable people, who exceeded expectations for many years in a row and just had one bad year (sometimes after a team change or a promotion).
Could this lead to a manager that tries to have the best team for himself will always include average employees that they can easily fire?
It's setting a bar that when evaluated on a curve a certain percentage of your employees wind up being below that bar. You derive the ratio from how aggressive you expect your bar to be.
But no one is saying you need to fire people. They're saying they expect a certain amount of lower performers and if they don't see it, they want to know reason. But it also only manifests at much higher populations than an individual team. Totally possible a small enough team has everyone >= meeting expectations.
Interview process at Meta isn't that hard. Mostly medium leetcode questions (in front of single interviewer), not particularly tricky. With enough preparation, it's doable by any reasonably good undergrad. Google was slightly harder though. Similarly, system design can be prepared.
The hardest part is to get the interview in the first place. But if you do, it's just a matter of preparation. You want to be able to nail these questions.
My assumption based on some interview experience articles[1][2] is that there's an internal arms race between the recruiting and engineering at Meta where candidates are not forwarded for the interview process until they feel sufficiently prepared, often giving them months (in any other company, I feel this would be a big red flag), and interviewers expecting the equivalent of Djikstra or Knuth to join their team, regardless of what the team actually does. (I assume not everyone writes distributed system or database implementations from scratch at Meta.)
[1] https://medium.com/@rohitverma_87831/my-interview-experience...
[2] https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5132569/Me...
If the company is growing 10% a year and firing 5% a year you're still growing significantly.
So I think it's pretty important to look at the rate of hiring, not just the rate of firing.
Wouldn’t be every coworker a competitor? How do you plan your life or start a family if you are every year 10% likely of being fired or backstabbed?
On the other hand, do you really want to be stuck working with someone who's not very competent? I think we've all had that experience and it's miserable.
Sounds like a good way to turn a functioning team into Survivor Island.
Speaking as someone who works at Meta, I certainly don't plan my life as if I'll always be employed by Meta, always earning this high of a wage. The ride could end at any minute, and I plan accordingly.
10% is an overestimate, of being fired or backstabbed in any given year, fwiw. The people getting laid off in any given cycle tend to be heavily skewed towards newcomers in my experience.
If 5% is every coworker is a competitor, unions are your coworker doesn't even have to deliver any value at all yet is treated the same as you.
Before, Zuckerberg rhetorically accepted responsibility for lay-offs, but now he's making clear that the people he's firing are entirely to blame. He's deliberately talking up the firings, bringing them closer, making them feel more personal and making it a bit harder for the people fired to get replacement jobs, all for the purpose of cratering his own employees' morale.
He's making Facebook a pro-MAGA company and has decided that the way to make the workers get with the program is to intimidate them.
I think the difference is that they'll get rid of the PIP and fire people straight away.
What I have seen in the past was engineers that were performing completely fine being put on PIP-equivalents because there must be a few being PIPped on every department, based off on some bullshit percentage.
In reality, low perforers should be culled, no need to enforce percentages department-wide. That would require managers doing their job properly of course.
So if you aren’t getting a promotion, you are eventually getting fired. This meat grinder probably has some perverse incentives for employees and makes sure you are always churning through folk who you don’t need to pay QoL raises to
Besides, all those Associate Directors of Nonengineering Engineers of Developer Conference Swag Acquisition need to eat too.
The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
The current pivot, I think, is mostly that culture warriors have managed to describe their interest in liberal terms (freedom of speech), and social media companies are buying it (gets them out of moderation duty and lets them reduce headcount).
These are ad delivery networks that want to do the bare minimum required to avoid scaring people away, they’ve discovered that the bare minimum can go lower. They don’t have any principles, so why would they do anything else? They are exploring downwards in terms of effort, eventually they’ll bounce off the floor.
Getting more specific, I don't buy the argument that we're getting more conservative. Instead, I'm inclined to think that a narrow election victory will lead to extreme measures that will create a significant backlash in the coming years. If you're in a position to exploit a system with little repercussions for four years and all it costs is a little bit of dignity and some public image, most corporate leaders would take that opportunity for the money, prestige, power, etc.
