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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#951

Post by raleighm »

godelski wrote: post #920
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…

Well said.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#952

Post by synicalx »

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.

That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#953

Post by digitaltrees »

godelski wrote: post #920
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…

I agree. Thanks for bringing that to the discussion. The risk is that it creates a false equilibrium where the perception is the good equals, outweighs or justifies the bad.

But you are totally right. We must celebrate with he good in others and life or our critical observations lose all merit.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#955

Post by avgcorrection »

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…

Everyone: The hero of their own story.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#956

Post by dheera »

godelski wrote: post #920
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…

Well yes, but a good fraction the good they've done would have been done by other companies if they weren't around.

What's frustrating is that they currently have a near-monopoly on friend-to-friend publishing, yet unlike about 5 years ago, they now gatekeep a lot of those communications -- many times I post something on my Facebook or Instagram that I want friends to see, and Meta doesn't show that content to my friends, just because it isn't a "Reel". Friends in my age range (+/-10) who grew up in North America tend to use only Meta's products, so I basically feel like I'm talking to a wall most of the time.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#957

Post by nomel »

cletus wrote: post #917
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 (…

> If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty)

Could you expand on this? It's seems absolutely certain, with products like nreal Air existing: https://www.nreal.ai/air

What unsolved hurdle do you see? Heck, there were even prototypes of laser retinal projection at CES!

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#958

Post by betawolf »

godelski wrote: post #920
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…

Good thing I read today!

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#959

Post by alasdair_ »

jrm4 wrote: post #816
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'm sorry, but the "A/B" responses to this sentiment are some of the worst euphemistic cope I've ever seen. You all really need to get out of your "tech" shells and take seriously this idea that "running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.

>"running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.

If a store owner puts two different candy bars at the register to see which one sells more, is that an evil thing?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#960

Post by nickersonm »

jjav wrote: post #919
mattmaroon wrote: post #364

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…

> 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 w…

You're mixing up responsibility and restitution. "It's my fault" is exactly taking responsibility.
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