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Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

cnbc.com

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Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#111

Post by nisegami »

Arainach wrote: post #10
asveikau wrote: post #7

Performance reviews are bullshit. Being a "low performer" at Meta might mean you are not a suck-up, or that you have a sense of ethics.

Performance reviews aren't bullshit - it's crucial to have an objective (as objective as possible) system for measuring performance both to reward your high performers and to understand your low performers whether to provide support or to document reasons for firing them. Several kinds of performance management system such as mandatory percentages for each rating level ARE bullshit, but without performance management…

The underlying goal behind performance reviews is noble and admirable.

But performance reviews are still bullshit. You could replace them with 'vote off the island' style votes every quarter instead and we wouldn't be any worse off.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#112

Post by crowcroft »

dgrin91 wrote: post #74
crowcroft wrote: post #56

This is your regular reminder that tech is essentially a fiefdom. Just because you aren't a serf doesn't mean you aren't a peasant.

Ah yes, the peasants who are free to leave at any time, get nice salaries and a nice severance at the end, plus a ton of benefits. Oh and at FB many can still WFH. Big tech has problems, but lets not exaggerate - that undermines progress.

Sure, I'd rather be a peasant in big tech than a king in almost any other era.

Especially in companies like Meta with dual class shareholders though, I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say the CEOs are essentially kings.

That doesn't mean the work environment or lifestyle you get working at these places is good or bad, people just need to have a realistic expectations about the governance behind these things though.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#113

Post by geodel »

crowcroft wrote: post #56

This is your regular reminder that tech is essentially a fiefdom. Just because you aren't a serf doesn't mean you aren't a peasant.

This is reminder only for those who thought berating employer, questioning policies above their remit all while keeping employment at that pure evil employer is just how the world works.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#114

Post by parasense »

yodsanklai wrote: post #16

It seems Zuck is turning into Elon. What's next? closing the European offices? forcing people to return to the office? relocating HQ to Texas?

Closing European offices? Gee... why would any international tech company want to do that? Hrm....

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#115

Post by voidfunc »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #81
voidfunc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal". The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

Is the 30's "mid-century"?

I dont think we're heading for the 30's and arguably the 1910-40s were probably more progressive than the mid-century both artistically and culturally compared to their preceding years. I think a lot of people don't remember how conservative the US was between the 50s and 90s. A lot of the stuff we consider acceptable or OK today was really not tolerated at all in public. See, for example, LGBTQ acceptance, minorities and women in positions of power, welfare state etc.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#116

Post by mtkd »

What Meta has been publishing on reasoning recently is very impressive -- I imagine they have internal product that is even further ahead

Senior engineers can now get answers in seconds to questions it might have taken a junior a couple days to figure out ... agents are starting to do comparable workflows to low/mid-skilled ops/support teams in some verticals at a fraction of cost

If Meta, and others pushing on AI, are not reducing heads in 2025 -- it would kind of undermine the value of the massive investments they are making

HN commentariat coupling this to anything else is a bit disingenuous as most engineers I know are talking about this a lot right now as nobody really knows where it leads -- with some discussion about whether it is comparable to horses being replaced by cars in 1920s and employment redeploying elsewhere over time

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#117

Post by harvodex »

chollida1 wrote: post #57
asdev wrote: post #14

how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession?

> how much more confirmation do we need that we are in a recession? Actual GDP data would be a good first start, no?

lol yea or a few bad jobs reports?

I think many got use to the most incredible labor market of a generation or two and we are just now back to something more historically normal.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#118

Post by yoyohello13 »

mywittyname wrote: post #103
voidfunc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal". The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

I wouldn't call it a cultural reset. It's more of a revolution. We've never known a country where the wealthy had this much capability. Owning just one of Facebook, Amazon, Palantir, X, etc makes a person incredibly powerful, but the fact that they've all seemingly combined forces makes me think we are in for an era that makes Cyberpunk novels look like a Disney flick.

Seeing as many of them site dystopian sci-fi novels as their inspiration you're probably not far off.

Re: Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'

#120

Post by asveikau »

voidfunc wrote: post #46
yodsanklai wrote: post #16

It seems Zuck is turning into Elon. What's next? closing the European offices? forcing people to return to the office? relocating HQ to Texas?

Everyone who is smart see's which way the winds are blowing and it isn't in the direction of "more liberal". The US is looking at a cultural reset back into the mid to mid-late 20th century.

I think this is actually a misread of long term trends. Not sure when it will be, but there will be backlash to the reset.

It reminds me like when crime rose in 2020 and 2021. It had been falling for something like 25 years. Then it was rising briefly, because of COVID. Many people treated this as a new normal, and a reason to make lasting and dramatic political changes. Then crime fell again in 2023 and 2024, without those substantive changes. The truth is that the short term trend didn't really have to do with criminal justice policy.

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