In our large company, we often had a consulting firm that advised us in difficult times. Bottom line, they said that they think the company needs to deeply breath out and then breathe in again. After the severance payments, we were always urgently looking for people. For me, that was always proof that the managers had failed. But a disproportionately small number of managers had to leave the company.
Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they do 40 billion stock buyback out of concern of their employers wellbeing? Wow, did not know Zucc is so selfless.
My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook – so naturally they would be the largest beneficiary of any stock buy back. But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook
i would be surprised if that is really the case. I expect institutional holders followed by founders to be larger.
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#73Just before the last round of layoffs, Zuck said some of you "shouldn't be here" and a memo circulating in management-only groups was laying blame on "coaster" ICs (it leaked and they got called out, and tried to walk it back). I don't wish any ill will towards anyone there, but it's flavors of schadenfreude that management (probably mostly M1/M2) is now instead the target of the layoff machine.
With all these layoffs though, it's perverse because the people being laid off are practically never the people responsible for the problems. Laying aside Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility for lighting billions of dollars on fire for nothing, the reason there's a massive swathe of middle management in Meta is because that's what Meta's management team decided to reward. If you were a good IC, you got made a manager. Now they've got tonnes of managers doing nothing and instead of saying "Ok, let's take a look at senior leadership and figure out where the weak leadership is that led to this situation", the answer is to fire a load of top performers (that's why they got made managers!) and let the people who made the mistakes continue to coast. The exact same problems are going to happen again, because whilst they'll do a detailed post-mortem for 5 minutes of downtime, no one is interested in a post-morterm for 5,000 fired engineers.
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they do 40 billion stock buyback out of concern of their employers wellbeing? Wow, did not know Zucc is so selfless.
My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook – so naturally they would be the largest beneficiary of any stock buy back. But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook
The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and together have less than Zuck does.
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much time passed between reaching out and publishing the article? Presumably the normal amount of time? Do you think journalists just go publishing things haphazardly? I get the feeling you have no experience in the world of reporting.
And I suspect you've spent too much time in the world of reporting if you think that journalists are some paragons of truth and honesty.
It really depends where you are. On one hand side, Matt Levine is a journalist. On the other, so are people in the Daily Mail. Yet, there's a massive difference there.
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook – so naturally they would be the largest beneficiary of any stock buy back. But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and togeth…
Excluding Zuck, at IPO the "employees" in aggregate were the largest group of shareholders. Source: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2146441/Fac...
I don't believe there is more up to date information on the breakdown of the shareholders.
Obviously Zuck is the largest single shareholder – he is the founder – but at time of IPO at least, the employees own more than him in total.
This isn't that uncommon for tech companies either. It's quite typical for companies like Facebook to give away a few percent of the company each year to employees in the form of stock based comp. I thought people on HN generally work for tech companies and were aware of this? A large part of your total compensation if you work at a company like Google or Amazon comes in the form of stock. Employees (especially the early employees) generally own a very significant amount of companies like Facebook and Google.
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#77In our large company, we often had a consulting firm that advised us in difficult times. Bottom line, they said that they think the company needs to deeply breath out and then breathe in again. After the severance payments, we were always urgently looking for people. For me, that was always proof that the managers had failed. But a disproportionately small number of managers had to leave the company.
And yet if we as individuals prioritize ourselves over our companies, we are called "disloyal".
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and togeth…
Excluding Zuck, at IPO the "employees" in aggregate were the largest group of shareholders. Source: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2146441/Fac... I don't believe there is more up to date information on the breakdown of the shareholders. Obviously Zuck is the largest single shareholder – he is the founder – but at time of IPO at least, the employees own more than him in total. This isn't that uncommo…
Do you really want to support your thesis with article from 2012?
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#79Last time they did a big layoff the stock went up.. so I guess keep firing people as long as the stock keeps going up is the plan for say people who own lots of the stock.. I wonder who might benefit?
there are reports that $META stock ticker will revert back to $FB soon
Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts
#80Just before the last round of layoffs, Zuck said some of you "shouldn't be here" and a memo circulating in management-only groups was laying blame on "coaster" ICs (it leaked and they got called out, and tried to walk it back). I don't wish any ill will towards anyone there, but it's flavors of schadenfreude that management (probably mostly M1/M2) is now instead the target of the layoff machine.
With all these layoffs though, it's perverse because the people being laid off are practically never the people responsible for the problems. Laying aside Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility for lighting billions of dollars on fire for nothing, the reason there's a massive swathe of middle management in Meta is because that's what Meta's management team decided to reward. If you were a good IC, you got made a m…
> If you were a good IC, you got made a manager
I’ve been here for 8 years, and never known that to be true. At most, higher IC levels are expected to do more “direction setting” work (ie, writing a technical design doc for your team to follow, rather than writing all the code by yourself), but that’s still distinct from “management”