Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#401

Post by decafninja » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #134

filoleg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately cannot see this question in the current context as anything but being made in bad faith. Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Something like "high pay, interesting/difficult challenges and problems to work on, large scale rarely found elsewhere, and lots of learning opportunities (including loads of great engineers to learn from)" never cro…

I always think of the same question when I talk to someone who goes to work for Meta. High pay, sure, but that's available elsewhere. Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta? I know they have to rebuild their ad plat…

Not just pay, but also perks, people, and prestige. All of which will make your daily life as an engineer more pleasant and catapult your future career in ways the vast majority of other companies cannot.

Is it selfish? Perhaps. And maybe Meta will fall out of the pantheon of top tech companies at some point, but for now they’re still there.

The projects in their domain is definitely more interesting than slogging through yet another Generic Line of Business Project at Generic Tech Is A Cost Center Company where the vast majority of SWEs work.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#402

Post by itake » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:38 AM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #370

charcircuit wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less business were able to. Personalized ads makes it so that more businesses are viable.

Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it. As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they a…

> they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices

What are they? Android is copying Apple[0]. Desktop?

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#403

Post by seibelj » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:45 AM UTC

itake wrote: post #402

seibelj wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it. As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they a…

> they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices What are they? Android is copying Apple[0]. Desktop? [0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/16/google-plans-android-privacy...

It's a free market, someone can create a pro-advertising phone if they think it will be successful. Plenty of Android phones are chock full of terrible adware.

It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#404

Post by tarsinge » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

usrusr wrote: post #331

losvedir wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Facebook is a platform unto itself. If it was still an enjoyable product that everyone used, and connected to their local interests and groups on, they could still have great, targeted advertising I think. But people don't really seem to use it much anymore in earnest, and their targeting probably relied more on 3rd party scripts across the Internet which are being restricted.

I'm still in the habit of clicking that Facebook bookmark occasionally, and have a few extend circle contacts who regularly post. But nine out of ten times the page does not even update anything beyond the server-side populated parts above the fold. Those "story" or what they are called snapchat(?) clones? They work even less frequently. Sometimes they do, so I assume that it can't really be a systematic failure on m…

> Apparently Facebook, the website, is crumbling on the inside (technology)

This is what makes me really uneasy about React. I feel there is too much cargo cult of a technology that doesn’t even work for their creators in the first place.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#405

Post by pempem » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:46 AM UTC

zeusk wrote: post #381

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do low rates lead to wealth inequality?

Because the rich get to borrow and buy assets and assets go up in prices. The haves benefit way more from cheap debt than have nots who can't take out debt or have appreciating assets to begin with.

Explain it like I'm 5 (or pls link me, happy to read more):

Previously the rich were borrowing easily and buying assets that go up in price bc...easy money. i.e. Houses appreciate really quickly, people can't afford them, the median income is outstripped by the median price etc. etc.

Now rates are going up but more people need to lose their job and be able to afford even less just at a lower price? i.e. Houses appreciate slowly but cost so much that even though the median price of a home is lower, most people still can't afford it bc the monthly is too high?

It seems like in both scenarios most working people can't afford things despite the interest rate being in the single digits unlike the 80s bc the interest rate on your money is so low and the cost/ownership of day to day items (say, a phone which was $15 for a house and is now ~100 per person per month) is wildly more.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#406

Post by pempem » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:49 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #316

eloff wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Immigration is incredibly key to this. There are a number of nations where young people outstrip elderly populations and allowing the flow of people and labor is crucial, as is their enablement/assimilation/integration so that they stay

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#407

Post by behaveEc0n00 » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:56 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #320

BurningFrog wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

I maintain that this Fed tightening is manufactured consent to be ruled by an aristocratic class in charge of government. Rent seekers in their twilight years convinced future agency must directly build upon their efforts by propping up their wealth working in the industries they own all the valuable real land and infra capital.

A minority has monopolized agency and insulated themselves from real work using a historical basis that there’s always been bean counters who divvy up public production, take 5 for themselves and give 1 to the next person in the public line. It’s a hard job being stingy, after all.

It’s government quota on free trade abstracted into technical jargon and made unfalsifiable.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#408

Post by black_13 » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 5:57 AM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#409

Post by stonogo » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

decafninja wrote: post #401

stonogo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think of the same question when I talk to someone who goes to work for Meta. High pay, sure, but that's available elsewhere. Scale, by now, is surely an operations matter. If they're still having to innovate to perform at their current scale, what the hell have they been doing? In other words, aside from the VR distraction, what interesting challenges remain at Meta? I know they have to rebuild their ad plat…

Not just pay, but also perks, people, and prestige. All of which will make your daily life as an engineer more pleasant and catapult your future career in ways the vast majority of other companies cannot. Is it selfish? Perhaps. And maybe Meta will fall out of the pantheon of top tech companies at some point, but for now they’re still there. The projects in their domain is definitely more interesting than slogging th…

Sorry, I must not have expressed my question clearly. Specifically which projects are interesting? They don't seem to be doing anything new, at least from the outside. I don't mean by that 'anything new for Facebook' but genuinely novel things, things you can't work on anywhere else.

Stipulated the rest of it -- what's the engineering challenge?

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#410

Post by Simon_O_Rourke » Fri, Sep 30, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

Knowing a few people who work at Meta, it seems that they're deliberately making work less tolerable, with a view towards getting people to leave of their own accord. I know of three people who've been appointed new bosses within the past month. By all accounts these new managers are all jackasses, and are deliberately nasty in meetings and one-to-ones. Nasty CEO, nastier managers, I've advised anyone in there I know to get out now!