> “I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me,” Zuckerberg said in the internal call this summer. “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here.”
Is there widespread belief among the employees that many others aren't working out well?
Or some other internal context to understand the intent and how it was received?
It's incredible that he would say that, and what is worse is that he apparently also believes that. But self-selection never works out for a company. It is the most talented people who leave -- the least talented will hang onto their lucrative Facebook jobs for as long as possible. When a company needs to shrink, it needs to be pro-active in figuring out who to let go. Merely passively letting it happen is a bad plan.
IBM, HP, some of the other big institutional employers, found this out in the 1980s.
They offered buyouts for senior employees. I'm not sure exact terms, but something like a year's severance and adding five years service time to your pension, because they did have company pensions back then.
Some people just took the money and retired.
Others took the money, and got other jobs, so they had a huge windfall and continued their careers
And those who stayed behind? Some were company loyalists, but many were exactly those who felt they could never get a decent job anywhere else.
It sounds almost as if he gives managers a green light to push workers out. “self selection” is a euphemism for quitting without severance. i hope facebook employees pay attention to how their “transfers” to other teams or changes in workload are made as to not be intentionally designed to make them quit.
From the perspective of someone who unfortunately deals with FB Business manager, their palette of services has become such an incoherent and buggy mess that it sure feels like they have totally lost control of their products and infra. Just two most recent issues I found last week:
- Removing a paypal account and adding another one is not reflected when creating a new ad - the old one is still there and new is nowhere to be see . Upon using the old one, ad got accepted normally but it wasn’t shown to any user. No error messages or anything. The ad went to some limbo state where it couldn’t be removed, edited or paused from the ads manager, but curiously could be deleted from mobile instagram app.
- Reels (a feature > 1yr old) can not be advertised from desktop dashboard, only from mobile instagram app. The reels or their statistics are not visible at all in business.facebook.com.
Stuff like this shouldn’t happen on any production service.
Oh and another fun one was an ad published after my client had a fundraiser for NGO aiding children in Ukraine. Results for the ad (it didnt relate to the fundraiser) showed ~15k clicks and 0 completed goals. Statistics happily stated that 99.9% of the budget was used by android users in Ukraine. Audience was all EU countries. Somehow it seemed a bit suspicious to me, but not to FB. Raising an issue about the results to FB is as useful as complaining about them to my dog.
The elephant in the room is that if people want to see updates from friends and family but have to put up with ads or dissimulated ads in 8 out of 10 posts just for you to not be insolvent, then it is clear that you don't have much of a business if you keep this ad business model.
Why did Zuck even stick with this dumpster fire? He could have walked with what, 50B cash at what was the top of an obvious bubble and gone out looking like a champ.
So he could sit around and get accused of causing the world's problems and be globally hated?
I think it shows how profoundly unvisionary he was to not see the writing on the wall.
As companies grow it becomes harder and harder to maintain a good culture, healthy team and high productivity. Google, Twitter, Facebook all have a reputation for some teams not doing a whole lot. Interesting how Microsoft, Amazon and SpaceX seem to avoid it.
