The Jack Welch plan ... turnover lowest 5%-10% each year. Problem is, "low performer" is determined by annual performance review where the golf-buddies and boss-kissers stay, guy who doesn't have time to golf because he works hard gets canned.
The fires in California have shown us the long term results of this type of selection process and gatekeeping, so be ready for an economy that either most closely resembles MadMax or the fall of the Berlin Wall…
I wonder if Meta will go the way of General Electric, McDonnell Douglas, ... One analyst on How Money Works said good employees avoid companies that fire the low performers because they could end up on a bad project or with a bad manager and see their career go down the drain
@ I am in nuclear power, avoided GE all my career for this very reason ... so have many of my talented peers ... maybe why nobody wants their reactors.
If American workers can't compete (and one look at our education system and the dearth of qualified Gen-Z candidates coming out of college over the past five years lays bare just how uncompetitive our workforce has become), then as the kids say, "wye?"
@@SimuLord This whole "gen-z is stupid and uneducated" thing is nonsense. Yes, American workers can't compete, but it's not because of skill, it's because American workers are more expensive. Stop taking the words that come out of Vivek Ramaswamy's as gospel.
@@SimuLord it’s because foreign workers are cheaper . Not because they are inherently better . All they are doing now is making all tech salaries lower over time. Everyone loses except companies and CEO
I used to work for a compnay that would actively recruit people that got caught up in lay offs at bigger companies. We found in most cases they were talented people and made great contributions. In a lot of cases they just didn't fit well in a big compnay but thrived in our smaller organization.
Lower performers are terrible for ordinary grunts too. Last time the woman in purchasing came back from maternity leave and I no longer had to deal with the temp they brought in to screw up her job for 12 weeks, I said "You know I mean this in good fun, but please do not have any more children, I can't take another 12 weeks of that!"
@@aaroncook5928 Of course, but this assumes that you can accurately find who the 'low performers' are. In some jobs, it might be fairly simple. In others, it's not so obvious. People might have strengths and weaknesses. Groups of people might work well together, raising the standards of the whole team, but this teamwork may not be reflected in individual KPIs. And judging it based on simplistic metrics affects how people do their job, often negatively. What gets measured gets done. I've known plenty of 'low performers' who've been promoted because they know how to play a flawed system.
@@SimuLord without context, the phrase “lower performers“ is basically useless. Think about the lowest performers in the NBA. They would destroy a pretty much any average or even good basketball player. Now think of the best players on a bad professional team. The problem is systemic, not with the individual people. Getting rid of your “lower performers“ isn’t going to alleviate systemic problems. In other words, please stop drinking the Kool-Aid .
It's so wonderful living in a country with little to no labor protections where companies can arbitrarily mark you as a 'low performer' for completely ambiguous reasons. /s
@ Cope for what? Which do you think is more likely? Thousands of highly-skilled employees who got into a top tech firm are truly 'low performers', or the company is looking to restructure to optimize the bottom line by replacing them with cheaper (likely H1B) labor and/or simply skeleton staff their teams?
What would be the benefit of Mark telling people they're cutting low performers....no benefit other than to be the terrible person that he is. Just bc a company thinks you're a low performer, doesn't mean that you are. Meta is especially known for being politcal and just awful.
I will never understand why people who are very much working or middle class (hell, even upper middle class) worship billionaire oligarchs. They are not your friends and do not have you best interests at heart.
As always.... These companies are capitalists.. They could give a hoot if it's good for the U.S. or for that matter the world. Deport these guys out of the U.S. based on their lack of performance.
Come off it, low performers are.....Anyone who knows more than the punk boss they put in charge, anyone who refuses to be used up and disrespected any more, anyone who stands up and refuses to be bullied, anyone who says no, and anyone who refuses to be a scape goat for bad management decisions. You can deliver on all of your project goals, carry the highest work load in the group, and instead of getting the raise you earned....your boss has HR create a PIP, with the sole purpose to get you to leave the company. That is reality.
The 5% lay off approach that you are discussing is the forced performance distribution curve. It was the Up or Out model introduced by GE back in the Jack Welch days. I think it is actually viewed now as being destructive not productive.
Besides, the premise is dumb. There’s no inherent relationship between between being a bottom X% performer (always exists as a statistical reality, so it means you are always canning), and being an actual low performer in *absolute* terms.
I, and the rest of my team, were laid off in November, a week before Thanksgiving. It wasn't performance based, but a change of direction in what kind of marketing has priority. But my manager didn't have a say, nor did she know. My skip did know and had an opportunity to provide feedback but was ignored by leadership.
If it's performance-based, then it's not a layoff, it's a firing. Also... is Zuck having a midlife crisis? Why does he suddenly look like an aspiring rapper?
I don't know why people keep working there either. What long term career experience do these companies actually offer? after seeing some of the "day in the life of a tech worker" short videos and some extravagant resumes, it doesn't really seem like you get much value working at these big tech companies. I see people showing off they've worked for the big 4: twitter, meta, apple, and google. You can get a sense from their posts they never really did anything of worth. I think their workforce is just so diluted that very few are getting actual work that builds their skills.
The sad thing is this cutthroat mentality seeps down to other small tech startups. None of us in the industry have a career. It's essentially turned into a series of short term gigs or glorified contract work, except you don't know what day the contract ends.
Companies will never say why a person was fired. Yet they just publicly stated they just laid off a few thousand people because they all sucked. I would assume it's legal defamation what are you talking about one person or a 1000. Anyone want to guess when the class action lawsuit will be filed?
Doubt Microsoft will be doing it again. It was very destructive. You can Microsoft lost a lot of the steam and overtaken by Apple Netflix and to some extend Huawei in various markets taht would have been exclusively MS. That yanking strategy is very destructive as there will be actively best candidates in dustry ACTIVELY evangelized their circles to not go there.
I used to feel EXACTLY like you described about the “Scarlet Letter”. I’ve been laid off so many times from startups over the last decade and while I had things maybe I could have done better, majority of them were not at all my fault. I used to feel so much mental anguish over the scarlet letter of a resume gap and even when I explained to recruiters that the lay offs were not about performance, I could tell they didn’t want to actually hear my story many times and just wrote me off as damaged goods like you said. What’s infuriating is I’ve met people from FAANG companies and have heard stories from friends about others who work at these prestigious companies but literally don’t do ANYTHING !!!! Or next to nothing, or have no critical thinking skills. So it’s so frustrating that recruiters will refuse to even look at my portfolio because of my “scarlet letter”, but will fawn over talentless people who have a pretty FAANG name on their resume …. Grrr I really wish more people would challenge their biases 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 like you should NOT be able to work in HR if you have not gone through some kind of training to combat your biases !!!!!
