Facebook employees complaining ‘bleh’ hiring is reason for company woes

Facebook’s
CEO Mark Zuckerberg listens to French President Emmanuel Macron
after a family picture with guests of the “Tech for Good Summit”
at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 23,
2018.
REUTERS/Charles
Platiau/Pool

• Some Facebook employees are complaining that new hires
  at the company are “bleh.”
• The company’s stock dropped 20% this week after a
  nightmare Q2 2018 earnings report, and employees took to
  anonymous app Blind to vent.
• Some believe Facebook’s hiring practices are partly at
  fault for the issues the company is now facing.

Facebook employees have been venting their worry and frustration
after the company’s stock fell off a cliff — and some are
pointing the finger at their coworkers.

After Facebook announced financial results for the second quarter
of 2018 that failed to meet Wall Street’s expectations, its share
price dropped by around 20%. Many employees of the California
social network, who are partially paid in stock,
took to anonymous social network Blind to vent.

One theme that came up is that some felt the quality of
Facebook’s hires had slipped, contributing to the problem the
company faced.

One Facebook employee criticised their employer for hiring at an
“ungodly” pace, and suggested that some of the new hires were
“bleh.”

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

Facebook declined to comment on the Blind posts.

‘We are hiring at an ungodly pace’

The anonymous Facebook employee wrote: “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.”

“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.”

Facebook’s headcount increased 47% year-on-year, according to its
earnings report, to 30,275 as of June 30, 2018, and has
previously said it is hiring rapidly in safety and security. The
30,000 number refers only to full-time Facebook employees, a
spokesperson said, and the new safety hires include both
contractors and Facebook employees.

Several other Facebookers chimed in in agreement. “^ THIS!” one
replied. “Overhiring is definitely [an] issue,” another
added. 

A third cited
Facebook’s recent closure of three small apps due to low
usage as a step in the right direction. “Some of the dead
wood is in the process of being removed: tbh, Hello, and Moves.
Maybe that will help a tiny bit,” they wrote.

And another questioned Mark Zuckerberg’s recent sale of stock,
insinuating something suspicious was going on. “Didn’t Zuck dump
a bunch of the stop a few days before the announcement?
Convenient timing! lol.” (In reality, Zuckerberg — like many
other executives — has established automatic stock-sale programs
in place, to avoid any appearance of insider trading.)

Just because employees are angry, doesn’t mean they’re right

Facebook’s stock dropped after the company warned that its future
revenue growth and profits would fall well short of what
investors were expecting, and the company saw more than $100
billion in market value knocked off overnight — the largest
single-company wipe-out in US history. 

Facebook has said it is focusing on the long-term success of the
company, and cited increased investment in security, a switch to
less-monetized new formats, and currency headwinds as among the
reasons for the disappointing results.

It’s also worth noting that even with the 20% plunge in
Facebook’s share price, the stock is still trading at the level
it was a few months ago. Even so, some Facebook employees are
clearly rushing to blame those who they believe to be
responsible.

But another Blind user, identified as working for
environmentally-focused finance firm Renew Finance, urged caution
against taking employees’ diagnoses of their company’s ills as
gospel.

“Hilarious to come on blind and watch overpaid tech geniuses get
confused on how stocks work, how FB makes money, and more
generally how all of finance works,” they wrote. “Also for future
reference employees of a company very rarely have a clue why
stocks move.”