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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

#671

Post by mghackerlady »

sulam wrote: post #552
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…

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.

the only thing I miss about stadia was the controller. Man, that was a nice controller. Also, playing games on a nest hub was a neat party trick

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

#672

Post by aworks »

torginus wrote: post #519
John23832 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight. This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social? > Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt. Whole countries literally run on…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl... There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography. Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China. Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.

3B Facebook users!

And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.

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

#673

Post by derwiki »

autaut wrote: post #435
matchbok3 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone. Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China. Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovat…

You have brain poisoning from reading too much slop online. >But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company

No idea what Dutch company you’re alluding to. FWIW my guess for cutting edge chip tech is TSMC.

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

#674

Post by xtracto »

byzantinegene wrote: post #594
xtracto wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before. I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.…

in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.

Using AI is fine. The key is to use it to build processes/Systems that solve problems deterministically. Instead of "asking them" to solve the problems non-deterministically themselves. It's way cheaper and robust.

As an example, we had to be able to parse most uses b2b bank statements. That means understanding the structure of around 30 different formats, some with very subtle differences within them.

The naive and expensive approach was to train an LLM to do it (after OCR).

Instead we used AI to generate a generalized python parser that is "configurable" for different structures. (And also extracts data from PDFs without OCR, unless they are pure images).

It covers the 99% of the cases. And for that 1% we pass it through AI for immediate solution, and to generate the additional deterministic config to cover it.

But I digress (lol). The point is, there are so many interesting problems that can now be solved. We should have teams of 3 to 5 people doing crazy stuff.

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

#675

Post by ljm »

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.

The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess.

Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.

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

#677

Post by derwiki »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #350
givemeethekeys wrote: post #303

With the way people get added and removed from big tech, why is having worked at these companies still considered a badge of honor?

I don’t know if it’s a badge of honor, but it’s definitely highly desirable because they pay a lot. The term FAANG was originally coined to group together extremely high paying companies. Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.

Mathing that backwards, you’re saying L5 makes 250k/year? That seems very low for Senior.

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

#678

Post by b_t_s »

subpixel wrote: post #637
muragekibicho wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment put everything into perspective. I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years. I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.

If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.

true. It's like the the only reason I open FB anymore....craigslist that isn't a PITA.

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

#679

Post by danans »

igleria wrote: post #609

I wonder if in a parallel universe without the extremely stupid metaverse sidequest this could have been prevented.

I doubt it. Expensive and wasteful side quests are a symptom of too much wealth/power concentrated in too few hands.

Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.

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

#680

Post by basisword »

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…

Re: pandemic overhiring - haven't most of the big tech companies already corrected for that? Starting in 2022 we've seen very large rounds of layoffs multiple times a year. That's 3-4 years of layoffs now. Meta alone has laid off over 30k people since 2022, not to mention closing many open roles.
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