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Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#41

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

Instagram is an $80bn company right now. I’d call that a success.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#42

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

[deleted]

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#43

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

Didn't Zuck allegedly steal the concepts from those twins and claim it was his own? Something like that but at Harvard the idea morphed as people connected and I seem to recall a quote from Zuck that he couldn't believe people would give up all this data. So alleged plagiarism and getting lucky by the sounds of it.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#45
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages.

I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.

At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#47
post #41

Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into anoth…

Instagram is an $80bn company right now. I’d call that a success.

Which, as I said, they bought. And then they ripped off the biggest feature. Most of the genuinely 'new' things they've tried with Instagram have failed.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#48
This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time.

Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:

* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"

* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".

* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".

Duh.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#49
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success from your perspective, or the market's? The market seems generally pleased that he's taken more than a quarter of global ads, and dominates in social media advertisement. By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.

The question wasn't if Zuck has been successful, it was if Meta has succeeded at anything new. When was the last time Meta made something original, brought to market and had success with it?

Thank you for being one of the few to actually read the question :)

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#50

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

Zuckerberg was barely adult when he started Facebook. And he probably bumped into a few older guys who thought they knew better than him, and history proved them wrong.

He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.

Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.

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