If you're in a job where work product and work volume are measured, you're in trouble. If you're in a soft skills only job where no real production metrics exist, you'll never be fired for performance. Corporate America has everything upside down and backwards right now.
Why do we let one company in this instance Meta dictate how other companies might run their company.. Can't each company decide for themselves what they want? Also, it is situational you can be a "low performer" at one company and thrive at another company simply based off of culture.
I mean they can, but what usually happens is that the company's stock price makes short term gains on the news, and the the shareholders from other companies put pressure on CEO's to do the same thing.
I'm a prime example of that last sentence in your comment. My boss and I got along like fire and gasoline in a confined space-she was an abrasive micromanager and I'm a guy with authority issues and an as-long-as-it-gets-done mentality. I didn't shed any tears when I was let go-indeed, I think I slept the best I had in the three months since I took that job the night I got canned. Three years later, I work for a boss whose approach to management is "hire good people and let them do the job" and I'm having some of the best success I've had in my entire career. The fact that this job pays $30,000 more a year than the job I got let go from didn't hurt either!
He means a lot of these companies already all feel the same, but don't want to be the one to start the trend. there's also risk involved. cutting the workforce always looks good on paper, but the bad PR can hurt you more. You might lose sales volumes, users, stock price, and engagement. Everyone just chooses to wait for the proof of concept to be shown. it's all one big game of "chicken".
@ I hear what you are saying, but this is a bit of a different situation. It's not just like the post covid boom where companies overhired. This is an appeal to the powers that be that want to see DEI programs eliminated. Mark sees that noose from jan 6th being repurposed for him. Apple has already publicly pushed back on pressure to eliminate these programs.
Isn't routinely firing its bottom 5% a common company thing? Companies like Meta/Facebook and Amazon are notorious for their rank and yank systems. Tech companies are famous for their PIP culture. I guess before it was tribal knowledge while now it's public knowledge.
This should be illegal. Its an idirect way of trying to get people to even work harder against eachother and it can have damaging effects. Now if only people would find a way to damage management and the CEO in the same way.....
Tech employees need to unionize as much as possible in 2025 and when companies like Meta try to lay off thousands for spurious reasons, tech workers go on strike. I also suggest internal Meta employees consider leaking docs and otherwise embarrassing the sociopaths in the c-level.
Welcome to the real world. lol. Darwinism and it is part of capitlism. You fire people all the time when you don't go to restuarants or buy certain things anymore if you are unhappy with the service. The boss has the same rights as youto spend money how he wants. The customer is always right. If you do not like it then work harder and deliver and you won't be let go. Life is unfair and only the best deserve to remain employed
@@Dee-no3snwho said anything about them meeting or not meeting production goals? Being a *relative* low performer, even if completely accurate, implies absolutely nothing about *absolute* performance. Maybe you earn $1.5mm a year, but you’re in a friend group where everyone else has an income of $10mm+. The $1.5mm is relatively low, but it is absolutely high - no-one would call it a poor income.
so these low performers were found after the huge layoffs that have already occurred? management has no credibility, throwing baseless reasons for laying off top performers who survived the previous layoffs.
There was no need to say stuff like this. Why cause troubles for people. Ultimately, these are families getting impacted. Its so arrogant and rude. Leaves a very bad taste.
Because he's a rich, privileged w@nker who's never suffered a single hardship in his life, and so has no idea of the impact this can have on the lives of someone who didn't spend their childhood in a fee-paying school surrounded by other rich people.
CHEERS: You're eliminating the poor performers and giving them a chance to find a different role that suits them better. JEERS: This will be 100% political and many poor performers who know how to play will game the system and not be fired when other better performers will be.
An employee's "performance" is very subjective and isn't the best measure of overall performance. I wouldn't want to work for the company. These corporations are always trying to suffocate and stagnate employees. When I worked in local government, we had an expected amount of tax payments we were expected to process each day.
I’ve seen places lowball people because they didn’t wanna give out bonuses to anyone but their favorite pets. All of a sudden, parts of people‘s annual reviews were removed to justify the lower rating.
They are actually following the lead set by Microsoft a couple weeks before. Either way, I think the impacted employees should be allowed to file lawsuits, as this isn’t very different from a former employer badmouthing you to a prospective employer that is calling for a reference, which, as far as I know, it is a liability heat zone.
You are not entitled to a job. It's his company. He can run it how he wants. If you're not meeting your production goals, you're fired. That's how most jobs are today and it won't stop fired employees from landing enough jobs. i know people who were fired and were able to land a better paying job. We have to let go of our entitlement complex in America.
@@Dee-no3sn Considering access to basic healthcare is dependent on having a job, I'd say a job is in fact an entitlement and that's not a bad thing. If we require a job to survive in this imbalanced country, then a job should be provided.
In the Uk you cannot do that... if you layoff.. the position is gone and you cannot have anyone else fill the position or a similar position... either you sack them for legit reasons or you layoff because the position is terminated.. there is no backfilling roles.. there are no half way houses.
@@tonycrabtree3416 an employer cannot simply change the job title of a position that has been made redundant and rehire someone for that exact same role without following the proper redundancy procedures. If the job title is changed, but the core duties and responsibilities remain the same, it could be considered a way of circumventing the redundancy process. If they do rehire for the same position shortly after a redundancy, it could be viewed as an unfair dismissal or misuse of the redundancy process. An employer cannot rehire for that exact role within a reasonable period, typically around 12 months
I can imagine the managers sitting together and deciding who they like or not ( AKA low performers ) to cut off. I feel so abused in every second I am working these days for these corporations. The HR mandatory training OMG is pure brainwashing to force you to obey.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see those roles changed into temp contracts, which will save them more money. However, for the employee, contracting over full time can be lucrative if you play your cards right!
