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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include Stripe, Klarna, Netflix, Uber, Robinhood, Snap, Lyft, etc. tech layoffs in recent months have topped 100,000 now.

Which is about how many people Google itself hired over the course of the Pandemic, for context. So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.

[deleted]

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#114
post #27

> I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go _How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m. > In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...

Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#115

Severance summary: Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap. PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time. RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 15, 2022 vesting. Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months. Career services. We’ll provide three months of career support with an ex…

That sounds pretty good. Even better than good.

Is it if you are not a home owner still? The problem with not being a home owner is that you have very high burn rate because the market was able to optimize for housing profit extraction - that is, significant portion of the compensation of high earners ended up in the pocket of property owners.

Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).

I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.

Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#116
post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical:

"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."

"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."

"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."

"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."

"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."

etc.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#117
post #69

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave… I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR. Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be.

Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#118
post #50

Good. About time. $180K per employee for years is not sustainable. This is the general 'Tech Crash' I was talking about before all of this happened in advance. [0] [1] We'll see what happens after the news. No company is safe. Not even FAAMNG companies that HN has been screaming about for years was ever untouchable. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663119 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

Crab bucket mentality. Those salaries are fine, what went wrong is Meta overhired. FAANG companies don't have enough work to go around as it is.
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