[ffsm8]

He is the owner though.

If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior...

The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.

[zmmmmm]

Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions.

And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if execution is failing you need a reboot. Well he did the reboot and it is still failing.

[kelnos]

> Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions.

So he's the owner, for the definition that matters for GP's argument.

[ffsm8]

Again, I'm just an armchair analyst, but in that year of efficiency,his aim was to reduce wastage, removing low performers etc.

That kind of trimming entrenches previous culture even more, which can be desirable - but not in this particular case where the culture itself is the issue.

At that point you can't trim, you need to decimate. The layoffs at that time were several waves of around 10% - unless I misremember? If he instead did two waves with 40% each and slowly rebuilt from scratch, it'd be a different story.

[bennyelv]

Why is the problem assumed to be middle management? Maybe middle management is the only thing preventing the company going from successful dumpster fire to unsuccessful dumpster fire…

[ffsm8]

Because the issue is the culture, and the culture is entirely in the responsibility of middle management.

If an IC behaved like this then it's would've been the responsibility of the middle management to let them go when it started. So it'd still be on them.

And that's ignoring that issues like this have historically always started in middle management.

Also I suspect you're looking at it from an individual level: one middle manager on their own obviously cannot have enough impact to change this culture, so it's not the "fault" of any one manager. And that's the reason why the heavy handed approach is necessary, because the bad culture has settled. Anything any one manager may try to improve their ICs work life will inevitably get soured by the next level.