I feel bad for tech workers, but I think this direction should have been expected. When we reduce the core of the job to just being a laptop jockey that makes the jobs much more competitive and incentivizes employers. Salaries they offered were directly related to the site's location. with remote work they don't have to pay for that decision anymore. people in a lower cost of living area are willing to work for less than you. it may not necessarily be less for them. gross is lower, but their take home after expenses is still more than what they had before and what you would have had. I wouldn't be surprised if tech workers start moving to the fly-over states. it would make more sense if you factor in retail businesses in larger cities shutting down and making shoping for necessities inconvenient.
Great video, Byran! Amazon and Tesla automatically cut 10% of their lowest performers each and every year based on their metrics! Some employers cut up to 15% of their workforce every year, based on Forbes research. My buddy worked at Amazon for 3 years and at Tesla for over 5 years, as a Software Engineer, and he got canned from both places based on their metrics! 5% is messed up, too!
everyone that works at microsoft is here from India on hb1 visa. I use to live near headquarters in Bellevue WA in Seattle for like 25 years. It makes that area more expensive than San Diego where I moved to recently. When it wasn't like that 10 years ago, they've been doing this for a long time since the 90s I want to say.
Everyone that works there for the last 20 years is here from India on a H1B visa, trust me I use to live in Seattle and Bellevue where headquarters are, for like 25 years.
Lowest performers? Lol!!! 😁😁😁 This is a company that hires nothing but ivy league graduates 🎓 . Most are 'A' type personalities who had to go through a vigorous interview process. 🤓
I hate when they announce things like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lays off others too. But now employees who are let go are going to be thought of as low performers making it harder for them to get new positions.
Imagine what would happen if school worked like this. Every year, starting at Kindergarten, we just expel the lowest 5% of each grade. You still graduate 51% of the students. After all, school is supposed to prepare kids for real life, right? 🤨
Really smart move on Zuck side. FAANGS used to do a lot of staff hoarding. One of the reasons was to keep smart people busy so they don't go on the market and start helping competitors to build smth that one day can be a threat. Labeling all people they fire now as underperformers is a great solution. Zuck not only can retain his initial goal, but he doesn't have to pay a dime for it.
Where I work they set up an arbitrary performance based system where the lowest performers get written up and terminated. They also installed AI cameras on the forklifts. I hate it with a passion 😠
A lot of that 5% just won’t be very good at their job. For example, you might have someone in a senior level role that’s really at mid or junior level. Some people just aren’t very engaged in their job and constantly create more problems for the rest of the team.
At my last job, the technology there kept changing and changing. I think the pandemic may have started an explosion in technology (such as making face time video calls). I used to fold and mail out flyers that took a few days as well as process program registrations pretty manually. But the last year I was working there upon being laid off amid the pandemic, the correspondance in the technology went from mailing out flyers that took a few days for 700-800 people to sending out the same info digitally that only took a few seconds (or less). Technological advancements intend to reduce human error, such as making AI or some automation take over so it's more streamlined and quicker than doing it manually.
It is nice to get started at Meta. Work hard, learn new skills, hopefully get stock grants and 401k. However, this type of job seldom lasts. Live way below means, have a back up plan mentally ready.
Sucks for those "let go" because people hiring ex-meta from these "rounds" LNOW these people are PIPed, so the usual "Meta on the resume bonus" is lost ?
What I don’t understand is the need to announce air dirty laundry? Manage your company and if employees are not fulfilling job requirements fire. And as for DEI I think it discriminates against non protected groups. I’m old hire the best person for the job not the best person who ticks a box. I’ve worked with DEI hires who yes are low performers because they think they’re protected.
@@karenpage5674 the only reason think think that DEI discriminates is if you believe that people from “non-protected groups” and inherently more intelligent and hard working.
Corporate's goal is to cut cost. They will always come up with a new excuse to cut people out. If one excuse doesn't cut enough people, devise another.
they have unlimited money, they even said they'll backfill the roles. So how is it about cost? It's about their irrational belief that people are "low performers" when I've rarely seen actual low performers in tech. The people that run tech companies are out of touch autists.
To be fair, if Meta is similar to other IT companies, then probably they have way more than 5% of low performers. In my experience, at least here in Europe, there are a lot of people in IT who've got used to being super comfortable not doing much work, not producing much output or value. And they just think companies will keep paying tens of thousands of dollars in salary for minor feature changes, without any negative consequences. Obviously companies aren't exactly benign, and they'd most likely want to replace us with AI purely just for profit, but the cost of software is really getting out of hand, while the quality of software is arguably decreasing.
Betteridge's Law would mean the answer is "No." However, every business calls themselves the "Google of...[Carpet Cleaning, Daycare, Doughnuts, (whatever inappropriate thing goes here...)]", the "Apple of..., the "Meta of...", and then shows off their open plan office to potential and existing customers. So, yeah, there's a reason to worry.
How many times have we heard management say they want staff to pick up the slack from those who were laid off or left on their own accord? It's similar to when management says that "we need to work more with less now." Of course when they say "we" they mean YOU.
When companies start doing this, they essentially go to a rank and yank system and it usually rolls down throughout the organization. Jack Welch made this popular. The thinking goes that at any given time somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of your workforce are low performers and need to be let go and those positions are then either eliminated or replaced with higher performers. So what happens is that every manager is given a proverbial deck of cards that has to be dealt. Each card has varying levels of ranking and 5 percent will be "Your Fired" cards. There are also assigned numbersof the other cards ranging from exceptional to marginal. So even if you get to stay, if you are at lower level of ranking, you are probably in trouble for next year, as with these systems if you draw the marginal rank 2 years in a row, you're going to be gone next year. So even if you're a manager in a department where you think everyone is solid, you still have to deal the cards and you will eliminate 5 percent of your people. No exceptions! In the short term this can be effective if an organization is having problems. However, when this is done as a long term strategy, it makes for politics back biting and ass kissing.
@@kennethsouthard6042exactly. Forced ratings actually turns employees against one another. Most of the time it just causes laziness and encourages people to take on less in fear of screwing something up and upsetting someone.
Given that this came right around the same time as all the anti-diversity measures, I get the feeling we'll see some disproportionate demographics in who gets labelled as "low-performing".
One of these days, soon very soon, someone is going to be prepared for these layoffs and they aren't going to go silently into the night. They are going to see how big of a devastation they can create. I am going to sit back and laugh.
