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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
181–190 of 509 posts
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#182Interesting 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…
> Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here,"
He makes it sound like these people sneaked in into the company without being hired.
This reminds me of my greedy uncle - went to a wedding, gobbled every other food and drink in sight and then when the fierce loose motions hit, blamed the food.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
His company pays design and UX experts a huge amount of money to come up with designs that work for users , not for him personally. Meta isn't Zuckerberg's toy. Ignoring that expertise, and designing for himself instead of users, is failing the shareholders by wasting money and not maximizing revenue. The parallel to Steve Jobs is a fair one, except that Steve was brilliant at design and UX and got things right. He w…
CEOs dog fooding their products and leaving feedback on them is not failing shareholders. Would you prefer a CEO to completely ignore everything their company makes and just trust others to tell him how things are going?
A wise CEO doesn't bypass the product and engineering process he's delegated to be put in place. Bypasing the process not only interferes with someones sprint and product roadmap, but more importantly, tells the people who own the process that they don't really own it after all. Which leads to people quitting.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#184Reminds me of Yahoo! at their great obsolescence tipping point when they were sunsetted to be replaced by Facebook. Zuckerberg has huge spread in Hawaii just like Yahoo! founder Yang did...the chuckling Marissa Meyer, cutbacks... 'lean in' Sandberg facing a host of legal issues.. it's like the same script again. Wonder what the new Yabook! will look like post recession...
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.
Whatever comes to replace Facebook I really hope it is a distributed system that doesn't have a single unique owner. And that monetization is not done through advertising.
The problem with Friendster, MySpace and then Facebook was their centralized nature. It sucks to produce/place your content in a place you have to pay for.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#185Interesting 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…
There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election.
And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the world.
But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good business leader. When you compare the business to something like Amazon - which has a strong culture around decision making and cultivates a style of leadership in it's executives.
So far, it seems like he hit a really good product/market fit and had good timing with Facebook. The strategy since then has basically been to stay ahead by acquiring social platforms that become successful. Until one came along that he couldn't just throw money at and acquire. Oops.
And now with the turn on the dime to "Meta" - other companies have been trying to figure out VR for a long time. Apple has reportedly had a VR headset concept going for years and is probably still several years from releasing it. For Amazon to come out with a product like that, it would have to start with a PRFAQ and a lot of vetting just to release the product. To rename the company and start putting all their energy towards it, which letting actual profit centers languish just wouldn't happen.
So not only has he not validated this new direction, he's now asking people working comfy FAANG jobs to knuckle down and suffer for it. It works when Elon Musk does it because he can make appeals like "we're going to make humanity multi-planetary"
Meta's pitch is "What if we convinced everybody to live in a virtual world controlled entirely by us, where we take 50% of a cut of every digital good that is purchased" - who wants to work 70 hours a week towards making that dystopia a reality?
I feel like Epic Games, with Fortnite being basically a social hub for kids and monetizing skins/associating social status with skins is closer to realizing some early version of "the metaverse" then what we've seen from Meta. I think that metaverse behavior is already happening in a lot of ways, it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'metaverse' play just feels weird to me, kudos to them if it works out though
Have you been to the metaverse? It's atrocious. 3G graphics from 1996, no real interactivity, nothing to do just "walk around". It's a thing that was stitched together by a bunch of people who clearly do not believe in any of it. Just the bare minimum to collect the fat FB paycheck and options.
Can I ask a genuine question (I'm 40 years old so please bear with me): What the heck is the "Meteaverse"? Is it an app/game that Facebook implemented similar to "Second Life"? is it something like Fortnite? Those have been for quite some time... shit, I was playing Unreal Tournament online decades ago. Eve online players have been having full financial/belic/development online interactions also for decades.
What's the "innovative" thing about this "Metaverse"? is it the 3D headset thing? Does that work for people who have strong astigmatism in one or two eyes (3D films sucked for me because given the difference in my eyesight on each eye, I never saw the 3D effect).
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business. I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an o…
I don't think it's a problem that VR is a completely new business. (It has a social aspect to it but it's not relevant to the discussion). I do agree that a better model would be the Amazon one. Amazon grew a completely new business (AWS) that had nothing to do with its core business (retail) but didn't lose focus on its core business and managed to grow both at the same time.
That’s a poor comparison. Amazon spun off a cost center into a separate business, so that they could make a profit on infrastructure they already had to have for their core business. So even with zero customers “AWS” would still have to exist in some form for Amazon’s core business to function. That is completely different relationship than Meta’s core business and their VR initiatives.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#188Interesting 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…
Meta engineering could definitely afford to get a bit leaner, but the question is whether their approach will cut fat or muscle. Having been there, I suspect muscle. There's a strong correlation there between the "impact" that is the be-all and end-all of their performance measurement, churn, and technical debt. If they cut headcount but keep all of the people generating churn and technical debt, there will be more of those per person who's left and fewer of those risking bad reviews to actually keep things running. Some parts of engineering are already cracking under that load, so the results could be pretty bad. Expect more outages.
This reminds me a bit of a discussion that used to be common during hard times early in my career: layoffs or pay cuts? It didn't take long for companies to figure out that with a layoff you get to choose who goes, but with pay cuts it will disproportionately be your best people because they have the greatest ability to jump upward. Nobody has that conversation any more, because the answer is known. I suspect in a few years Meta's approach to forced attrition (already practiced at Amazon for years) will also be recognized as bad for the long term.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
VR isn't like digital cameras destroying film, it's a completely different business. It'd be like Netflix deciding their video streaming business has peaked so they're going to hire 10,000 new engineers to work on a new wind turbine business. I agree with you they are focused on VR, but where I disagree is that they are a social media company. They're not focused on what their company actually does. It's kind of an o…
I don't think it's a problem that VR is a completely new business. (It has a social aspect to it but it's not relevant to the discussion). I do agree that a better model would be the Amazon one. Amazon grew a completely new business (AWS) that had nothing to do with its core business (retail) but didn't lose focus on its core business and managed to grow both at the same time.
But when AWS started with s3 the stakes were small and they already had the technology. It was a natural, low stakes attempt to diversify. They didn’t bet the farm on AWS it just kinda happened organically. At least that is my assumption, I could be wrong.
FB is betting the farm on a completely new technology with almost no user validation or product market fit. It’s incredibly higher risk than Amazon expanding into AWS.
Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds
#190Maybe I'm being totally naive, but what I want from FB is not better discoverability and metaverse, I want my friends to put their lives on it like they used to a few years ago. I don't even put anything on it myself anymore because of the smell around the company, and very few people I know do either, so my feed now looks like a bunch of memes and random news, with adverts in between. Engagement with a real human pu…
It’s not the smell of the company that has significantly reduced my usage. For me it’s just the fact I cannot state any opinion at all because of the controversy it might cause. It’s just not fun anymore. The stakes got to high.
All FB is good for now is an occasional cat or kid post. And even the kid pictures I don’t really feel comfortable with either because of the paper trail I would be leaving for my kid.