On what Zuck said today
His post will be the most quoted piece in tech in the next year
Come gather ’round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You’ll be drenched to the bone If your time to you is worth savin’ Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’
Prediction: this piece by Mark Zuckerberg on how Meta plans to drive efficiency will be the most quoted piece in the tech world this next year. Founders, CEOs, executives of startups and growing tech companies will look at it as a new playbook to adapt to the new world we already are in.
The most interesting part of the memo is not what they are doing, but why they are doing it — their principles and the stands they are taking. It reveals some inconvenient truths the industry at large has been brushing under the rug for the past few years.
Let me simply quote the parts I find the most interesting, with some commentary:
Our efficiency work has several parallel workstreams to improve organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage collect unnecessary processes, and more.
I love the metaphor of garbage collection here. It signals what will be important again — technology, and very unapologetically so. Technical jargon in such broad communication sets a strong tone.
As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision.
Every CEO in their layoffs post, while taking responsibility and expressing remorse, has pointed at specific things that went wrong: the pandemic growth wasn’t as permanent as we thought, the economic environment changed on us, we placed the wrong strategic bets, certain initiatives were not working out, Wall St demanded profitability and we need to heed our investors, etc.
Zuck’s message here is in stark contrast to all that: it simply expresses an operating principle: a leaner organization that will need fewer people to do the same things. Team size will be seen to be the vanity metric it is.
It’s well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making. Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain.
Well-understood? Hardly. Every layer talks up their impact and value add. Every organization has a career ladder where aspirational qualities are attached to every level. Higher and higher tangible monetary and status rewards create a self-serving loop for this ladder. Zuck is giving everyone permission to point out that the emperor has no clothes.
We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.
This will be fascinating to observe. Imagine you are an engineering manager and an engineer on your team happens to be your manager’s peer. How does that work out from a people dynamics perspective?
It’s tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. That project team needs space, and maybe it tips its overall product group into splitting across multiple floors or multiple time zones, which now makes communication harder for everyone. That project team needs laptops and HR benefits and may want to recruit more engineers, so that leads us to hire even more IT, HR and recruiting people, and now those orgs grow and become less efficient and responsive to higher priority teams as well. Maybe the project has overlap with work on another team or maybe it built a bespoke technical system when it should have used general infrastructure we’d already built, so now it will take leadership focus to deduplicate that effort. Indirect costs compound and it’s easy to underestimate them.
This is very true — no one will deny it. But here’s the thing: we have very poor accounting for costs of projects, and even worse incentives. Most senior managers are incentivized towards top-line numbers. Even when someone says they were GM of an area, I have to ask: did you really own P&L? How did you understand profits and losses? In most cases, people use direct headcount (typically engineering + product + design) as a proxy of costs, which misses the point. In an environment chasing growth at all costs, that may have been fine. But now, this one paragraph has the potential to change how planning works for all of us.
…with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company remains primarily technologists.
As we add different groups, our product teams naturally hire more roles to handle all the interactions with those other groups. If we only rebalanced the product teams towards engineering, those leaner product teams would be overwhelmed by the volume of interactions from other groups.
we’re focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles. It’s important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as possible.
I found this a bit abstruse. If I try to read between the lines and venture a guess, it says they are going to restructure teams to be mainly people who are directly building stuff. Other functions will be pared down not just proportionally but even more, to reduce co-ordination overhead for the technology teams. I suspect roles where the majority of the work is co-ordination in some way or another are going to simply disappear.
What is considered “valuable work” is going to change very a lot, and change fast. Across our industry.
Profitability enables innovation.
The rhetoric in tech has always been the mission. Not business, not profits. It will be interesting to see whether that might change, and what effects it might have.
The times they are a-changin’.