[loeg]

> Having half of the company’s engineers enmeshed in an endless loop of proposing changes and being told no was totally fine - they didn’t need to be productive anyway, and this way they weren’t impacting business-critical systems.

Well, it's a take. This is pretty cynical.

[shermantanktop]

There are many stories of FAANG hiring during that era for the purpose of denying talent to competitors. But now that you hired them, what will they do? And how will you keep them from creating problems?

It sounds cynical in retrospect; at the time the same set of facts were explained differently, in a way that didn’t hurt people feelings.

[KaiserPro]

> It sounds cynical in retrospect;

At the FAANG I was at, we were pushed to interview interview interview, and the company tripled in size in two years.

We constantly questioned the motive for more engineers, when we had plenty already, constantly seeking alignment. The rationale was more engineers meant we could make more products more quickly.

It never worked, and caused huge headaches that never really went away. It didn't help that team size was made a specific goal of a number of VPs. So it because a goal to grow team size, rather than a business need

And because the VPs were doing it, a whole bunch of people down the hill started copying then, using team size as a forcing function for power.

[loeg]

Those stories were fanciful at the time, too.

[eru]

That's a bit silly. Presumably you wanted to deny competitors use of these engineers, because they would build something useful. Just have them build that stuff for you instead?

And if competitors were in the same boat, why bother hiring these people at all?

[andwur]

It's about denial of labour leading to denial of broader competition, rather than a true intent to build a competing product. If you were actually to follow through with building the product you would need a lot more than just engineers to roll out a successful product, effectively an entire company is needed, which would spread the company focus out and the lead to investor questions about your focus and commitment. Then if it's an unproven idea there's significant risk in going to market etc etc.

Cheaper to just lock up the talent and burn the wages. Bit of a ding to your books, big ding to your competitor's capability.

In saying that, it's a terrible practice. Massive waste of time, opportunity, talent and money.

[Muromec]

>And if competitors were in the same boat, why bother hiring these people at all?

Suppose an established org (N) got disrupted by a startup (N+1) because the startup was able to do things faster and cheaper. Once the startup becomes the established org themselves and slows down a bit, they are exposed to the same risk, unless they hire all the smart people (who would otherwise be hired by N+2 startup) and buy out all the N+2 companies who actually managed to do something despite having less money. Eventually it becomes too expensive and there is a good excuse to fire all those people. I don't think it's 100% of what is happening, but it could be.

[peder]

Right, and it’s just the wrong, maybe weirdest correlation to suggest, and I’m someone that loves to find unexpected connections between things. ZIRP had nothing to do with this “no-man” phenomenon, it predated ZIRP.

[stephbook]

As someone else said, much about the post is simply not testable.

Is someone at Facebook working on the Metaverse a crucial part of prototyping new business models, or are they doing busywork? It'll only be clear in hindsight.