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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#801

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…

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

Reminds me of Hank Scorpio

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#802

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…

Not normally a fan of the man, so this is very nice to hear.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#803
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.

That is such a poor reason to not like Meta, among many, many reasons. All meta did was publish their results. The backlash ensured that no other companies shared results—but AB testing is bigger than ever across the industry. Now if you had said “fuck meta because my feed is filled with an unintelligible mix of baby photos and political screeds,” I’d totally follow.

There's always this, as well -

"On 6 December 2021, approximately a hundred Rohingya refugees launched a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it did not do enough to prevent the proliferation of anti-Rohingya hate speech because it was interested in prioritizing engagement."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#804

Some data from the inside: Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go. Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well. Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need. edit: updated to clear…

Not true that "most" bootcampers are gone. Please don't spread misinformation.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He's lost a lot but it's not like he's having to ask his wife to stop going out to lunch with her friends. There's a level of wealth where the numbers just stop having any real meaning. $1B is still multiple lifetimes of the most decadent luxury currently possible.

> the most decadent luxury currently possible.

Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it. He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.

> He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.

This. Yes.

Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.

Greed

It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.

I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

Reminds me of Hank Scorpio

I'm pretty sure Scorpio's lair of paradise was inspired by Microsoft in Redmond. In the 90s, it was legendarily posh with how well the people were treated. Nobody in corporate america had that quality of fitness centers, on-site cafes, etc.

Google was the next to up the ante in mid-2000s with things like daycare, a ball pit, food, drycleaning. All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#808

> 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.

> Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now?

Does everybody take a job expecting to leave it? I don't think that is the case.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down? Well I predict two things: One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate. Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market f…

Non-developers in the Bay Area dream of this happening.

Why? The top end comp creates a competitive pressure where the middle and low end benefit and get skewed upward

If bay-area comp drops, what do you think will happen to developer comp in the midwest? (refer to programmer compensation before 90s+ SV was a thing)

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#810
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.

+2 weeks base pay for every year of service with no cap.

Yup. One person I know is getting around 10 months of severance(!). Actually seems like a sweet deal.
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