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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#731

Post by dunkmaster »

commandlinefan wrote: post #700
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.

Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is about money in the linked article:

"Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#732

Post by miiiiiike »

hardolaf wrote: post #725
miiiiiike wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?" Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and…

It sounds like you should pay more for developers because we don't have an issue retaining top talent over in the financial space.

> Financial space

Real numbers here: $250k for a mid-level UX designer and $575k (base comp) for an Angular dev. That's expensive. And, depending on the candidate, not worth it.

There's a lot of reality outside of FAANG and finance.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#733

Post by AbrahamParangi »

adam_arthur wrote: post #711
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…

It’s easy to be generous when times are good and your equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals

And yet, many are still not generous when times are good.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#734

Post by mongol »

miiiiiike wrote: post #710
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…

> As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?" Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and…

Taking responsibility is more than just admitting reponsibility. It is also about bearing the consequences. Such as, if you broke something, you fix it. If you lost something, you pay up to replace it. Or similar. A manager usually can't fix a problem themselves though. But unless they pay a cost for their mistakes, they are not really taking responsibility. Then they just pay lip service to the word.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#735

Post by sytelus »

maccard wrote: post #27

> I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go _How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#736

Post by [deleted] »

gfd wrote: post #704
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.

Not saying it makes it okay, but every company in existence does this to some extent. Everyone does A/B testing with the intent to alter user behavior (aka psychology) to increase their profits.

[deleted]

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#737

Post by beambot »

sausagefeet wrote: post #631
adrianmsmith wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is a pretty poor take, IMO. I have not seen any difference in results of a CEO who "takes responsibility" vs "blames outside factors". Taking responsibility seems to be a cheap way to come off as a better person without actually doing anything differently.

Are "results" the only thing that matter to you?

Let's say you have two leaders in this situation. #1 says "The macro economic climate is bad, so we're laying people off." #2 says "I made a mistake; this was my fault." All other things equal, I know which one I'd prefer to work with... How a leader comports themselves is just as important as their results -- especially in bad times.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#739

Post by bigbacaloa »

gfd wrote: post #704
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.

Not saying it makes it okay, but every company in existence does this to some extent. Everyone does A/B testing with the intent to alter user behavior (aka psychology) to increase their profits.

Not every company consciously does unethical things, no.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#740

Post by adam_arthur »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #733
adam_arthur wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to be generous when times are good and your equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals

And yet, many are still not generous when times are good.

Many were. And now that their stocks are down 90%, they aren’t
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