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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#551

Post by matwood »

registeredcorn wrote: post #500
eschneider wrote: post #146

I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.

I'm interested to hear your opinion: Do you have any thoughts on the current way companies are valued/how they operate vs how they were leading up to the 2000 crash? Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested t…

This is literally nothing like 2000 unless in you're in something like crypto. Meta hired 30k+ people during covid and they are correcting that over hire mistake. They are fine financially.

In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.

Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#552

Post by consumer451 »

yashg wrote: post #270

16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance and everything else, looks like a decent severance package at least. This seems better handled than Twitter's layoffs.

That is really generous. But man, I'm sitting here really hoping my sibling who works at Meta is not getting axed.

He took the job because of the money, after our parents had to declare a medical bankruptcy. The increase in salary allowed him to pay for their housing which they cannot afford on SS benefits.

Even under those circumstances he still would not take the job until he got my super-anti-Zuck butt on-board with the idea.

I hope people realize that reasons for working at Meta may be more complicated than it might seem on the surface.

UPDATE: he still has a job, whew

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#553

Post by adrianmsmith »

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…

I thought this https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590304422735015936 was a good explanation:

> What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#554

Post by nelsonic »

Facebook ("Meta") made $46.7 Billion in Profit in 2021. They have $42 Billion in cash. If the average engineer is paid $150k then these 11k people would cost the company 150,000 x 11,000 = 1,650,000,000 ($1.6 Billion/year) Mark Zuckerberg could _easily_ afford to keep these people employed and focus their efforts towards improving the safety of the platform e.g: stopping Human Trafficking, Drug Dealing and Child Abuse all documented extensively in the Facebook Papers. They are failing to protect the most vulnerable people in society while sitting on a _mountain_ of cash. Shame on you Mark.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#557

Post by dpkirchner »

dolmen wrote: post #549

> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell. E-mail address still working for the day? Is this the standard way to layoff employees in the US?

I wonder if they've limited outgoing emails so they may only be sent to internal users.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#558

Post by bombcar »

triceratops wrote: post #452
texasbigdata wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He can resign. As CEO he's ultimately responsible for the share price. By that measure, he just might be the worst-performing employee at the company.

He's also got full control of the company and arguably the shareholders not named Zucc want him, so he'd in some way be betraying them.

IIRC, the owner/CEO has fired himself some times, Ford had something like it, and I think LEGO too, years ago.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#559

Post by papito »

cdolan wrote: post #391
discordance wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

Rewatched all of it recently. It actually got better and more on the nose with time. Incredible.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#560

Post by alecbz »

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…

I think just leaving it at "I got this wrong" would land way better.

Adding "and I take responsibility" without actually substantiating that makes it sound way more hollow.

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