"Here's an option you'll hate—take it, or leave" is a tried-and-true way of making people quit. "You've been re-assigned" is a common form for it to take.
No, because these positions are genuinely being offered as an alternative to being laid off. If you choose not to take the new position, then you have terminated yourself.
Well the details are important here - are they being laid off, or is Meta suggesting they quit and then forcing them into a new role? The beginning of the article just says they're "asking" them to leave the company, not firing them, and I can't read the rest so it's a bit unclear what they're doing.
If an actual layoff is the alternative, rather than being fired for-cause (after failing at being an IC, perhaps) or quitting, then yeah, it's not really constructive termination. I can't read the article to see if that's the case, though.
Individual contributors is just a fancy name for a software engineer without direct reports. Aka you'd stop being a manager and just write code (for the most part).
Anyone non-tech I know would just call it "labor", as opposed to management. The people who mostly do the things that make the stuff, rather than mostly telling others to do the things to make the stuff.
Again, people'd just say "labor" in other contexts. Or maybe "workers". I'm not sure where "IC" came from but I've never seen it outside of tech, and that, mostly online.
I think “labor” is associated with repetitive or at least well characterized jobs
In tech, any two given workers are much less likely to be doing the same thing. So they are clearly not just laboring but contributing at some creative and self-management level as well
Non-managers, they aren't responsible for anyone but themselves. I know nothing of Meta's specific titles but I'd expect that e.g. the first level of full time engineering manager would convert to a full time senior or staff engineer.
Yep. Used pretty often. Attempting to fight things like that without a union backing you is scary and risky enough (plus lots of people just have no clue what the law says—which, who can blame them when it hardly matters?) that it usually works just fine. Probably a little more dangerous with employees as well-paid as at FAANG, but then again, if they ever want to work at that level anywhere else, they're not gonna want to rock the boat that way.