My previous company did the same thing. They let go of some people and work increased because they didn't replace them. I also used all of my vacation (EU) each year. Of course this will make my numbers go down. I don't care becuase I have a family and I will take my vacation. Still, they used it against me but I sure did make them pay me if they didn't want me to sue. They created the whole stupid paper trail to cover themselves of course. This is why few people want to be managers - you have to be a criminal and have no morals. Thankfully, I have plenty of FU money, so of course I made the right decision to make them pay me to leave.
Re: Scarlett Letter, that’s exactly what I was thinking. We probably need HIPAA-like regulation to prevent people earning 400 times the average salary not being able to layoff AND insult/label the people they are canning to help the stock price.
When the whole COVID mass hiring started, I turned down META, GOOGLE, Amazon and other larger companies because I knew they were just hiring people to fill roles.
So, if you fire a few thousand employees and state that it is because of their performance, doesn't that leave you vulnerable to mass libel claims. There are many reasons an employee might be measured as being a poor performer. Not all of those have anything to do with the skills, work ethic or productivity of the individual. Unless there is a genuine reason to not give an employee a reference, HR professionals simply state the role is no longer required. Meta sets a dangerous precedent (hopefully dangerous to Meta).
This should be a lesson for everyone to start something of their own as small as it maybe rather than working for these blood sucking monsters who will drain your soul and body and drive you crazy.
I feel like in hard times like today’s economy companies should prioritize surviving and making sure their workers and consumers survive than making increasing profits year over year and hurting their workers. Destroying the consumer that will no longer be able to buy anything and then they go out of business and everyone loses except the ones that have the money to survive.
Lower performers could be the position not just the person. Sometimes we find great people but unfortunately we later find out the position their in is not performing the way we thought. Sometimes we stop funding the position, the position no linger exists, and the person gets laid off. But this is the public sector where you can’t just move someone into another position. They have to reapply…
They own Instagram and WhatsApp. The former being the Millennial platform of choice, and the later being the main form of communication in many parts of the world.
Why announce that "low performers" will be targeted? This makes it look like a sacking disguised as a layoff, also they'll find it hard to find another job if labelled a Meta reject?
The Jack Welch plan ... turnover lowest 5%-10% each year. Problem is, "low performer" is determined by annual performance review where the golf-buddies and boss-kissers stay, guy who doesn't have time to golf because he works hard gets canned.
The fires in California have shown us the long term results of this type of selection process and gatekeeping, so be ready for an economy that either most closely resembles MadMax or the fall of the Berlin Wall…
@@momosgaragethis behavior happens in every state.
I wonder if Meta will go the way of General Electric, McDonnell Douglas, ... One analyst on How Money Works said good employees avoid companies that fire the low performers because they could end up on a bad project or with a bad manager and see their career go down the drain
Here in Canada, we call it the Jimmy Pattison plan
@ I am in nuclear power, avoided GE all my career for this very reason ... so have many of my talented peers ... maybe why nobody wants their reactors.
If it isn't obvious, Meta is not a place you want to work.
I'd work accounting in the adult film industry before I'd work accounting in tech. The former at least produces something of value to society.
@@SimuLord lol
@ okay
@@SimuLord it's at least honest and doesn't try to 'rebrand' it's focus every 1-3 years...
But the “day in the life of” TikToks made it look fun
Those "replacements" will invariably be based in India or brought over via H1b. DEI is not the threat. THIS IS.
If American workers can't compete (and one look at our education system and the dearth of qualified Gen-Z candidates coming out of college over the past five years lays bare just how uncompetitive our workforce has become), then as the kids say, "wye?"
Well the entire right wing simultaneously did a 180 on their view of H1B's like the hive mind that they are.
@@SimuLord This whole "gen-z is stupid and uneducated" thing is nonsense. Yes, American workers can't compete, but it's not because of skill, it's because American workers are more expensive. Stop taking the words that come out of Vivek Ramaswamy's as gospel.
@@SimuLord it’s because foreign workers are cheaper . Not because they are inherently better .
All they are doing now is making all tech salaries lower over time. Everyone loses except companies and CEO
DEI is a threat, but H-1B is the common enemy all Americans have.
The workplace has become dystopian
Arguably worse than being a serf
You either perform or be condemned to the lower class from whence you came.
"Has become" implies that at some point it was not.
Zuckerberg is dystopian
I used to work for a compnay that would actively recruit people that got caught up in lay offs at bigger companies. We found in most cases they were talented people and made great contributions. In a lot of cases they just didn't fit well in a big compnay but thrived in our smaller organization.
"Backfilling" roles? Sounds a lot like cost-cutting being dressed up as targeting "lower performers" for the shareholders.
as a share holder, director, peer, i want lower performers gone
Lower performers are terrible for ordinary grunts too. Last time the woman in purchasing came back from maternity leave and I no longer had to deal with the temp they brought in to screw up her job for 12 weeks, I said "You know I mean this in good fun, but please do not have any more children, I can't take another 12 weeks of that!"
@@aaroncook5928 Of course, but this assumes that you can accurately find who the 'low performers' are. In some jobs, it might be fairly simple. In others, it's not so obvious. People might have strengths and weaknesses. Groups of people might work well together, raising the standards of the whole team, but this teamwork may not be reflected in individual KPIs. And judging it based on simplistic metrics affects how people do their job, often negatively. What gets measured gets done. I've known plenty of 'low performers' who've been promoted because they know how to play a flawed system.
I don't fault companies at all for getting rid of people who suck at their job. Get better if you can't do your job.
@@SimuLord without context, the phrase “lower performers“ is basically useless. Think about the lowest performers in the NBA. They would destroy a pretty much any average or even good basketball player. Now think of the best players on a bad professional team. The problem is systemic, not with the individual people. Getting rid of your “lower performers“ isn’t going to alleviate systemic problems.
In other words, please stop drinking the Kool-Aid .
This feels like an excuse to remove people they don't like.
Exactly.
It's also getting cheaper, more thirsty workers who want a foot in...
An excuse to replace positions with lower paid roles.
The other side has laws enforced to remove people they don't like. There is no equivalency to the leftward shift over the past decades
That's exactly what it is.
It's so wonderful living in a country with little to no labor protections where companies can arbitrarily mark you as a 'low performer' for completely ambiguous reasons. /s
Cope
I don't ever remember seeing a thousand and one european Tiktokers showing me they're not working working days at work.
