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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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also Eastern European or ex-USSR countries where highschool STEM curriculum is more difficult than in the west and participation in STEM competitions and olympiads is encouraged for kids. We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams and study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS. Ugly stuff for a bunch of 16 year olds who just wanted to make Flash games.…

> We had to solve binary and hex division and multiplication on paper for exams This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper. > study Dijkstra's algoritm and binary tree traversal in highschool CS That's more like it!

>This is not ... hard. It's the same logic as decimal multiplication/division on paper.

Do you really think tests where you gotta solve several divisions and multiplications on paper in hex and binary with no aids under time pressure is approachable for every 11 year old who just starts to learn about CS?

It's good to learn and know how such operations are done, but those tests were the bane of my 11 year old childhood.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#312
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience they place most weight on system design. They allow you to get 1-2 neutral flags from leetcoding and still get an offer.

When I did the system design interview the guy told me that zuckeberg created memcached. Not sure if he meant used or invented, could have just been a language thing. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't pass.

A oft-told tale in FB. Zuck rewrote memcached for FB in 2005. Either you or he is slightly misremembering the story.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#313
post #280

Our startup spends a little bit on Facebook Ads (across FB, Instagram, etc). It's very clear over the past few months that there's trouble in the ads engine. Attribution is a mess, ad efficiency fluctuates randomly, the UI and API are flaky. I don't know whether this is a result of the ios privacy changes, the broader economy affecting ad spend, or internal issues... Maybe a mix. But it's clear that Meta's main reven…

Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet. There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.

Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#314
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…

> The economy is stabilizing. The economy is in the early phases of the biggest Fed tightening since at least the 1980s. If you know where that will end up, congrats. For the rest of us, it's very much uncharted waters.

That's what I'm hearing; we didn't dodge a recession it just hasn't started yet.

In TX energy prices are already up a lot this year. We generate a substantial percentage of electricity from natural gas, and exports are up for obvious reasons.

Winter is coming.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money is still a good motivator

But meta is very stock compensation heavy so you are betting on the company stock at least not dropping considerably like the people that joined in august of last year at a $350 per a share price.

On the other side, joining when the stock is low is great, since you get more RSUs and a stronger chance of them bouncing back up.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#316
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

China doesn't have another generation. They'll be going into a very stark population collapse that's worse than what Japan is experiencing now, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers. I expect that China's economy and influence will take the shape of an upside-down U, with the peak in the next decade. If they're going to move on Taiwan, they cannot wait forever. They came close to catching up the US, but I don't th…

>They'll be going into a very stark population collapse that's worse than what Japan is experiencing now, where adult diapers outsell baby diapers.

As opposed to most of Europe ...

Also, the quality of your human capital is more important than just having a large unsustainable population growth without much marketable skills or know-how on the international scale. Otherwise parts of Africa and Asia would be economic super powers by now.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#317
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…

>*The economy is stabilizing.* The economy is never "stable". It is constantly in a cycle of ups and downs, over-investment and under-investment, easy money and tight money... The current state is no more "normal" than any other period.

The economy most definitely experiences stability when people and business are able to have a reasonable amount of confidence that things don't hit the fan at any second now. This stability allows people to invest with more freedom, take more risk, and grow at a stable rate.

Of course this behavior eventually overheats...but in terms of expectations there is definitely a stable state to an economy, even if it only last a few years.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#318
This is what likely is happening. Zuck and co, just like the Google leaders, need to keep Wall Street happy to try to bolster the stock as much as possible. While I don't know all of the internals of the FB organization, if it is anything like Google, it could probably make the same profit with a fraction of its current headcount. So why was it on a hiring spree? Because it gives the perception of innovation to Wall Street which boosts the stock price.

Since they pay a large chunk of their comp in RSU's that is like printing money to further prop up the price of the stock. Does all of that extra headcount actually create real innovation? Some does, but a lot is just fluff to keep Wall Street happy with their perception of innovation while not really moving the needle with profits.

Now we are in a bear market and Wall Street is rewarding austerity and fundamentals over speculative spending. The leadership of the company is reacting accordingly.

The silver lining is that perhaps this will begin to erode away the nearly monopoly status that companies like Google and Facebook have had in their respective spaces.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#319
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our CPIs have been absurd ever since the privacy changes. Meta is fucked and I don’t think people realize how much of an effect this is going to have on the entire internet. There are large downstream effects the iOS privacy changes are having on mobile advertising and the viability of companies that rely on mobile programmatic to bring people in the door.

Somehow businesses marketed effectively before individualized ad tracking. I don’t think the world is going to end.

Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#320
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…

> The economy is stabilizing. The economy is in the early phases of the biggest Fed tightening since at least the 1980s. If you know where that will end up, congrats. For the rest of us, it's very much uncharted waters.

> The economy is in the early phases of the biggest Fed tightening since at least the 1980s.

But the 2010s through 2020s period is a myth, a figment of cheap money. This money was made cheap to help us get out of the 2007/2008 recession, but the cheap money clearly went on too long.

Its warped all of our thinking. We should have been raising rates and paying down the Fed's balance sheet a long, long time ago. To be fair, we began the process in 2019, but COVID19 wrecked us in 2020.

Now its 2022 and inflation is growing out of control. We have no choice but to raise rates now.

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