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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

#651

Post by joenot443 »

pembrook wrote: post #600
operatingthetan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.

It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point. If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-…

> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.

I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.

In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.

Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.

When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?

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

#652

Post by ninjagoo »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #646
ninjagoo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> here 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 Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? > speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Al…

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

> Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore?

Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.

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

#653

Post by giancarlostoro »

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.

I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether.

This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.

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

#654

Post by pelasaco »

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…

> 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)

At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.

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

#655

Post by 3form »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #555
AbbeFaria wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.

I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.

Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.

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

#656

Post by ninjagoo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #650
hdndjsbbs wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

Did they ever pretend, and anyone ever believed that? "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team. Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.

> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.

Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.

There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.

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

#657

Post by seanclayton »

carlosft wrote: post #483
gary_b wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises

I feel better working at a company when the support staff are also working for the same company.

Good, they want you not asking a single question, your paycheck obviously requires it.

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

#658

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

xg15 wrote: post #547
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.

I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.

Absolutely.

Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.

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

#659

Post by VoidWarranty »

seattle_spring wrote: post #500
VoidWarranty wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to motivate people to work on things that destroy society. Money helps. Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.

What do you think is an appropriate time for most employees to end their workday?

I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.

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

#660

Post by Tade0 »

mkl wrote: post #615
idontwantthis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this from?

I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge

Truly the US military is a logistics organisation which dabbles in warfare.
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