@ Cope for what? Which do you think is more likely? Thousands of highly-skilled employees who got into a top tech firm are truly 'low performers', or the company is looking to restructure to optimize the bottom line by replacing them with cheaper (likely H1B) labor and/or simply skeleton staff their teams?
Nah on this case it is understandable. Simply be good at your job and you'll keep it.
@@vikingsoftpaw
That's HR, and they're irrelevant.
What would be the benefit of Mark telling people they're cutting low performers....no benefit other than to be the terrible person that he is. Just bc a company thinks you're a low performer, doesn't mean that you are. Meta is especially known for being politcal and just awful.
Mark claims he wants to be "ruthless" in business, just like he says he is in judo. Honestly, he's got some serious issues.
Here comes the H1B wave
What Elon did should not be something to be envious of, but I guess some people think otherwise.
It's definitely coming. You can literally trap them
@@DetectiveRackham investors demand it. Because it gives them much greater dividends.
I will never understand why people who are very much working or middle class (hell, even upper middle class) worship billionaire oligarchs. They are not your friends and do not have you best interests at heart.
@@BOSSDONMAN it's a US cultural thing mostly. Freedom above all things I guess.
@@iorch82 Oligarchy is the opposite of freedom. The main issue is a lack of education and/or critical thinking skills.
@@iorch82 If you want to call lack of critical thinking skills as a cultural problem, then sure.
even many of those types are 2, maybe 3 PIPs away from the truth.
More like Fantasy above all things.
It also sounds like they are creating room for H1B applicants, so they can pay less.
Yup, get rid of those over 50 making good money and replace them.
As always.... These companies are capitalists.. They could give a hoot if it's good for the U.S. or for that matter the world. Deport these guys out of the U.S. based on their lack of performance.
@@latsnojokelee6434 BINGO the truth that Life outside of Layoff guy never talks about, why?
Come off it, low performers are.....Anyone who knows more than the punk boss they put in charge, anyone who refuses to be used up and disrespected any more, anyone who stands up and refuses to be bullied, anyone who says no, and anyone who refuses to be a scape goat for bad management decisions. You can deliver on all of your project goals, carry the highest work load in the group, and instead of getting the raise you earned....your boss has HR create a PIP, with the sole purpose to get you to leave the company. That is reality.
The 5% lay off approach that you are discussing is the forced performance distribution curve. It was the Up or Out model introduced by GE back in the Jack Welch days. I think it is actually viewed now as being destructive not productive.
It’s a piece of garbage.
You now know Meta is going GE fate?
@@jameschalkwig787 good they need to go away
@@jameschalkwig787 everyone does. They six-sigma themselves into a state of pencil-whipped severely overpriced mediocrity.
If you're let go due to being a low performer, you're not being laid off, you're being fired.
Besides, the premise is dumb. There’s no inherent relationship between between being a bottom X% performer (always exists as a statistical reality, so it means you are always canning), and being an actual low performer in *absolute* terms.
LOL then why is Zucc still there?
Not human
Especially after he lost billions on his failed metaverse project.
The same reason Elon is. Between himself and his yes men, they own 51% of the company
It's a lot harder to fire a CEO that owns such a large stake in the company.
@@antieatingactivistthe board can fire him without forcing a sale of his shares.
I, and the rest of my team, were laid off in November, a week before Thanksgiving. It wasn't performance based, but a change of direction in what kind of marketing has priority. But my manager didn't have a say, nor did she know. My skip did know and had an opportunity to provide feedback but was ignored by leadership.
My heart HURTS for those who MUST work...I have ZERO respect for Mr Meta or any Executive....May KARMA be UNMERCYFUL to them ALL
Executives usually work ridiculous hours, as someone who works in a corporate office with them
"Stress of work is better than the stress of no work."
Once I heard it, from a coworker, it changed my perspective
If it's performance-based, then it's not a layoff, it's a firing. Also... is Zuck having a midlife crisis? Why does he suddenly look like an aspiring rapper?
Can't wait till he gets a face tattoo.
Zuck is a synth. His attempts at being more human have a sort of Temu Lieutenant Commander Data about them.
It’s not performance based. They’re forcing rankings. It doesn’t intensify employees. It makes them complacent.
Simply pre-empting legal repercussions by calling this performance based
Stack ranking
This is why I will never work for a famous public company. Just throwing your employees under the bus.
I don't know why people keep working there either. What long term career experience do these companies actually offer? after seeing some of the "day in the life of a tech worker" short videos and some extravagant resumes, it doesn't really seem like you get much value working at these big tech companies. I see people showing off they've worked for the big 4: twitter, meta, apple, and google. You can get a sense from their posts they never really did anything of worth. I think their workforce is just so diluted that very few are getting actual work that builds their skills.
People won’t then they will say they have to get contractors as they can’t find the staff in the US
The sad thing is this cutthroat mentality seeps down to other small tech startups. None of us in the industry have a career. It's essentially turned into a series of short term gigs or glorified contract work, except you don't know what day the contract ends.
Who needs Squid Game when you've got FAANG?
This is just a page taken from Jack Welch’s playbook.
Thank goodness none of the companies I worked for practiced that bull.
Seems like some of those people are “low-performers” due to a bad manager. Feel bad for those people.
Now, about 3,600 people with a label “ex-meta low perfomers” have a hard time with future recruiters.
Companies will never say why a person was fired. Yet they just publicly stated they just laid off a few thousand people because they all sucked. I would assume it's legal defamation what are you talking about one person or a 1000.
Anyone want to guess when the class action lawsuit will be filed?
Sounds like GE 's Jack Welch's program of " rank and yank"!
We had it at Microsoft 10 years ago, it was a nightmare. Sounds like it's coming back.
Doubt Microsoft will be doing it again. It was very destructive. You can Microsoft lost a lot of the steam and overtaken by Apple Netflix and to some extend Huawei in various markets taht would have been exclusively MS. That yanking strategy is very destructive as there will be actively best candidates in dustry ACTIVELY evangelized their circles to not go there.
I used to feel EXACTLY like you described about the “Scarlet Letter”. I’ve been laid off so many times from startups over the last decade and while I had things maybe I could have done better, majority of them were not at all my fault. I used to feel so much mental anguish over the scarlet letter of a resume gap and even when I explained to recruiters that the lay offs were not about performance, I could tell they didn’t want to actually hear my story many times and just wrote me off as damaged goods like you said.
