<story><title>Meta Layoffs</title><url>https://brandur.org/fragments/meta-layoffs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmk</author><text>Why does there need to be a metric? People with management experience can decide these things based on intuition. It&amp;#x27;s practically impossible to quantify anything in this industry, but &amp;#x27;data-driven decisionmaking&amp;#x27; is fetishized to the extreme. Ultimately it just becomes another buzzword and method for people with little or no experience to override people with experience.&lt;p&gt;Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of &amp;#x27;metrics&amp;#x27; to justify the common-sense conclusion that junior people need more direct supervision is clearly sugarcoating it for junior recipients for whom the message is intended.</text></item><item><author>yellowapple</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;gt; Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.&lt;p&gt;This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured.  It&amp;#x27;s very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric.&lt;p&gt;This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what&amp;#x27;s being compared.  I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2?  1?  1&amp;#x2F;2?  1&amp;#x2F;30?  1&amp;#x2F;365.24?  There&amp;#x27;s a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly.&lt;p&gt;This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures.  These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that&amp;#x27;s more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and&amp;#x2F;or an in-person culture that&amp;#x27;s less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures.  I&amp;#x27;ve personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshstrange</author><text>&amp;gt; Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of &amp;#x27;metrics&amp;#x27; to justify the common-sense conclusion that junior people need more direct supervision is clearly sugarcoating it for junior recipients for whom the message is intended.&lt;p&gt;This line of reasoning will never not make my blood boil. &amp;quot;Well of course it&amp;#x27;s not data driven but we have to pretend it is for the juniors while the seniors know the truth&amp;quot;, what absolute hogwash. Say what you mean or I&amp;#x27;ll assume what you believe what you say. Yout don&amp;#x27;t get to have it both ways. They said it&amp;#x27;s based on data so you don&amp;#x27;t get to pretend it was intuition (on top of which the people exercising the &amp;quot;intuition&amp;quot; have a vested interest in WFO).</text></comment>
<story><title>Meta Layoffs</title><url>https://brandur.org/fragments/meta-layoffs</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rmk</author><text>Why does there need to be a metric? People with management experience can decide these things based on intuition. It&amp;#x27;s practically impossible to quantify anything in this industry, but &amp;#x27;data-driven decisionmaking&amp;#x27; is fetishized to the extreme. Ultimately it just becomes another buzzword and method for people with little or no experience to override people with experience.&lt;p&gt;Phrasing the whole discussion in terms of &amp;#x27;metrics&amp;#x27; to justify the common-sense conclusion that junior people need more direct supervision is clearly sugarcoating it for junior recipients for whom the message is intended.</text></item><item><author>yellowapple</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;gt; Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively.&lt;p&gt;This is meaningless without knowing how productivity is being measured.  It&amp;#x27;s very possible that said metric inherently favors in-person collaboration over remote collaboration - which would then skew the results of any further analysis of that metric.&lt;p&gt;This is also meaningless without knowing exactly what&amp;#x27;s being compared.  I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if 3 in-person days a week was indeed more productive than 0, but what about 2?  1?  1&amp;#x2F;2?  1&amp;#x2F;30?  1&amp;#x2F;365.24?  There&amp;#x27;s a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of numbers between 0 and 3, and coming to any conclusions without understanding the actual shape of that graph is folly.&lt;p&gt;This is also meaningless without information on the wide range of in-person cultures or the wide range of remote cultures.  These preliminary results could readily come about from having a remote culture that&amp;#x27;s more dysfunctional than other remote cultures and&amp;#x2F;or an in-person culture that&amp;#x27;s less dysfunctional than other in-person cultures.  I&amp;#x27;ve personally experienced both ranges more-or-less in full over the course of my career - as well as varying combinations of the two in hybrid environments.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>deelly</author><text>&amp;gt; these things based on intuition&lt;p&gt;And these people never ever mentioned using of intuition during making decisions because...&lt;p&gt;because no one believe that using intuition is actually working?</text></comment>