[German]Maher Saba is vice president of remote presence and engineering at Facebook parent company Meta, a top management position after Marc Zuckerberg. In a message to managers of the company, he instructed them to look for "underperformers" and kick them out.
The whole thing has become public from the medium The Information – unfortunately, the article is not available without registration. But the beef can be reconstructed from other sources. The following tweets summarize the whole thing quite well.
In an internal post, there was direction from Maher Saba, vice president of remote presence and engineering at Meta, to subordinate managers in a workplace group to identify by 5 p.m. employees who "need support" and to "fire people who are not able to get on track." The post goes on to say, "If a direct report is treading water or performing poorly, they are not who we need; they are failing this company. As a manager, you can't let someone be neutral or negative for Meta."
Meta is increasing pressure on employees to work more efficiently and with lower budgets. The backdrop is that the company is struggling with macroeconomic conditions and the impact on its advertising business. To be sure, no layoffs have been announced at Meta so far. But Mark Zuckerberg said at a recent staff meeting that, given the changing conditions, "some of you may decide this place is not for you, and that self-selection is fine with me."
So there's pressure on perceived underperformers who aren't moving the company forward in Marc's mind. The Wall Street Journal quotes from Maher Saba's letter of last Friday, which the editorial board must have:
Every manager needs to think about each person on his or her team and the value they contribute to Meta. If a direct report is not progressing or performing poorly, we don't need him; he is letting the company down. As a manager, you cannot allow someone to be neutral or negative to Meta.
Understand our high performance requirements and hold your team accountable. Identify early who needs support, work with our Employee Relations team to get that support, and terminate those who are unable to stay on track.
Seems like such a really nice corporate culture – also fits with the scheme just made visible in the article Uber files: Dirty lobbying campaign in Europe. Facebook is currently under a lot of pressure – economically, but also politically (see Facebook: Stock went down, and now exit threat in Europe? (Feb. 2022)). Recently, the manager Sheryl Sandberg, second head behind Marc Zuckerberg, resigned (see Facebook manager Sheryl Sandberg steps down and leaves Meta).
