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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#911

Post by adam_arthur »

phonebucket wrote: post #861
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

> equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals Which fundamentals? The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]? The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio

Those stats are for now, not then. Good try though

And they are vaporizing all of their FCF by reinvesting into the metaverse. Or were until the stock continued to collapse.

It’s fair value here if you assume the metaverse is actually something they can monetize in a big way. Too far off for most investors

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#912

Post by webmobdev »

jahsome wrote: post #891
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.

I understand the sentiment. I agree there should be accountability. With that in mind, I'd like to point out root merely expressed an anecdote about above and beyond humane treatment of employees from the CEO. Parent described the hacker-friendly culture. Those appear to be first hand accounts. How does your comment relate contribute to that discussion? Further, how does over the top and genericized outrage and harm…

Work culture and values both matter. I found @Leires comment insightful because it jarred me to the reality that while we are appreciating the good in someone, we shouldn't forget their capability to be bad. Can a Gandhian be comfortable working at Hitler's gas chamber? Both had amazing leadership qualities. What attracts us to either of them are the values we think they represent.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#913

Post by kenhwang »

sytelus wrote: post #683
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…

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects th…

I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies.

Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#914

Post by pishpash »

conductr wrote: post #883
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 live in a oil rich area and there's a large economy of well paid folks attached to it. They all understand it's boom and bust. They get paid really well when it's booming. Then they take the L when it's busting. All to say, I think people need to come to terms with the fact they weren't being paid well due to their sheer brilliance but due to the risk they assumed by joining a boom and bust industry. Nobody was lur…

On some level it's not even Zuck's fault. It's Jerome Powell's. It's however up to each individual to plan for what comes after knowing 2020-2021 was an epic bubble.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#915

Post by bonney_io »

bartread wrote: post #902

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. There was similar wording to this in the recent Shopify an…

> some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a lot of people crawling the walls who couldn't wait to be let off the leash again

And what did people turn to? Social media.... VR...

Sorry, Zuck, not buying it.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#917

Post by cletus »

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…

Ex-Facebooker here too, also during that time.

Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.

But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:

1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);

2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.

This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.

But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.

But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).

So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#918

Post by artificial »

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.

They hired 42,000 during COVID. Lots of companies did the same, Twitter added 3500, the largest since they started.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#919

Post by jjav »

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 suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.

But that's not taking responsibility.

As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#920

Post by godelski »

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.

We can condone the good behaviors and condemn the bad ones. It is important to do both because if all we do is condemn then there is no pressure to do the right thing. If all you can do is evil then you'll only ever be evil and criticism will fall upon deaf ears.

A lot of people here agree with you about Meta's faults, even me. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the good they've done. Even if it isn't much and even if it is vastly outweighed by the bad. We should still use positive reinforcement to pressure companies to do the right thing.

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