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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#331

> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionai…

That’s super pessimistic. What do you want him to say: “sucks all y’all lost your jobs but wasn’t my fault. Haha you’re unemployed now”. Like sure it’s not much, but without owning your mistakes how do you get better and improve to prevent them from repeating?

I think your confusng pessimism with scepticism.

Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why?

For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment?

I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#332

Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail. Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope tha…

No way. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear. They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan. There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't…

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#334
As a non-tech guy who follows the tech scene:

87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous.

These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same.

Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to "do good" after.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#335

Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail. Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope tha…

No way. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear. They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan. There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't…

> those (chinese) companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside

> (...)the United States government will clamp down on them hard.

In the same sentence, nice one. :)

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#336
post #309

I'd like to highlight this quote from the statement: > and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected Apple decisions + EU regulations?

I have a stupid question. Perhaps someone can explain. What is the link between Apple introducing new rules to nerf tracking and Meta making less money? I guess less tracking means less relevant ads. Are Meta's customers able to somehow evaluate this and are they now unwilling to spend as much money on advertising with them? Or is it that Meta now has lower click-through rates on iOS? Is there something else?

it means its harder to say that this advert lead to this click on the page.

This means the quality of the analytics coming back are much poorer. so its harder to optimise for a market segment.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#337
If 11k employees are 13% of the workforce, then Meta employed roughly 85k people.

Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long?

Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That's quite something.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#338
post #284

Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.

Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary? if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there. now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different

Getting laid off during a tech crash often leads to smart people deciding to finally follow the dreams they couldn't justify during the tech bull market. There's probably no shortage of people working at Facebook who have dreams of quitting to build some idea they have. But quitting a job paying 350k or whatever is just not in the cards.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#339
Genuinely curious why Meta (other big companies) hired so much during the pandemic? Did one companies make a strategic business decision to hire more based on project needs, and other companies followed on in a copy cat way? I guess maybe meta was thinking “VR will take off during pandemic and folks won’t be able to put the goggles back down ever”. I could see some companies copying it just to hedge against other companies over-recruiting and snatching some of their employees. Seems almost like a similar copy cat effort is happening now, unless they are all just admitting they over-hired.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#340
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://…

Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different:

+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.

+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.

+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.

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