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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#391

Post by cdolan »

discordance wrote: post #259
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #246

> 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…

"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."

SV from HBO I’d really something else

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#392

Post by amusedcyclist »

kadomony wrote: post #382
ericd wrote: 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.

I mean, the "world-changing" stuff they're investing in is what directly led to this layoff. The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.

There were some contradictory signals about this in the article. In one bit Mark says they are continuing to focus on the metaverse but he also says some people at Reality labs will be affected. But it sounds like the apps teams are going to be affected too

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#393

Post by stewx »

randomsearch wrote: post #323
ericd wrote: 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

What is Google doing to change the world right now?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#394

Post by sidcool »

buggythebug wrote: post #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.

Facebook I believe does a lot of things, including their own infrastructure.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#395

Post by sagebird »

While many are commenting that these layoffs are sensible given the situation, I am fearful that laying off approximately 13% of Meta employees will lead to a less connected world. I don’t think people fully understand the magnitude of step-backwards it will be in terms of people connecting in this world. Does Zuckerberg take responsibility for what this will mean to people who simply need to connect more through great products developed by Facebook and future technologies being developed by Meta?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#396

Post by erikpukinskis »

lvl102 wrote: post #69
CarbonCycles wrote: post #51

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.

If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity.

They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.

They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#398

Post by lanstin »

Ocerge wrote: post #186
marcus_holmes wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the dot-com (and Y2K) bust, when all the people who got into tech for the money (and not the love of it) suddenly decided to switch career. I hope the same happens now.

So you're implying only people who are passionate about tech should be allowed to work in tech? This does not hold water for almost any profession. Tech pays extremely well, and if you can do the work, who cares how you feel about it?

It is more fun to work with people that love the work they are doing, who get jazzed up on covering all the corner cases and really good test suites and efficient use of a computer. People who will listen to tech talk for ten minutes and then act like they are thinking, “how will this get me director or VP by thirty” are less engaged and less fun.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#399

Post by recuter »

mattmaroon wrote: post #364
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #246

> 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…

Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever. But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I…

I can't imagine these sort of layoffs, which are baked into the lifecycle and business plans of the company, were not something he wasn't anticipating years and years ago when hiring was being ramped up. In fact some notable fraction of these 11,000 were hired in the first place only to be fired, by design.

Sweet dreams.

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