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by ProAm 1146 days ago
> Layoffs mean they're doing less

This isn't true, it means they had fat to trim. People that were under performing or working on nothing. There was a hiring arms race the last several years and everyone over hired fearing other companies would get talent first. The industry at most of the notable tech companies was bloated.

1 comments

They are not exactly trimming 'fat'. This latest round had numerous people who were getting high marks and even AE. There is some meme going around that this was a performance based layoff and it absolutely was not.
Trimming the fat is about organizational fat. Some teams could be bloated, or unnecessary, etc.

I don’t know what went on in meta, but a few years ago I worked on a product team in a tech company. That team had a dedicated sub-team who reworked our AWS hosting every year. The company had a full Dev-Ops team to do it for us. Those 4-5 people were just making busy work and design docs in their name. While I’ve since quit and moved on, i hear that team experienced layoffs this spring. That’s “fat” which can be trimmed even if the engineers are very capable people.

What's AE?