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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

#261
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, and this is just speculation on my part so take it with a grain of salt. Meta gets the overwhelming majority (97.7%) of their revenue from advertising[1]. Their business model is completely reliant on using user data to sell highly targeted ads to sellers. While most consumers don't actually care what corporations do with their data, governments have been starting to crack down on the types of data that c…

> Netflix is probably going to the first FAANG company to fold Why would Netflix go out of business? Are they overly burdened by debt?

Much stronger competition in the streaming space. Disney has better content for every family with kids, so they're first choice. Amazon already has people via Prime. How many more are you going to buy? Possibly one, small chance of two? You've got Netflix and all the others scrambling for that last space in the house.

Plus they don't seem to be able to make a hit show of the kind that gets subscriptions, just a lot of not too terrible content.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS privacy has killed facebook advertisements A problem I see with FB is that they don't control anything on which they run. They run on stuff from their competitors: it's either Google (Chrome / Android), Microsot (Windows / Edge) or Apple (OS X / Safari / iOS). Despite the downturn these three behemoths are still enjoying a market cap in the trillion+. Meta is actually down to $360 bn. Meta controls neither the…

> They want to change that by having people switching en masse to the Metaverse but I'm really not sure this is happening. The tech isn't even close to there yet. Current gen VR tech demos sparks the imagination, and it's definitely great for people that want to like it... But that's not even close to good enough for mass adoption. Their teased prototypes look like a solid upgrade, but it's still not going to be enou…

I walked in oculus for like 10 minutes, and I puked. The technology isn't ready.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#264
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…

A little dated [2018], but still rings true: The average tenure for engineers at many major tech companies is ~3 years. Thus, you'd expect new hires at a rate of 30% annually just to maintain staffing levels. To determine headcount growth you, should look at year-over-year changes in total employee count, not just the number of new hires. TLDR: Meta's new-hire rate is not atypical. https://www.businessinsider.com/ave…

In fact, the overall head count has been rising rapidly.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stages of grief. First he blamed employees, now the economy..

CEOs are collectively hammering these talking points about the economy, pretending that it's 2008 all over again. They want their workers scared. The thing is, this isn't 2008, not by a long shot. They can keep complaining, but the jobs numbers speak for themselves.

If you think the world’s economy is in good shape, I have an investment to sell you.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#266

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.

> FB / Meta made two large stock bybacks, one with cash and one with debt, at a very high premium.

I don't know enough to understand if that is clearly a bad move or if maybe they had a different strategy.

I mean if they wanted to buyback their own stock it seems that they are not in a position to time the market. Waiting to buy low feels like they are shorting themselves.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#267
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and Taiwan situations Let's hope we don't get a Taiwan situation on top of all of the other stuff that's going on. That way lies WWIII.

I expect that's the real reason for the US and Europe's "all-in" hardline over Ukraine: signalling to China about Taiwan. Because pursuing a similar strategy with China would be substantially more expensive, in terms of treasure and blood, for both sides. But the critical date there seems to be 2030-2035 based on military preparations.

Absolutely. The entire thing is absolutely about China. Russia is a broken country that would have no significance beyond its hydrocarbons and nukes. China is an economic superpower and growing world power. Very soon it could replace the US as the primary driver of globalism. If the west had shown itself as disunited, it would have been time for China to take center stage in world affairs for the next hundred years. Instead it will wait for another generation.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think it just heavily favors new grads, who just spent a year+ studying algorithms.

Year+ is a fair assessment. A proper Computer Science course(4 years!) is mostly about algorithms. Most of leetcode hard would qualify as warmup exercises for my class.

That was a while ago. Right now? My brain is chock full of architectural stuff, k8s, several programming languages, multiple cloud provider idiosyncrasies, etc etc. Can I do leetcode? Yeah sure. Can I do it during an interview? I've tried recently, bombed spectacularly.

I'll probably have to invest the time prepping properly because there's little choice these days. Like you said, it's using up our precious free time. I'd rather be, I don't know, writing some stuff in Rust so I can add that language to my toolbox.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#269
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple already is filling that void. If you run your ads on third-party networks, you are beholden to Apple's privacy rules. But if you run Apple Search Ads through, Apple itself, a lot of the same rules don't apply and you get targeting and attribution back. A lot of advertisers are thus shifting their ad spend into Apple.

But this is just in the App Store, right? Not on web or within iOS spotlight. Honestly I don't use FB, but my wife does, and I can tell you she spends about 1/100th the time in the Apple App Store as FB. I don't see Search Ads as having anywhere near the same context.

Yes, their inventory is smaller at the moment, but they also show ads in News and Stock apps (note that those ads are personalized and don't have an ATT prompt by default.. so Apple apps don't have to play by the same rules as others). My guess is they will continue to expand inventory to other Apple apps (eg Maps, etc), but whether they try to build a full-fledged ad platform (where you can use Apple to buy ads in 3rd party apps) is yet to be seen.. they'd definitely have to overcome a backlash if they did that.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suspect the reason why people have stopped posting is because of increasing content from other sources. It's definitely my reason.

It's a negative feedback loop.

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