What’s infuriating is I’ve met people from FAANG companies and have heard stories from friends about others who work at these prestigious companies but literally don’t do ANYTHING !!!! Or next to nothing, or have no critical thinking skills. So it’s so frustrating that recruiters will refuse to even look at my portfolio because of my “scarlet letter”, but will fawn over talentless people who have a pretty FAANG name on their resume …. Grrr
I really wish more people would challenge their biases 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 like you should NOT be able to work in HR if you have not gone through some kind of training to combat your biases !!!!!
How loud do the birds sing. 1-16-25 th
If you're in a job where work product and work volume are measured, you're in trouble. If you're in a soft skills only job where no real production metrics exist, you'll never be fired for performance. Corporate America has everything upside down and backwards right now.
Why do we let one company in this instance Meta dictate how other companies might run their company.. Can't each company decide for themselves what they want? Also, it is situational you can be a "low performer" at one company and thrive at another company simply based off of culture.
I mean they can, but what usually happens is that the company's stock price makes short term gains on the news, and the the shareholders from other companies put pressure on CEO's to do the same thing.
I'm a prime example of that last sentence in your comment. My boss and I got along like fire and gasoline in a confined space-she was an abrasive micromanager and I'm a guy with authority issues and an as-long-as-it-gets-done mentality. I didn't shed any tears when I was let go-indeed, I think I slept the best I had in the three months since I took that job the night I got canned.
Three years later, I work for a boss whose approach to management is "hire good people and let them do the job" and I'm having some of the best success I've had in my entire career. The fact that this job pays $30,000 more a year than the job I got let go from didn't hurt either!
He means a lot of these companies already all feel the same, but don't want to be the one to start the trend. there's also risk involved. cutting the workforce always looks good on paper, but the bad PR can hurt you more. You might lose sales volumes, users, stock price, and engagement. Everyone just chooses to wait for the proof of concept to be shown. it's all one big game of "chicken".
@ I hear what you are saying, but this is a bit of a different situation. It's not just like the post covid boom where companies overhired. This is an appeal to the powers that be that want to see DEI programs eliminated. Mark sees that noose from jan 6th being repurposed for him. Apple has already publicly pushed back on pressure to eliminate these programs.
Because investors see what they are doing and then demand the companies they own do the same to give them a bigger dividend.
Isn't routinely firing its bottom 5% a common company thing? Companies like Meta/Facebook and Amazon are notorious for their rank and yank systems. Tech companies are famous for their PIP culture. I guess before it was tribal knowledge while now it's public knowledge.
It sounds like keeping your job at Meta will be like getting a new job as a LinkedIn user.
This should be illegal. Its an idirect way of trying to get people to even work harder against eachother and it can have damaging effects.
Now if only people would find a way to damage management and the CEO in the same way.....
Introducing Luigi
Tech employees need to unionize as much as possible in 2025 and when companies like Meta try to lay off thousands for spurious reasons, tech workers go on strike.
I also suggest internal Meta employees consider leaking docs and otherwise embarrassing the sociopaths in the c-level.
You mean in a way that lead paint and lead pipes in childhood didn't?
Can he actually do this? It is like these ppl won’t be able to get jobs because he labeled them low performers
Yes, he's the boss. Most jobs are performance based. If you don't meet your production goals, you are fired.
True. This is a horrible label
Welcome to the real world. lol. Darwinism and it is part of capitlism. You fire people all the time when you don't go to restuarants or buy certain things anymore if you are unhappy with the service. The boss has the same rights as youto spend money how he wants. The customer is always right. If you do not like it then work harder and deliver and you won't be let go. Life is unfair and only the best deserve to remain employed
@@Dee-no3snwho said anything about them meeting or not meeting production goals? Being a *relative* low performer, even if completely accurate, implies absolutely nothing about *absolute* performance. Maybe you earn $1.5mm a year, but you’re in a friend group where everyone else has an income of $10mm+. The $1.5mm is relatively low, but it is absolutely high - no-one would call it a poor income.
so these low performers were found after the huge layoffs that have already occurred? management has no credibility, throwing baseless reasons for laying off top performers who survived the previous layoffs.
This is also known as "Forced Ranking". Nothing new about that sadly.
There was no need to say stuff like this. Why cause troubles for people. Ultimately, these are families getting impacted. Its so arrogant and rude. Leaves a very bad taste.
Because he's a rich, privileged w@nker who's never suffered a single hardship in his life, and so has no idea of the impact this can have on the lives of someone who didn't spend their childhood in a fee-paying school surrounded by other rich people.
Keep laying off. You'll create your own competition.
CHEERS: You're eliminating the poor performers and giving them a chance to find a different role that suits them better.
JEERS: This will be 100% political and many poor performers who know how to play will game the system and not be fired when other better performers will be.
An employee's "performance" is very subjective and isn't the best measure of overall performance. I wouldn't want to work for the company. These corporations are always trying to suffocate and stagnate employees. When I worked in local government, we had an expected amount of tax payments we were expected to process each day.
I’ve seen places lowball people because they didn’t wanna give out bonuses to anyone but their favorite pets. All of a sudden, parts of people‘s annual reviews were removed to justify the lower rating.
They are actually following the lead set by Microsoft a couple weeks before. Either way, I think the impacted employees should be allowed to file lawsuits, as this isn’t very different from a former employer badmouthing you to a prospective employer that is calling for a reference, which, as far as I know, it is a liability heat zone.
You are not entitled to a job. It's his company. He can run it how he wants. If you're not meeting your production goals, you're fired. That's how most jobs are today and it won't stop fired employees from landing enough jobs. i know people who were fired and were able to land a better paying job. We have to let go of our entitlement complex in America.
@@Dee-no3sn Considering access to basic healthcare is dependent on having a job, I'd say a job is in fact an entitlement and that's not a bad thing. If we require a job to survive in this imbalanced country, then a job should be provided.
In the Uk you cannot do that... if you layoff.. the position is gone and you cannot have anyone else fill the position or a similar position... either you sack them for legit reasons or you layoff because the position is terminated.. there is no backfilling roles.. there are no half way houses.
