Facebook employees react to stock drop on Blind app

Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
REUTERS/Leah
Milli

• Facebook employees are not happy about the company’s
  massive 20% drop in stock price.
• They’re taking to anonymous social network Blind to
  moan about how “bad” they feel, and to point the finger at
  those they think are responsible.
• In messages seen by Business Insider, employees said
  they “feel like shit” and blamed over-hiring for Facebook’s
  woes.

Facebook’s stock price has plunged 20% – and employees aren’t
happy about it.

As with most Silicon Valley tech companies, Facebook employee’s
compensation is heavily based on equity in the company. So
Facebook’s  weaker-than-expected
Q2 earnings report and the subsequent sell-off has not gone
unnoticed inside the company.

On Thursday, the day after Facebook’s earnings report, some
employees took to Blind, an anonymous social network for tech
industry workers, to vent.

Reactions ranged from darkly gloomy — “feeling shit” — to
optimistically shrugging off any worries and predicting brighter
days ahead. Some also pointed the finger at overhiring and poor
execution by the company’s leadership for the recent
woes.  

‘My feeling is so bad’ 

Blind requires users to sign up with company email addresses to
verify that they work for the company they claim, but beyond that
the users remain anonymous. Users can create and reply to threads
in various public forums, as well as exclusive employee-only
forums for particular companies.

On Thursday morning,
a Google employee remarked in one of the public forums: “I
wonder how the mood in the office will be today.”

A Facebook employee replied glumly with a frowning emoticon and
the assessment “my feeling is so bad 🙁 ” 

A file photo of an
employee at one of Facebook’s offices.
Toby Melville/Reuters

Another Facebook employee was cruder in their assessment — though
they showed some signs of optimism. “Feeling shit, but it will
probably go back up like did recover from 150 in 3 months.”

In one of the app’s private forums restricted to employees of
major tech companies, the Facebook stock plunge was a big topic
of discussion. 

One of these employees put on a brave face: “Sucks since it’s a
big dip, but it’ll be OK.” They added they wished Facebook had a
program to automatically sell their shares as soon as they vest.

Another cautioned employees of other tech companies against
taking pleasure in their misfortune. “Remember, all of us
are in this together,” they wrote. “Our pay is determined by
market. If competition lowers pay, it will impact you too. May be
not by much if it’s FB alone, but given the top of the market is
defined by 4/5 companies, one of them suffering a set back will
have an impact on other’s benefits too, IMHO.”

“I feel like shit. Hope it helps,” another employee added
bluntly.

Some employees are playing the blame game

Meanwhile, some Facebook employees on Blind began pointing the
finger at who and what they believe to be responsible fo the bad
news.

One employee criticised
the company’s hiring practices as part of the issue.
“Problem: We are hiring at an ungodly pace. With operating
margin under 40% it only makes sense to slow down hiring, plus
the quality of a lot of the new hires is bleh,” they wrote.

“Quantity doesn’t equal quality and the talent pool is tapped
out. Earnings are tanking because we are hiring people we don’t
even need. This is the problem and I don’t know why others aren’t
really talking about it. It’s frustrating.

They added: “Solution: 1.) Slow down hiring completely. 2.) Stop
hiring people we do not need.”

“Overhiring is definitely [an] issue,” another replied.

A file photos of Facebook
employees working at one of the company’s
offices.
Sean Gallup / Getty
Images

Another in the private tech company group republished a comment
they had made in a Facebook-employee-only Blind forum, in which
they knocked their employer for missing the boat on
voice-activated speakers. 

“FB struggles to grow user base in US, but there are 7M people
just in USA with visual disability. But we couldn’t make a simple
voice-powered interface to make the platform (and corresponding
Ads) to bring this people to connect to the world,” they wrote.

“But, it’s Amazon — who was never known as a talent powerhouse —
[that] introduced the world to Alexa. Google and Apple followed
them, and we are years behind. Our genius leaders clearly failed
to see the values, as they were busy looking the world in VR
glasses and to be fake-excited.”

‘HODL’

It’s not just Facebook employees who have been hit by the
fallout. In
another thread, an Oracle employee implied that they held
Facebook stock and were reliant on it rebounding to buy property:
“My friends at Facebook. Please work hard to get the stock back
up. I need the down payment for a second house. Please.”

A Facebooker replied “HODL!!” — a slang term from the
cryptocurrency world that urges people not to sell off their
assets in times of falling prices.

An Amazon employee,
who said they previously worked at Facebook, claimed to have
lost $86,000 as a result of the drop-off. A
Facebook employee said they effectively lost $120,000 in
unvested RSUs. 

And in one of the public threads, a Facebook employee was stoic
about the whole thing, suggesting it was bound to happen sooner
or later.

“This was inevitable though don’t ya think?” they asked
rhetorically. “Why is it surprising that there would be a growth
decline? There are only so many people in the world.”

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