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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

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

#551

Post by bandrami »

loeg wrote: post #523
bandrami wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.

Maybe you're thinking of AWS/Azure/Oracle? Meta isn't selling their compute.

Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.

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

#552

Post by sulam »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #505
wisty wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd li…

It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profi…

Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.

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

#553

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

culi wrote: post #470
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…

People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need? I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign

It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.

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

#554

Post by sulam »

loeg wrote: post #476
bandrami wrote: post #458

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.

It’s slightly more nuanced than layoffs = capex. You’re right, they don’t. That said, they do create free cash flow, which the market uses as one important input into the value of a given stock. Moving FCF positively when capex spending is moving it the other way is the real financial accounting move that is happening here.

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

#555

Post by Schlagbohrer »

AbbeFaria wrote: post #546
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find n…

My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to ke…

What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?

I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.

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

#556

Post by Schlagbohrer »

bandrami wrote: post #515
loeg wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.

I think any company that is seen to reduce capex right now is going to be the Bear Sterns of this cycle

Is this because you think the market will short sell them, or because capex is so worthwhile right now that a company which doesn't invest will fall fatally behind?

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

#557

Post by hnfong »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #517
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profi…

Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?

IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years.

It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.

But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...

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

#558

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #418
rao-v wrote: 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?

Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.

Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.

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

#559

Post by netcan »

wisty wrote: post #472
bandrami wrote: post #458

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd li…

Meta basically "pivoted."

The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.

That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.

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