Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 923 posts

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

#751

Post by redrove »

jldugger wrote: post #155
booleandilemma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend…

This is very well put. Thanks for the comment.

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

#752

Post by jimbokun »

bandrami wrote: post #583
aurareturn wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated

We’re seeing multiple reports now of the number of PRs being closed increasing by 1.5x and that sounds about right.

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

#753

Post by sharadov »

3form wrote: post #655
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?

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

#754

Post by jimbokun »

lumost wrote: post #665
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…

Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept". The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.

The network effect is still there, they have billions of users who are on Facebook because friends and family are on Facebook.

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

#756

Post by snarf21 »

sharadov wrote: post #755

As much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.

I think it is hard to call IG and WA bets. He simply bought the competition that was set to wreck his platform.

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

#757

Post by tren_hard »

hansmayer wrote: post #605
aurareturn wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

> f 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300% If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some…

funny you say this, my meta swe friends have been talking about how many more loc they have been producing since they were given llms tens of thousands more. the thing i have found most interesting is how that seems to be the only metric that actually matters to them. just generating more and more.

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

#758

Post by pgoggijr »

sharadov wrote: post #755

As much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.

Sure but these are low-risk bets for him personally. When they don't work out 8,000 folks pay the price and he is still one of the richest people on the planet who will never have to worry about money, food, housing, or healthcare.

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

#759

Post by Ifkaluva »

derwiki wrote: post #677
Ifkaluva wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your housing, childcare, food, and even taxes are $0? Wow dude.
Post reply on HN