I'm willing to bet sizeable amounts of money that most voters do not support rolling back employee protections, or removing the debt ceiling, or buying/bullying [insert random country], or any of the other wildly regressionist statements thrown around by un/elected folks. Conflating the complexities involved in how a person votes with a general mandate for one specific reason people vote is not a good idea. Extrapolate that to over 100 million voters as some unified stance and it starts to feel like propaganda.
We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.
It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.
Yabushige: “How does it feel to shape the wind to your will?”
Toranaga: “I don’t control the wind. I only study it.”
They abandoned the movement during bush senior and the Clinton years.
1930-1980 were marked by much higher levels of taxation and wealth redistribution than we have today.
1980-Present are the neo-liberal experiment resulting in massive income inequality.
Liberals are most fired up when conservatives like Trump are in office. Where I am, I expect to see more local elections fall to far lefties, I expect more BLM-like protests (which really could only have occurred under Trump), more activism and not less. It is a bit sad because I thought we were making some progress like electing moderates (who I really prefer and think are better for the community) rather than far lefties (who really can only get elected when someone like Trump is in charge).
> The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.
No, things are way too conservative now for that. We haven't had a politician as liberal as Ronald Reagan since Bill Clinton, America definitely lurched right since after the 1990s.
This is already in progress, they're closing UK offices extremely quickly.
> Meta is set to cut about 5% of its workforce, focusing on the company’s lowest-performing workers, CNBC confirmed Tuesday. > Another 5% of the 2024 employee base “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating” will also be cut, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo.
And a direct quote from Zucky:
> I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster. We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle, with the intention of back filling these roles in 2025.
Taken together, one could read it as getting rid of people those programs had been protecting?
Setting the expectation that you can be canned quickly if you aren't a good backfill will probably be a useful filter. It's not like they can get rid of all the dead weight, but every 5% helps.
Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies of the world. AI, glasses as the next computing platform and the future of social media.
About six months into my own daily beating regimen, I found I was sleeping longer and deeper, I had more energy and focus, and my libido had returned to a state not unlike my early 20s. My morale was fantastic. Only after having been repatriated and thus no longer subject to daily beatings did my morale return to lower levels.
Why doesn’t Huberman talk about this?
Now - if the mean is higher, variance is low, and the distribution isn't symmetric, that's when things start to become harder.
Worst case, you start firing people that are "low-performers" on paper, but in reality might be very close to the "meets expectation" workers. Which creates a very toxic environment, as your average workers will be walking on eggshells.
And we know from history that this isn't some outlandish scenario in tech. There have been companies that have had(still have) a strict stacked ranking system - and come hell or high water, someone has to go.
I don't say this to bash your statement, I agree with you in principle. Just useful to keep in mind that the context matters. Sometimes, the people complaining about having to compensate for the low performer, are the actual low performers.
The migration of US TikTok users to Xiaohongshu this week, to the point where it is #1 on the US app store while still having half of its UI in Mandarin has been particularly eye opening.
This reaction is very rushed and I don't think it's going to be very lasting, I'd expect people to go to reels/shorts until maybe another (western, american probably but could be european) alternative appears.
These people are up for grabs, they're not going to stay in Xiaohongshu.
It's very hard to go back to an app with a poor FYP algorithm (ie. Reels, Shorts) after using an app with a good FYP algorithm, and this, along with a knee-jerk reaction against Meta for its perceived role in lobbying for the "TikTok ban" will make capturing ex-TikTok users an uphill struggle for Meta's products.
You can say it's not fair or cruel but this isn't a layoff. They want to churn (maybe for cheaper talent? Maybe for H1-Bs?)
Meta is already filled with H1Bs. They are probably the model utilizer of H1B visas. They pay them all really well and the employee base is truly global, not just all from one country.
I'd like to see 5% of engineering managers get cut every year, since they're either selecting for, or I suspect creating, disengaged employees.
The story of Sun Tzu using the emperor's concubines to demonstrate military discipline is one of the most famous anecdotes from The Art of War.
When Sun Tzu was summoned by King Helü of Wu to prove his military theories, the king challenged him to demonstrate his strategies using the palace concubines as soldiers. Sun Tzu divided the concubines into two groups and appointed the king's two favorite concubines as their leaders. He then explained the orders clearly and ensured they were understood.
