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Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

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Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#81

Post by mensetmanusman »

kypro wrote: post #69
KptMarchewa wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

The .1% are the largest shareholders.

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#82

Post by kypro »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #78
kypro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You know what, I cba.

I'm the only one providing explanations here. I'm the only one who bothered to try to provide a source for the claims I was making. I explained that I don't believe there's more recent data, so yes, I am supporting my "thesis" with an article from 2012. Everyone is just making baseless comments here anyway, "ree, Zuck bad", so whatever, believe what you like for all I care.

The point I was originally trying to make was that technology companies (including Facebook) compensate their employees with billions of dollars of stock every year[1] ($12b last year in the case of META). This means the employees of technology companies are generally significant shareholders of the company – whether they're the largest, second largest or third largest owner is frankly irrelevant to my point – employees benefit massively when the share price goes up because in many cases most of the wealth of those employees is tied to the company stock.

None of what I'm saying here should be controversial and is widely understood by tech workers at companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon.

I have no idea what Zuck or BlackRock being a large individual holder of META stock has to do with anything. Do you guys think that the thousands of employees at Facebook should (or could) have 10% of the company each or something? Obviously Zuck owns more than any individual holder – it's his company. And yes, obviously, there are large institutions that hold Facebook on behalf of their clients – most of whom by the way are just average people who have money invested with companies like BlackRock for their retirement. Are you guys also surprised to hear that 89 year old Doris doesn't manage her retirement portfolio on Robinhood or something?

If you're honestly unhappy that companies like Facebook don't give enough of their stock away to employees then I don't know what to say to you. You'll find one of the main complaints institutional share holders will cite when it comes to owning the stock of tech companies is that they give away far too much stock to their employees. This dilutes investors like BlackRock at the benefit of employees receiving SBC.

In my opinion the reality here is completely opposite to what this community is trying to paint. But I know, I know. Zuck is rich and therefore he must be a bad boy who doesn't care about any one or anything other than his own wealth.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#83

Post by majikaja »

shakkhar wrote: post #28
majikaja wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employees must have seen the writing on the wall when the company was hiring en masse. Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly.

> Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly I have been hearing this about Meta / FB for the last 10 years. This line of thinking is overly simplistic. If a company like FB wants to ramp up hiring, they have many tools at their disposal. Hiring bar isn't the only tool, or even a very important one. Things they can do: 1. They can really jack up the compensation package and signing bonuses 2. O…

Ok maybe you're right (I have no experience of trying to integrate huge numbers of people coming from outside big tech in a way that doesn't devalue their skills), but I would feel a bit concerned for my future compensation regarding #2, #3 and #4 in your list if I wasn't extremely bullish about the future of the business (especially #3).

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#84

Post by majikaja »

bushbaba wrote: post #26
andsoitis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers vocally advocated for hiring more people because they have “too much work”. Engineers are on the interview panels and so are also responsible for hiring standards to drop (if, in fact, that is true).

There’s always more work to be done. Doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.

Most of the engineers I worked with (non-tech industry) never seemed to have a clue about the business situation of the company. They could just see there were lots of requirements and assumed the future was bright.

Edit: Yes, I see this contradicts my original post. I was hoping the employees in big tech would be a bit smarter.

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#85

Post by [deleted] »

bagels wrote: post #47

Just 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.

[deleted]

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#86

Post by [deleted] »

Shish2k wrote: post #80
SilverBirch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

[deleted]

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#87

Post by HDThoreaun »

andirk wrote: post #37
givemeethekeys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock goes up when costs are reduced. If there's a major outage due to structural weakness (as a result of layoffs), then the stock crashes down.

Board members who are at the whims of the holders of their stonks will ebb and flow with the wishes of those who need more ROI during an oncoming recession. Another way to put it: a lot more people will be laid off and that will continue until the underlying product is harmed. But what is the underlying product? Besides sharing photos on Instagram, I don't personally hear or know about any mass adoption of Meta wares…

Mark is the board, he can do whatever he wants.

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

kypro wrote: post #76
dragonwriter wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

> Excluding Zuck, at IPO the "employees" in aggregate were the largest group of shareholders.

No, just because an article arbitrarily treats them as a group and every other entity as an individual entity doesn’t make them ”the biggest group”, and the immediate pre-IPO distribution (when comp was more heavily weighted to equity and there was no practical way for most employees to exit their equity position pre-IPO) is likely not refleftive of current distribution more than a decade post-IPO distribution.

And “employees excluding Zuckerberg” aren’t a coherent, interest-aligned group abyhow.

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#89

Post by ojbyrne »

bugbuddy wrote: post #15
chrisbolt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blank did not immediately respond to blank 's request for comments is so common as to mean nothing.

How do we know if the article was not written by an AI?

My experience is that AI is generally better than humans at _syntax_. Leaving a word out seems to be exclusive to (rushed) humans.

Re: Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

#90

Post by b212 »

altacc wrote: post #46

This is familiar to those of us who went through the dot com bubble burst. We're not at the same scale of industry specific recession but there are similarities with an economic slow down, more cautious spending, reduction in VC money and shareholders seeking returns. Wave after wave of redundancies to try and reach a stable cashflow, each one "right sizing" until they realise that their calculations where wrong and…

Where is this VC money going though? There’s more money on the markets than ever, billionaires are richer than ever etc.
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