Just change the job title…
@@tonycrabtree3416 an employer cannot simply change the job title of a position that has been made redundant and rehire someone for that exact same role without following the proper redundancy procedures. If the job title is changed, but the core duties and responsibilities remain the same, it could be considered a way of circumventing the redundancy process.
If they do rehire for the same position shortly after a redundancy, it could be viewed as an unfair dismissal or misuse of the redundancy process. An employer cannot rehire for that exact role within a reasonable period, typically around 12 months
@@tonycrabtree3416 you cant just change job title ; would have to change the tasks.
@ And yet, they do it. Of course, jobs are leaving the UK, just like in US, for lower cost regions…
@@joecater894 that's gonna be impossible to enforce.
I can imagine the managers sitting together and deciding who they like or not ( AKA low performers ) to cut off.
I feel so abused in every second I am working these days for these corporations.
The HR mandatory training OMG is pure brainwashing to force you to obey.
Tech is full of superfluous non-tech jobs.
HR and "analysts", mostly
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see those roles changed into temp contracts, which will save them more money. However, for the employee, contracting over full time can be lucrative if you play your cards right!
I feel bad for tech workers, but I think this direction should have been expected. When we reduce the core of the job to just being a laptop jockey that makes the jobs much more competitive and incentivizes employers. Salaries they offered were directly related to the site's location. with remote work they don't have to pay for that decision anymore. people in a lower cost of living area are willing to work for less than you. it may not necessarily be less for them. gross is lower, but their take home after expenses is still more than what they had before and what you would have had.
I wouldn't be surprised if tech workers start moving to the fly-over states. it would make more sense if you factor in retail businesses in larger cities shutting down and making shoping for necessities inconvenient.
Measuring true efficiency is also hard, likely based on metrics but then ppl just learn to hit the metrics.
Great video, Byran! Amazon and Tesla automatically cut 10% of their lowest performers each and every year based on their metrics! Some employers cut up to 15% of their workforce every year, based on Forbes research. My buddy worked at Amazon for 3 years and at Tesla for over 5 years, as a Software Engineer, and he got canned from both places based on their metrics! 5% is messed up, too!
Imagine how motivated will be the people getting laid off to work again but harder in yet another shit company.
If you have low performers on your team the coaches, and bosses should be fired.
Microsoft already started their own version of this.
everyone that works at microsoft is here from India on hb1 visa. I use to live near headquarters in Bellevue WA in Seattle for like 25 years. It makes that area more expensive than San Diego where I moved to recently. When it wasn't like that 10 years ago, they've been doing this for a long time since the 90s I want to say.
So is Microsoft. The new hiring pool will be H1-b's.
Everyone that works there for the last 20 years is here from India on a H1B visa, trust me I use to live in Seattle and Bellevue where headquarters are, for like 25 years.
He is covering his butt and projecting his poor choices
like the metaverse
It’s GE all over again. Hard for those departments which have small teams.
Wouldn't it be great if you could be as arbitrary and erratic about your mortgage payment as your boss is about your job?
Lowest performers? Lol!!! 😁😁😁
This is a company that hires nothing but ivy league graduates 🎓 . Most are 'A' type personalities who had to go through a vigorous interview process. 🤓
I hate when they announce things like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lays off others too. But now employees who are let go are going to be thought of as low performers making it harder for them to get new positions.
Amazon has this type of policy too if youre in the bottom percent you get a warning then 3 strikes and you're terminated
Imagine what would happen if school worked like this. Every year, starting at Kindergarten, we just expel the lowest 5% of each grade. You still graduate 51% of the students.
After all, school is supposed to prepare kids for real life, right?
🤨
Not only meta, Uber just announced support only will be via chat (bot), no more call agents
Really smart move on Zuck side.
FAANGS used to do a lot of staff hoarding. One of the reasons was to keep smart people busy so they don't go on the market and start helping competitors to build smth that one day can be a threat.
Labeling all people they fire now as underperformers is a great solution. Zuck not only can retain his initial goal, but he doesn't have to pay a dime for it.
Where I work they set up an arbitrary performance based system where the lowest performers get written up and terminated. They also installed AI cameras on the forklifts. I hate it with a passion 😠
I like the way Meta has become full dystopian: “Today we remove tampons, fact checkers and low performers. Good luck, whichever category you fall in.”
Aren't the 'poor performers' Zuck and managers that over hired?
A lot of that 5% just won’t be very good at their job. For example, you might have someone in a senior level role that’s really at mid or junior level. Some people just aren’t very engaged in their job and constantly create more problems for the rest of the team.
So skipping the PIPs and straight to the door?
It will be super demoralising for anyone who is let go after this announcement 😕 The use phrase of "low performance based" is really calous.
Why not cut low profit projects instead.
At my last job, the technology there kept changing and changing. I think the pandemic may have started an explosion in technology (such as making face time video calls). I used to fold and mail out flyers that took a few days as well as process program registrations pretty manually. But the last year I was working there upon being laid off amid the pandemic, the correspondance in the technology went from mailing out flyers that took a few days for 700-800 people to sending out the same info digitally that only took a few seconds (or less). Technological advancements intend to reduce human error, such as making AI or some automation take over so it's more streamlined and quicker than doing it manually.
The pauses in this video...makes the news more dire and terrifying.
It is nice to get started at Meta. Work hard, learn new skills, hopefully get stock grants and 401k. However, this type of job seldom lasts. Live way below means, have a back up plan mentally ready.
Sucks for those "let go" because people hiring ex-meta from these "rounds" LNOW these people are PIPed, so the usual "Meta on the resume bonus" is lost ?
What I don’t understand is the need to announce air dirty laundry? Manage your company and if employees are not fulfilling job requirements fire. And as for DEI I think it discriminates against non protected groups. I’m old hire the best person for the job not the best person who ticks a box. I’ve worked with DEI hires who yes are low performers because they think they’re protected.
@@karenpage5674 the only reason think think that DEI discriminates is if you believe that people from “non-protected groups” and inherently more intelligent and hard working.
Corporate's goal is to cut cost. They will always come up with a new excuse to cut people out. If one excuse doesn't cut enough people, devise another.
they have unlimited money, they even said they'll backfill the roles. So how is it about cost? It's about their irrational belief that people are "low performers" when I've rarely seen actual low performers in tech. The people that run tech companies are out of touch autists.
