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Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the perceived value.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > perceived value. I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Especially when the "perceived value" is avoiding a loss. If I come in and cut the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing. If I come in and fix a problem that was going to raise the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing for about five minutes and then forgotten.
treis 4y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.
- musk_micropenis 4y ago
  Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's no way that is how it went down.
  - alasdair_ 4y ago
    Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation. Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Meta hired the consultants from Office Space. "Probab...probabli... probably not going to work here anymore, anyway!" Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g
newaccount2021 4y ago
apohn 4y ago
It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people. Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative). Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year. Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year. Total = 1.85 Million/Year. Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.
- drc500free 4y ago
  These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year. It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org. He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?
    - 4y ago
davewritescode 4y ago
The author made it fairly clear why he thought they were let go; they weren't in the critical path anywhere. The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.
- csa 4y ago
  > I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. 2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    > 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. A man who is still kicking isn't really down. No need to talk bad about a person who left silently, but anyone who kicks up a fuzz should expect people to respond if they disagree with the fuzz.
- raydev 4y ago
  > I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.
  - chis 4y ago
    There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack. I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it. The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...
lokar 4y ago
Meta is never going to solve their apple problem by cutting costs. To get back to their old numbers they need users on a platform where they make the rules, not apple.
quasse 4y ago
Based on input from my friends at Meta, this is a direct side effect of the way individual performance is quantified. Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering excellence" and "impact" * "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all do not count towards your impact. * "Engineering excellence" is where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point in engineering excellence. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee. I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of the internal political game at Meta.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago

Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the perceived value.

nemo44x 4y ago
> perceived value. I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  Especially when the "perceived value" is avoiding a loss. If I come in and cut the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing. If I come in and fix a problem that was going to raise the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing for about five minutes and then forgotten.

treis 4y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.

musk_micropenis 4y ago
Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's no way that is how it went down.
- alasdair_ 4y ago
  Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation. Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.
cableshaft 4y ago
Meta hired the consultants from Office Space. "Probab...probabli... probably not going to work here anymore, anyway!" Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g

newaccount2021 4y ago

apohn 4y ago

It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people. Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative). Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year. Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year. Total = 1.85 Million/Year. Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.

drc500free 4y ago
These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year. It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org. He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?
  - 4y ago

davewritescode 4y ago

The author made it fairly clear why he thought they were let go; they weren't in the critical path anywhere. The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.

zeroonetwothree 4y ago

I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.

csa 4y ago
> I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. 2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. A man who is still kicking isn't really down. No need to talk bad about a person who left silently, but anyone who kicks up a fuzz should expect people to respond if they disagree with the fuzz.
raydev 4y ago
> I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.
- chis 4y ago
  There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack. I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it. The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...

lokar 4y ago

Meta is never going to solve their apple problem by cutting costs. To get back to their old numbers they need users on a platform where they make the rules, not apple.

quasse 4y ago

Based on input from my friends at Meta, this is a direct side effect of the way individual performance is quantified. Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering excellence" and "impact" * "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all do not count towards your impact. * "Engineering excellence" is where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point in engineering excellence. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee. I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of the internal political game at Meta.