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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#991

Post by mike00632 »

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…

I have very similar thoughts, especially when I compare the Metaverse spots to the products that video game companies make for way less money that are comparably much better. I guess video game companies have a reputation for over-working and under-paying their employees though.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#992

Post by Firmwarrior »

vaxman wrote: post #209
whatwherewhy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way. If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.

Yeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :D Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor r…

Or they'll start their own companies and crush the competition like insects, while the dinosaur companies full of contractors slowly die out

just like we saw in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#994

Post by mckravchyk »

guhcampos wrote: post #970
sytelus wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are. From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good. I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally riski…

It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first.

[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#995

Post by kraf »

princevegeta89 wrote: post #717
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…

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.

You can't be serious. I think it's rare for a company to treat developers poorly but that's beside the point.

Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.

This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#996

Post by kraf »

adrianmsmith wrote: post #553
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 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…

Actually to me his explanation kind of sounds like he's blaming the economy

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#997

Post by vel0city »

nomel wrote: post #957
cletus wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> What unsolved hurdle do you see?

Drawing an opaque, dark line. Almost all these screens are adding light to an existing scene. The only way they can make black is to just not project light, which means you need to have a dark background to actually show dark.

Ever view a projector outside in a bright sunny day?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#998

Post by appleflaxen »

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 (…

> Zuck has no vision for the company

Exactly this.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#999

Post by bionsystem »

> 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.

That's... Wrong ? Who predicted that the growth would continue ? To me and from a lot of reading I did, it was obvious by the end of 2020 that a lot of those tech companies took several years of growth in advance, not that it would continue...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#1000

Post by tomerbd »

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…

amazing and imagine if this was not just a common cold
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