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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

#421
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind) They never became anything more than the ad company

Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?

Look at Meta's profits by year.

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

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally billions of people would disagree with you. The arrogance displayed here is astounding. And this is coming from someone who doesn't like FB or Zuck.

>The arrogance displayed here is astounding. Projecting much?

Nope. Thanks.

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

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison. Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supe…

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind) They never became anything more than the ad company

Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.

In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.

The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?

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

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. T…

> A certain large company Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

I know of a large company that does not like to be named https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_Macs

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you have to pay people more to do boring or evil work vs meaningful or exciting work

In my experience the pay difference was never that close that meaning and ethics played a role in the decision. Cool exciting and meaningful science job: 200k Big Tech surveillance capitalism job: 800k (at the low end) The calculus has only been about affording housing and providing for the family.

800k at the low end? Big tech pays well, but that sort of comp is reserved for very senior folks.

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

#426
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?

One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since

Let’s go another step further!

The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.

Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.

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

#427

I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.

Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. T…

Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.

...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.

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

#428
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc). Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operatin…

> No operating systems, no processor design,

Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.

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

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind) They never became anything more than the ad company

Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth. In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops. The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billio…

No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.

They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.

There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.

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

#430

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…

Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
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