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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#171
post #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-com…

Corporate robots are the same, that's why corporate mistakes are also the same :/

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#172
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, if this continues at this rate. We'll be able to judge in 3-6 months the full impact. Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in Lalaland. The main thing is figuring out what's the full impact. If it's 10%+ of tech workers, the golden days are over for the vast majority of tech workers.

The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.

I would also believe these lay offs are mainly in recruitment and other HR roles and light on the hard core tech roles.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#173
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://…

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended Who predicted this? The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.

That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.

But my memory may be playing tricks on me.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way. If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.

I'm quite interested in learning which small central EU country has 150k outstanding programming jobs.

Surely they're not all engineers, many are sales and admin positions. But the number is still large tho

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#175
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://…

When has there ever been a "permanent acceleration" in revenue growth for any company? Or do I misunderstand what they're saying?

It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#176

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.

> meltdowns Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse. Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.

No, earnings have been going down because Apple fucked Meta with Apple's policy change on asking for consent to be tracked. Meta has even stated as much in various earnings calls since this happened.

This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.

The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#177
post #32

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO. Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

A link if you need to keep track of. https://layoffs.fyi/

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#178
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 surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos.

When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#179
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://…

I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#180
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.

I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model
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