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Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

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Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#161

Post by yuan43 »

> “I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” Zuckerberg said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.

The economy is stabilizing. It's being weaned off of ultra-loose money for the first time in years. The stock market is starting to behave more rationally, demanding that a company whose earnings potential is sinking and which offers no dividend be valued accordingly.

> ... Meta had more than 83,500 employees as of June 30, and added 5,700 new hires in the second quarter. ...

FWIW, 28 % annualized hiring growth for a company the size and age of Meta is not normal. It's a sign of mismanagement and especially loss of focus.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#162

Post by tonymet »

It should be both reassuring & unsettling to know that even experts can't forecast the future. FB / Meta made two large stock bybacks, one with cash and one with debt, at a very high premium.

Just in case you may feel bad for your investments, just remember no one can forecast the future.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#163

Post by uncletaco »

darth_avocado wrote: post #32
nobleach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever interviewed with Facebook/Meta? They don't do leetcode problems. Say what you want about them as a company, but I've done quite a few interviews in my career and their process was one of my favorites.

I got rejected on an obscure leetcode hard last year in the telephone screen, which was ridiculous considering I had enough practice to destroy leetcode hards. Though it worked out for me in the end, but I was definitely annoyed for a day or two.

I got rejected and then when they inevitably called me up the next year the recruiter pulled up the feedback from my interview and I wasn't recommended because I rewrote a function to be easier to unit test, after being asked "how would you test this?". By rewrote I mean I added a parameter to take in a fictional db client, rather than instantiate directly.

I told her no thank you and hung up.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#164

Post by foobarian »

yuan43 wrote: post #161

> “I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” Zuckerberg said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. The economy is stabilizing. It's being weaned off of ultra-loose money for the first time in years. The stock market is starting to behave more rationally, demanding that a company whose…

And they don't even create (and then quickly retire) random new product. Do they? What would be Meta's equivalent of Stadia?

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#165

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

yuan43 wrote: post #161

> “I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” Zuckerberg said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. The economy is stabilizing. It's being weaned off of ultra-loose money for the first time in years. The stock market is starting to behave more rationally, demanding that a company whose…

> It's a sign of mismanagement and especially loss of focus.

I think it's a natural symptom of running a company built on exploiting people's desire to craft and control their own image. It's corporate narcissism. Zuckerberg has been invincible for so long, how could he not be consumed by the reality distortion field himself?

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#166

Post by passion__desire »

bee_rider wrote: post #131
TylerE wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've gotten so damn greedy. On the mobile app literally over half my feed is ads.

My feed is mostly not posts from people I know (for some reason it has started sending me tiktok length clips of standup comedians). Actually it is not so bad, some of the clips are pretty funny, but I could get that sort of content from tiktok or youtube I guess, I just happen to use the facebook app because it is already installed. Their fundamental advantage was network effect, I guess that is dead now that like 1…

People have stopped posting on facebook. That's the reason for increasing content from other sources.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#167

Post by wollsmoth »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #132
myth_drannon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering if there is a correlation between hiring engineers who spend their lives memorizing leetcode hard problems and a company's ability to innovate and execute? Did they really optimize for hiring the top 0.001% of engineers or it's just that the fish is rotten from the top.

It seems to me that the selection process favors Indian and Chinese engineers who are used to cramming for rigorous entrance exams to top universities.

I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms. Those with full time jobs have to spend precious hours of free time remembering how to do these.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#168

Post by apendleton »

TylerE wrote: post #130
dangus wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if there’s any merit to this idea, but it seems to me that saturation can become a real problem. At this point skipping a story or feed ad in Instagram is like a nearly instant reflex for me. Plus, the programming on the recommendations is laughably amateur for company as resourceful as Meta. If I interact with an ad one time I’ll see the same ad over and over for days or weeks. Sure, I was curious for a…

Actually, that's a real thing advertisers DO want. It's called retargeting.

> that's a real thing advertisers DO want

I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.

I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#170

Post by galaxyLogic »

yuan43 wrote: post #161

> “I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, but from what we're seeing it doesn't yet seem like it has, so we want to plan somewhat conservatively,” Zuckerberg said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. The economy is stabilizing. It's being weaned off of ultra-loose money for the first time in years. The stock market is starting to behave more rationally, demanding that a company whose…

See also: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2022/09/28/meta-ordered-t...
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