Today, we are parting away with 13% of us.
It is a wednesday.
Wednesdays are usually noisy. Since it is supposedly no meeting day. People tend to send more chat messages, open more pull requests, and write more posts. But today is especially quiet.
This is the 2nd time that I’ve been through this. Last time, it was worse. It was about 35%. Some have been with the company since the early days. Some were (supposedly) close friends with the CEO.
I cannot imagine being the leader in a situation like this. How can you face those who are departing, and those who are staying? How do you explain that, due to your over-optimism and mis-judgment, now hundreds and thousands of families are in trouble?
Running a business can sometimes be so ruthlessly brutal.
Running a business, by the end of the day, is a complex optimization problem. But the goal of optimization is the success of the company as a whole.
As much as we would like to tie the success and future of the companies with each individual. It is not always the case. When business is going through tough times, we say that we have a shared vision, that we are all in the same boat, that we are a family. But when it rains too hard, or the wave is too rough, we will have to leave some in the water.
During the weekend, there was a leaked article from WSJ. Whether or not it is intentional, I think it is for the better.
At least, we have been mentally prepared in the past few days. People have time to download valuable feedback from their co-workers from the internal tool. People have time to export pay-stubs for their own record. People have time to go back to the office to retrieve their personal belongings.
Hopefully, for those who are no longer with the team & the company, they can find it less of a shock. Hopefully, they already had things planned out.
During my last trip to Bellevue during the summer, I had the opportunity to meet an engineer director.
It was also a time when there was a lot of uncertainty at Meta. Well, frankly speaking, there wasn’t much of a time that we didn’t have a lot of uncertainty at Meta this year. But during the summer, we had a hiring freeze, and we were not extending return offers to any interns, and the stock has gone down by a lot.
Our director has accomplished a lot and has been through a lot of ups and downs. I asked him: are you worried about the future of Meta?
His answer is no. There are things that we can control and there are things that we cannot. We can focus on those that we can, try to do the best. And the rest, we have to just let it be.
For those who stay, we’ll carry on and connect the world.
For those that are leaving, best of luck! And hope you’ll find your new direction soon!