You may be not laid off but change job by your will at that period so later would appear as poor performer on surface.
To be fair, if Meta is similar to other IT companies, then probably they have way more than 5% of low performers. In my experience, at least here in Europe, there are a lot of people in IT who've got used to being super comfortable not doing much work, not producing much output or value. And they just think companies will keep paying tens of thousands of dollars in salary for minor feature changes, without any negative consequences. Obviously companies aren't exactly benign, and they'd most likely want to replace us with AI purely just for profit, but the cost of software is really getting out of hand, while the quality of software is arguably decreasing.
Betteridge's Law would mean the answer is "No." However, every business calls themselves the "Google of...[Carpet Cleaning, Daycare, Doughnuts, (whatever inappropriate thing goes here...)]", the "Apple of..., the "Meta of...", and then shows off their open plan office to potential and existing customers. So, yeah, there's a reason to worry.
You people who voted for Trump: Get ready for more of this humane, "Christian" treatment.
How many times have we heard management say they want staff to pick up the slack from those who were laid off or left on their own accord? It's similar to when management says that "we need to work more with less now." Of course when they say "we" they mean YOU.
Keep in mind this is the same guy (Zuckerberg) that blew billions of dollars on the Metaverse which never materialized and missed the AI bandwagon.
When was the last time Zuck had a brilliant idea? Honestly...never. He's been one of the most damaging people in US history. Boycott Meta.
The true definition of decimation
It's a ventimation
@@vitoanania6042 "Ventimation" sounds like a cartoon about Starbucks.
@@vitoanania6042 Squid games
Real question: how is that different than a normal performance-based termination? Why is it a "layoff"?
Many of the layoffs in the past few years were a result of projects or roles being deemphasized rather than for performance.
When companies start doing this, they essentially go to a rank and yank system and it usually rolls down throughout the organization.
Jack Welch made this popular. The thinking goes that at any given time somewhere between 5 and 15 percent of your workforce are low performers and need to be let go and those positions are then either eliminated or replaced with higher performers.
So what happens is that every manager is given a proverbial deck of cards that has to be dealt. Each card has varying levels of ranking and 5 percent will be "Your Fired" cards. There are also assigned numbersof the other cards ranging from exceptional to marginal. So even if you get to stay, if you are at lower level of ranking, you are probably in trouble for next year, as with these systems if you draw the marginal rank 2 years in a row, you're going to be gone next year.
So even if you're a manager in a department where you think everyone is solid, you still have to deal the cards and you will eliminate 5 percent of your people. No exceptions!
In the short term this can be effective if an organization is having problems. However, when this is done as a long term strategy, it makes for politics back biting and ass kissing.
It's a stack rank and yank. It's the old Jack Welch poison that has destroyed so many other companies and their cultures.
@@kennethsouthard6042exactly. Forced ratings actually turns employees against one another. Most of the time it just causes laziness and encourages people to take on less in fear of screwing something up and upsetting someone.
Given that this came right around the same time as all the anti-diversity measures, I get the feeling we'll see some disproportionate demographics in who gets labelled as "low-performing".
One of these days, soon very soon, someone is going to be prepared for these layoffs and they aren't going to go silently into the night. They are going to see how big of a devastation they can create. I am going to sit back and laugh.
My previous company did the same thing. They let go of some people and work increased because they didn't replace them. I also used all of my vacation (EU) each year. Of course this will make my numbers go down. I don't care becuase I have a family and I will take my vacation. Still, they used it against me but I sure did make them pay me if they didn't want me to sue. They created the whole stupid paper trail to cover themselves of course. This is why few people want to be managers - you have to be a criminal and have no morals.
Thankfully, I have plenty of FU money, so of course I made the right decision to make them pay me to leave.
Re: Scarlett Letter, that’s exactly what I was thinking. We probably need HIPAA-like regulation to prevent people earning 400 times the average salary not being able to layoff AND insult/label the people they are canning to help the stock price.
The more people they layoff the worse their platform performs
When the whole COVID mass hiring started, I turned down META, GOOGLE, Amazon and other larger companies because I knew they were just hiring people to fill roles.
The first person which should be fired is the CEO. I have seen nothing good that Zuck has made lately to make Facebook better.
This is code to outsource and hire H1b for cheap labor in India.
So, if you fire a few thousand employees and state that it is because of their performance, doesn't that leave you vulnerable to mass libel claims. There are many reasons an employee might be measured as being a poor performer. Not all of those have anything to do with the skills, work ethic or productivity of the individual. Unless there is a genuine reason to not give an employee a reference, HR professionals simply state the role is no longer required. Meta sets a dangerous precedent (hopefully dangerous to Meta).
This should be a lesson for everyone to start something of their own as small as it maybe rather than working for these blood sucking monsters who will drain your soul and body and drive you crazy.
I feel like in hard times like today’s economy companies should prioritize surviving and making sure their workers and consumers survive than making increasing profits year over year and hurting their workers. Destroying the consumer that will no longer be able to buy anything and then they go out of business and everyone loses except the ones that have the money to survive.
5% of 7200 is 360 not 3600, right? Did I mishear?
What are the actual metrics that designate "performance"?
Which metrics are tech employers using to measure employee perormance?
Thank you ( I’m working on this for a project )
Being tagged a lower performer can simply mean that someone in your management chain just doesn't like you.
gotta love when one of the richest companies in the history of our planet gotta do cost cutting
Lower performers could be the position not just the person. Sometimes we find great people but unfortunately we later find out the position their in is not performing the way we thought. Sometimes we stop funding the position, the position no linger exists, and the person gets laid off. But this is the public sector where you can’t just move someone into another position. They have to reapply…
I am pretty sure Meta is referring to the persons, not positions. The fact that they want to backfill the positions makes it pretty clear.
I don't anybody who uses Facebook anymore. That company is dead anyways...
They own Instagram and WhatsApp. The former being the Millennial platform of choice, and the later being the main form of communication in many parts of the world.
@@antieatingactivist good luck trying to monetize WhatsApp without causing a mass exodus.
@@LAGG3R monetization isn’t really the issue here.
Why announce that "low performers" will be targeted? This makes it look like a sacking disguised as a layoff, also they'll find it hard to find another job if labelled a Meta reject?
I sense that we may see lawsuits coming.