When the exercise began, the concubines laughed and did not follow the orders. Sun Tzu stopped the exercise and said that if instructions are not clear, it is the fault of the commander. He repeated the instructions, ensuring they were understood again. However, when the concubines laughed and failed to obey a second time, Sun Tzu stated that if orders are clear and not followed, it is the fault of the leaders.
He then executed the two leaders, despite them being the king's favorites. This shocked the king, but Sun Tzu insisted that discipline was essential in any army. After the execution, the remaining concubines obeyed his commands with perfect discipline, demonstrating the effectiveness of his methods.
I am very very skeptical of this idea - what do you all think?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/22/mark-zuckerberg-envisions-1-...
Shareholders like "we're cutting labor because of AI adoption" much more than "we're cutting labor to save costs and cull some deadend r&d". While both are fiscally positive, one gives off vibes of growth and innovation while the other doesn't.
Doesn't this beg the question of why the bar wasn't higher the whole time?
Maybe if they replaced every 5th comment with an ad (like how every 5th or so post/story/reel on Instagram is an ad).
As more of the world came online, the population of the internet has become made up of mostly passive and mediocre people. The MySpace to Facebook type of migration won't happen anymore. Too many people aren't aware or don't care.
you should put freespeech above of a lot of things, weigh it much higher than you think and i'm sad to see liberal friends ignorant to US history.
on top of that, your premise suggests billionaires should be recalcitrant forces and billionaires should go along with the masses. most of the them made their money1 seeing opportunities no one else did and executing on them. they are more likely to have an 'edge' in seeing the future even if we removed their fortunes.
to be in the top 5% of global income you need to make more 30k a year. you are likely part of the rich. eat the rich etc. should i listen to you?
1. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made
Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management of some sort any organization with more than 3 people will fail.
Are they effectively saying that anyone terminated this year is probably for poor performance?
Usually there's more ambiguity, like changing business priorities.
Over time some cracks might show. Bugs that take longer to fix, issues that take longer to figure out, delayed releases, etc.
New features being implemented would be severely impacted, especially if those need integration from multiple teams.
Does this mean that there's fat? Maybe. Any company I worked for has a level of fat - and that might be a good thing, as demand quite often is not stable over time, you may need to ramp up initiatives without necessarily hiring/training new employees.
Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?
Were we in a recession in the 90s, as the rust belt was hollowed out and earning its name, and Wall street reaped the once in a generation windfall of outsourcing an entire country's manufacturing base overseas? Many would say those were the good times. White collar professionals had their time in the sun for those couple of decades, and GDP exploded. But the working class folks were wiped out.
Now it's our turn at the high end of technology. Once top paid SWEs are being reduced to the understanding that their careers are probably over. The economy today is chugging along just fine, but our little niche of high earning specialty labor is over, just as it was for the auto workers 30 years ago. The capitalists have almost fully completed their capture of the last remaining means of production out of their control; intellectual labor.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gross-national-in...
Personally I prefer to use the US case shiller housing index as a good indication of long term inflation. Housing prices are so high, it is the basket of goods that matters the most.
It also democratizes making AI content to get eyeballs to sell ads.
And lastly Llama breakthroughs help ads ML
Also Microsoft was the first large domino to announce cutting "underperforming" staff and now Meta is doing the same. [1]
Unfortunately, there will be copycats taking notes to use "AI" as an excuse to accelerate more layoffs for AI or cheaper labor.
Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.
Senior engineers can now get answers in seconds to questions it might have taken a junior a couple days to figure out ... agents are starting to do comparable workflows to low/mid-skilled ops/support teams in some verticals at a fraction of cost
If Meta, and others pushing on AI, are not reducing heads in 2025 -- it would kind of undermine the value of the massive investments they are making
HN commentariat coupling this to anything else is a bit disingenuous as most engineers I know are talking about this a lot right now as nobody really knows where it leads -- with some discussion about whether it is comparable to horses being replaced by cars in 1920s and employment redeploying elsewhere over time
If we take Zuckerberg at face value, then they aren’t cutting headcount, but instead replacing ‘low performers’ with new blood.
/s