Meta lays off 11,000 people • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#691

Post by nonameiguess » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #322

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…

What would him taking responsibility in practice look like to you?

If the issue is his moonshot bets on AI research and metaverse that are not expected to immediately payout hurt the company by having too much headcount not contributing to short-term revenue, and core products can't support that, then he made a bad strategic decision, and the appropriate way to take responsibility for that is to remove the unique voting structure so that Mark is no longer the sole person capable of deciding the company's future strategy.

But either way, it's still inevitable that a change in strategy would entail elimination of some of that headcount.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#692

Post by jbaczuk » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

Wow, people can find a way to complain about anything. The severance benefits are insanely generous. Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now? Would it have been better if he blamed the layoffs on the market? Maybe it's just a glass half empty kind of thing.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#693

Post by rajman187 » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:23 PM UTC

nokeya wrote: 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?

if reports are to be believed, large swaths of these layoffs were in business and recruiting units, much less so engineering, so not exactly 15k+ new applications coming in

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#694

Post by yashg » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

consumer451 wrote: post #552

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 wi…

Of course layoffs are never pleasant and I hope and wish no one ever has to face them. But in the capitalist world we live in, they are inevitable. I am glad your brother has his job. Another sad thing about the uber capitalist society that US is, are the medical bankruptcies. In a developed country like the US, people shouldn't go bankrupt trying to avail healthcare. But that's a completely different discussion and let's not go there.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#695

Post by twoWhlsGud » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

sabellito wrote: post #598

hbn wrote: post #420

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable. Literally how could that acceleration be p…

> but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable. Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.

the economist John Maynard Keynes notably said, “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

A good thing to remember when you're tempted to sell short.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#696

Post by camdat » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

> Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent

Link pls

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#697

Post by WoahNoun » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

camdat wrote: post #696

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

> Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent Link pls

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1416405111

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#698

Post by sytelus » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #688

sytelus wrote: post #666

Meta is burning $10B/yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E…

This is completely incorrect. They took on ~$10B in debt recently for stock buybacks when debt was cheap. They make around $28B in profit after metaverse spending and have $40B cash on hand.

Corrected. It still doesn’t make any sense to take on debt (which no longer is cheap) to do stock buybacks.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#699

Post by cloutchaser » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

No post body was provided.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#700

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Nov 09, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

alasdair_ wrote: post #670

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obli…

> If it were just about the money

Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.