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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

#421
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn't have a population collapse. They make up the difference with immigration, as does Canada and the US. Japan and China do not.

Most immigration to Europe is incredibly low-bar unskilled economic chancers interested in exploiting the welfare state, not skilled workers, doctors and engineers like you get in US and Canada which have stricter immigration policies.

That is patently false. Especially the Western and Northern EU countries have a massive influx of high-skill workers (doctors, programmers, engineers) from both Eastern EU countries (which will dry up sooner rather than later, to be fair, with terrible population growth already happening for more than a decade in places like Romania), but also from neighboring countries - Turkey being the largest source.

Even the so hated "refugee crisis" from Syria saw mostly middle-class Syrians moving to Europe (putting it in fear quotes since the whole of the EU had fewer refugees than Turkey alone to accept).

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#422
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…

I agree with you. But I also think this companies have potential for earning money. Real money. FB has incredible aí models and platforms as well as interesting hw products. But they keep pushing publicity for creepy projects such as their second life version. So what happens is that they have tons of fantastic things they do not properly use. I also think that media has chosen Zuckerberg to hit. Yeah. Lots of contra…

> Lots of contradictions etc, but if anything, he is not stupid.

What makes you think that? Especially after just pointing out that the strategy he himself has put front and center as the present and future of Facebook (Meta) is "creepy", when you think they have other things that could generate money?

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#423
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…

> Do you seriously struggle to think of possible reasons for why someone would want to work for Meta? Yes, I struggle to think of a good reason to work for such a harmful company as Meta. People usually don't land there because of a desperate need for money, which would probably be one of the very few acceptable reasons for joining that company. And why should my question be in good faith? Why should we not call out…

Where do you work? I'm sure we can find some good reasons why that's a harmful place too.

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#424
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…

Going by the current inflation and unemployment trends, the economy won't stabilize for a year at the very least. We have a very difficult situation. Inflation is high, unemployment is low. In 2008, we had low inflation and high unemployment, but not this time. So, with the tightening of interest rates, unemployment has to go high. With unemployment increasing, prices of goods will fall due to decrease in demand. At…

Why are you speaking as if high unemployment is better than high inflation?

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even compete with Android, just build a better Android phone, and sell it near cost (or at cost). Would have given them troves of data I'm sure. The muscle is around contract negotiation with the carriers and co-opting those partnerships, but they had the money to burn on this.

Who in their right mind would buy a Facebook phone, considering the neverending security issues, data leaks and total disregard for user privacy?

I mean people buy google phones, it can't get a lot worse than them. And they aren't bad phones either.

Imo at the end of the day people don't give two shits about privacy, convenience is king

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#426

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.

This isn't what new grads actually do. They're in the same boat you're in, algo classes have a lot of theory but LC is a different beast entirely

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I've been wondering what could possibly possess Meta to be so, "FUCK YEAH, ALL IN MF'ERS!!!" about the metaverse for a while now. This actually makes a lot of sense; companies control the platforms we are on, which then determines how we must operate (read: which prevents us from invasively monitoring you as much as we'd like), so why not control the full stack as people close more doors on us? I still thin…

Perhaps they shouldn't have bailed on making phones. Android phone arena is still very messy and they could just...have good hardware and a slick skin on Android and probably make a go of it. I know I'm armchairing the devil so to speak but I think this would have been a good long term play for them, but I imagine their expertise at the time was antithetical to hardware.

I think Google showed with Windows Phone that they were very much willing to sacrifice a few users of their huge platforms in order to sabotage any competitor platforms entirely (e.g. refusing them access to the YouTube API, and refusing to develop a YT app for WP). I think that once Amazon and MS stopped developping their phone OSs, the message was well and truly sent: you either make a Google phone, or you try to make a popular phone without easy access to YouTube and GMail and Google Maps (obviously, Apple was already too big by the time Android really got going for Google to have any chance of hurting Apple more than themselves with this same strategy).

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple tightening privacy while TikTok is eating their lunch... Not to mention the Metaverse is/was a giant distraction.

Metaverse is an interesting idea, but they're too quick to hail it as the feature of the company imo. It just looks like an expensive, boring, video game right now.

> Metaverse is an interesting idea

It just seems like a mix of xbox kinect and roblox

maybe zuck is just having a midlife crisis, who knows

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#429

My heart goes out to anybody losing their job, but it's always fantastic to see bad things happening to Meta.

I wonder what the effects of Meta failing would have on society? I can’t think of competing social network for people to migrate to. Would topic forums see a rise in popularity again or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users.

> Would topic forums see a rise in popularity

I highly doubt it

> or would sites like Reddit draw in some of those users

probably. I get the impression reddit is doing more marketing to non tech people, and more people I know have said positive stuff about reddit out of nowhere

but also... I feel like this is unrelated, but reddit has seriously gone downhill since what it was in like 2015. It's a good idea but the users make it insufferable

Re: Meta announces hiring freeze, warns employees of restructuring

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lots of people get car sick but nobody would say that the car isn't ready yet.

First of all, no one gets car sick while driving - already a major difference to VR. Secondly, most people who can get car sick can avoid it by sitting in the front row and looking only straight ahead.

Finally, even for people who get hopelessly car sick as passengers no matter what they do, the advantage of a fast safe private ride often outweighs the discomfort - especially since no one is spending more than 1h in a car more often than a few times a year. It is very hard to imagine what application could make VR give even close to the amount of utility that cars give you.

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