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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

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141–150 of 509 posts

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.

Like I said in my original comment: I'm sure there are a ton of interesting jobs at meta, no doubt - but they are the "meta" jobs of meta. In terms of driving their primary objective it's nothing that innovative from a technical perspective. Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology. Not self-driving cars, not better medical devices, not VR technology (well, OK, they bought their way into that). The…

Their innovation is solely rooted in behavioral psychology.

I’m not a fan of Facebook. I don’t even have an account. But it would be unfair to say they haven’t come up with some truly innovative approaches to large scale infrastructure.

Also, to their credit they are huge supporters of open source. For example the Open Compute Project is still alive and well in large data halls. They are also still supporting the Telecom Infra Project which is responsible for OpenRAN as well as their Open DWDM hardware.

Does all of this work in their favor to support their own business? Absolutely. But that can also be said for every tech company in some form or fashion. But, they still open source it which is way more than a lot of other shops can say.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blood in the water. Might be a good time to start a new social network. A simple blue interface that doesn't have all of the clutter and noise of Mybook. We can launch at universities first, invite-only.

We could call it themybook.com

Years ago someone introduced me to FaceBook and found it so ridiculous that I called it FarceBook.

I don’t know why many people don’t see that you can draw a straight line from FarceBook —> Trump —> Roe Overturned

Baffles me why some (seemingly) smart (ML) people still work there, including a certain Turing award winner. Ah yes…must be the money.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#143
post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

> turning up the heat Well that was long due: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2013/mar/11...

15 degrees!

Presumably only where legally permitted. For instance, Ireland:

> for sedentary office work, a minimum temperature of 17.5° C, so far as is reasonably practicable, is achieved and maintained at every workstation after the first hour’s work.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#144
post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

I wonder how many people at Meta are there specifically for the money. Just learn to game their interview process, get in, and coast. I doubt that there are a lot of engineers working for Zuck for the love of the mission, let alone for moral reasons.

In other news, the value of a developer who knows how to solve the problem at hand vs torching your money on maintaining the overkill of dozens of microservices has just gone up.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#146
post #133
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the, "I fucked up and I'm going to have cut people, but I'm going to blame the people getting cut because I'm a shit human being" speech. It's never a good sign.

Not really. Business cycles exist and advertisement is extremely cyclical. Labour demand isn't fixed. Sometimes you have to cut not because you over hired, but because economic conditions change and this seems to be what's happening in regards to Facebook. I don't think he's blaming anyone either. The fact he's acknowledging there are probably people working at FB who shouldn't be suggests you're wrong and that for y…

Returning to contract law; the employment agreement is a contract engaged by two or more parties to exchange labor for money (or a basket of financial incentives including money, in part).

In virtually every instance, Meta proffered the employment contract and its provisions, vetted the counter party, and gave assent to enter into contract.

Arguably, “there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here,” and their intent to “turn up the heat,” represents a failure of Meta to conduct proper due diligence when entering into contract, and a modification of the provisions of employment after-the-fact.

In most instances these would be considered organizational failures. Your reference to the business cycle and other delicate economic terms are not the explanatory variables, not even to Meta themselves.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#147
post #88

Well, Coinbase just did 18% layoffs (that's one gone from every 5-person team). In theory it's nicer if your CEO just tells you basically 'please start looking for jobs now, we don't want to have to do layoffs'. What's so off-putting here is that he's already trying to frame those departures as separating from 'the weakest' (which is disingenuous, because it's old management wisdom that the first to leave in such sit…

Not really. The best leave first when the ship is sinking. Here it sounds like they are going to let people go more easily based on performance. If you have high rating already then you don't need to worry so much and no reason for you to start looking outside.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD message board features faster. (yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)

> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.

There is no denying that there is some interesting "engineering exhaust" coming from Facebook, side and passion projects developed on company time that are genuinely interesting and in ways industry-changing (React), but that is driven by devs and not the company. That is almost expected from a FAANG, where they have enough money to let that happen. Now, I bet, things will be different. You won't just be able to "do your own thing".

Say ello to KPIs.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#149
I’ve wondered for a few years how Meta seems to employ some of the world best “advice-givers”. I don’t use LinkedIn a lot, but the times I’m there, I get post suggestions from 2nd degree connections working at Meta who seemed to wax on and on during the pandemic about how they’re “donating their time to review resumes and help with interview prep” (I assume for non engineering roles)

We’re talking some Walmart/Severence level cringe everyday. “Five things successful leaders do that you should too” etc

I kept going down the rabbit hole of these posts and realized what a huge bubble it is, underwritten solely by the immense pre-AppTrackingTransparency advertising model. I’ll admit, for a short while, I wanted to have a job like that without any real work but later realized how hollow and short sighted it was to think that way.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#150
post #74

On the bright side, the Facebook recruiters have stopped bugging me.

Which makes me think - what are FB recruiters doing right now if the company isn't hiring and has no plans to start? Are many of them laid off too? If not, are they just... chilling?

Friend is a FB recruiter (who’s quitting soon). They are not laid off (yet), they’re just chilling with zero work for the past couple of months.
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