Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let alone met any of these people.
A large company like this should ahve a structure that's really no deper than:
1. CEO
2. SVP
3. VP
4. Director and really high level ICs
5. Manager and high-level ICs
6. ICs
Any deeper than that is organizational bloat. The above will allow ~5000 ICs per SVP without any layer having two many branches (eg a manager should really have no more than 10-15 reports).
This is better than layoffs because mid-level management is more responsible for bad company strategy than any IC is. Even though this is a step in the right direction, Zuck still faces two way bigger problems:
1. There is no vision for the company's key assets (ie FB, IG, WA). All of these seem to be relatively stagnant (if not in outright decline) and facing pressure from new platforms, most notably Tiktok as well as the behemoth that Youtube remains; and
2. There is absolutely no product market fit for the metaverse, certainly none that justifies sinking tens of billions of dollars into it.
By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807 Given the best practices of number of direct reports [1].
How would you deal with the rest 30,000+ Full time employees that Facebook has?
> By that structure, the maximum number of people that such a company should have is 7×7×7×7×7 = 16807
That actually sounds like pretty reasonable limit. There are very, very few organizations that should exceed this size in my view. In fact, even 16807 sounds far larger than ideal in most cases.
I would say it's about as popular among the gamers at Meta as it is among gamers outside the company. I play it myself periodically, but I wasn't even aware that Mark was a fan of the game, and I've been here a long time.
Years ago playing Civ 4 I distinctly remember hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice say "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". That's what management in these companies is like. It became a meme that every 6 months you'd get an email saying "your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a new manager". You'd never seen, heard of or let alone met any of these people.
A large company like this should ahve a structure that's really no deper than:
1. CEO
2. SVP
3. VP
4. Director and really high level ICs
5. Manager and high-level ICs
6. ICs
Any deeper than that is organizational bloat. The above will allow ~5000 ICs per SVP without any layer having two many branches (eg a manager should really have no more than 10-15 reports).
This is better than layoffs because mid-level management is more responsible for bad company strategy than any IC is. Even though this is a step in the right direction, Zuck still faces two way bigger problems:
1. There is no vision for the company's key assets (ie FB, IG, WA). All of these seem to be relatively stagnant (if not in outright decline) and facing pressure from new platforms, most notably Tiktok as well as the behemoth that Youtube remains; and
2. There is absolutely no product market fit for the metaverse, certainly none that justifies sinking tens of billions of dollars into it.
Disclaimer: ex-Facebooker.
Disclaimer: