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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

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Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#301

Post by singpolyma3 »

shmatt wrote: post #11

if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success 6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals" Once these candidates actually star…

Last time I talked them they also wanted an NDA just to interview, which was just insulting and dumb so I kept my existing big tech job instead

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#302

Post by compiler-guy »

joenot443 wrote: post #246
pembrook wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing spe…

While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes. > The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 m…

The bureaucracy at Google has grown and grown. And then grown some more. But it is nowhere near as bad as the GP makes it sound.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#304

Post by singpolyma3 »

matchbok3 wrote: post #59
trjordan wrote: post #20

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#305

Post by singpolyma3 »

abosley wrote: post #123
matchbok3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.

AI isn't contributing to the layoffs though

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#306

Post by michaelt »

fragmede wrote: post #276
oytis wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.

> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America.

Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#307

Post by superfrank »

zmjone2992 wrote: post #292
hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!

I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.

Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.

I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#308

Post by compiler-guy »

mapme wrote: post #273
pembrook wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing spe…

Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer). As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will pr…

If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.

Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.

And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#309

Post by singpolyma3 »

shimman wrote: post #134
matchbok3 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally not true. Some bets just don't work. If a company tries to enter some new market and fails, they may use a layoff.

"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.

Because hiring people and paying them a salary is somehow hurting those people?

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#310

Post by pembrook »

mapme wrote: post #273
pembrook wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing spe…

Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer). As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will pr…

A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).

Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.

The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.

Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.

They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.

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