Meta to lay off 5% of ‘lowest performers’, plans to hire for impacted roles
Surprise, surprise, the Zuck is screwing with the cogs’ lives once again by announcing Meta to lay off 5% of their workforce for “performance reasons” and re-hire “where necessary” to backfill “skill gaps”.
Amongst the standard tech CEO shenanigans like ageism and firing people because they’re “too expensive” that this sort of thing entails, this announcement signals the open return of one of the more vicious and demeaning tech company “efficiency” practices: stack ranking.
Envisioned by old General Electric CEO Jack Welch, stack ranking is the idea that every employee is given ratings and compared (or “stacked up against”) every other member of their team, and the bottom 10% is summarily cut on a quarterly or yearly basis. This is otherwise known colloquially as “trimming the fat” from a “lean” organization.
Those of us that have been in the tech game remember these years and the unnecessary competition, boot-licking, and backstabbing that it engenders as it literally and constantly pits employees against one another in order to keep their jobs, whether they’re actually doing the job laid out in their job description or not. And in a late-stage capitalistic society, it is bringing the Hunger Games to life when it comes down to the question of food, housing, and healthcare. It’s Machiavellian corpo fascism, as it encourages employees to do whatever they can to remain out of that bottom 10% - whether it’s to work themselves to death to go “above and beyond” or sabotage other employees to keep them in a lower place.
This angers me so much because I’ve lived through it. I guess it never really went away, it just sort of went underground for about 10 years (probably to cement the employee lock-in and reliance on the company as their livelihood). But now it’s back, and everyone is going to be the worse off for it.
It’s this kind of thing that should be a sober reminder that you can like the company you work for, and even the people you work with, but that company should never receive your loyalty because it can (and will) turn on you at the drop of a CEO’s dime. They demand something that they are in no way capable of returning. Trust no corpo. Always keep your eyes wide open, chooms.
I’ll never understand how corpos think that this is anything but a Bad Idea, even if we don’t mention the obvious of it being generally shitty to constantly dangle the prospective loss of livelihood over all of your employees.
Surely, having everyone competing with each other to keep their job is only going to implode the business. People will stop thinking about long term growth of the corp and how they can make it better (and likely more profitable), but instead will be too busy in self-preservation mode ensuring that they can still put food on the table next month.
It’s seen so often in reality game shows like The Traitors or Big Brother, where it’s ultimately every person for themselves but they also have to do co-operative team tasks for benefits/increased prize funds. They’re all too busy thinking about themselves that the outcome of the task is usually always sub-optimal.
While I’m not averse to these big tech corpos being hoisted by their own petard it still sickens me that it may come at the cost human mental and physical wellbeing and safety.
The only people that think it’s a good idea are the people at the top because a) it keeps more money in their pockets and b) it forces the workers to overwork in order to keep their position.
This is a practice that started in the '70s (maybe ‘80s) at General Electric and so many companies adopted it - IBM was still doing it when I worked there up until 2011, and all the dotcoms and tech companies adopted it in a ruthless bid to extract every possible drop of productivity from their employees. This is where that ridiculous “we only hire the best of the best” statement came from, because stack ranking allowed them to enforce it by exploiting their employees’ fears.
But since we’re just cogs and the CEOs and execs don’t see us as people, they don’t care.
What I hear is ‘meta’s capacity to ensure user engagement with platform has been at least partially subsidized by the userbase themselves’
their apps, especially instagram, are exceptionally good at end-user learning models; they don’t need staff when their user pool teaches their tools for them with their behaviour/engagement across platforms, and they don’t need staff when the behavioural training involved has a singular bottom line: keep the userbase online.
Their entire business model is “screen time=money”. All you have to do to ensure significant returns on that model, and guarantee future earnings, is design a platform/closed userbase system in which those who most frequently engage with the product as consumers also do the bulk of the work in designing the product using their consumer behavior. Since meta doesn’t need to be concerned with actual end-user service (the users service themselves; the META product is designed entirely around the data economy, NOT the service!!!)
Ugh I know I’m preaching to the choir here but is ANYONE SURPRISED.
You are correct, specifically in Meta’s case. What I’m more concerned about is the fact that so many companies follow Meta’s lead and I think their leadership will take this as “it’s okay to do stack ranking in the open again” and not even try to hide it with arguments such as the ones you laid out.
The masks are coming off all over the place in the tech industry, and this is one that I believe was better left held in place.
wouldn’t it be fun though if the userbase abandoned meta at like a super critical moment for the company in a way that liberated a lot of people from their influence?? that would be so cool. Really here for the end-user messing with the way the alg exploits them. In metas case yeah, their whole business model is basically ‘the consumer will make the product, and we’ll sell the consumer’. imagine if the consumer became savvy enough to manipulate that whole dynamic for their own purposes though. it would be so cool.
IMO this is not just tech, right? This has happened before, but in the AI era and the fact that all those online courses, universities and colleges have been spitting out IT people for decades, the time has come, where corpos can do that to tech folks.
As long as there are people willing to work for their toxic cultures and at this point it’s rather difficult to run out of tech people, this is what’s going to happen, rinse and repeat.
And this is getting really ridiculous, people don’t want to spend money on anything in tech, they expect everything to just work. The internet is supposed to “just work”.
The sad reality is that we probably won’t have enough jobs for everyone that considers themselves an IT choom.
Yeah, it’s essentially the commoditization of tech work into factory or assembly line work. Supply has definitely caught up and surpassed demand at this point, it’s just that the companies still act like it’s 2005 so they can use those excuses to fire and not hire workers.