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Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

investor.fb.com

131–140 of 223 posts

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#131
post #57

Disclaimer: Ex-Facebooker. The first thing to know about Facebook is that they view the social media landscape in two dimensions: format and audience size. Format here means text -> audio -> video. So if you look at the match up between audience of 1:1,000,000 and text you'll find Twitter, for example. This has served FB quite well but what happens after video, if anything? Well, the company believes the next two ste…

Re: #2, they also decided to merge Facebook with Oculus login, and I still refuse to buy an Oculus for that reason alone. I'm tired of my data being cross analyzed and seeing creepy ads follow me around the internet. Last thing I want to do is plug into some Facebook metaverse where even my eyeball movements are analyzed and processed. As a kid I thought I would love VR. And even as solid as the modern experiences ha…

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Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#132
post #98

I am very bullish on FB: 1) Founder still has majority voting shares, gives a lot more freedom. 2) I think the Metaverse stuff will pay off in the long run 3) They are making the changes necessary to compete with TikTok. I am buying shares now at this price

Honestly, the whole question with FB stock is whether you believe the Metaverse stuff will pay off. I give them worse than even odds, but better than a 10% chance, to be the ones who get it right.

They don't necessarily have to get it right. They just have to be geared up enough to fast follow whoever does get it right, or be an enticing M&A partner. My bellwether is how they respond to TikTok.

Now with all that said, I think there's a snowball's chance in hell that VR headsets become as ubiquitous as cell phones. It won't happen until AR. It's like TiVo and Netflix.

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#133
post #98

I am very bullish on FB: 1) Founder still has majority voting shares, gives a lot more freedom. 2) I think the Metaverse stuff will pay off in the long run 3) They are making the changes necessary to compete with TikTok. I am buying shares now at this price

It is funny that so many engineers in the valley argued that (1) was essential for tech companies, and at the same time bash FB and Zuckerberg's potentially forward looking (but unprofitable for a long time) bet (2) on the metaverse. Some bean counters would never do that, and they basically want the bean counters to control FB instead of Zuckerberg.

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what all those people are actually doing. That seems so heavy a head count for the public end result. Is there a break down somewhere of how many are SWE vs SRE vs support?

Meta doesn't use SREs. There is a position called Production Engineer[1] which has the same skills and does almost the same work as a SWE, but has different focus - scalability, reliability, security, automation. The ballpark ratio is 10 SWE to 1 PE. [1] - https://engineering.fb.com/category/production-engineering/

PE and SWE are't even remotely close in the pecking order at Meta. Also, the interview loops were slightly different for PE based on whether the candidate came from a SWE background or a systems background.

I'm a former Meta PE who reinterviewed internally as a SWE and then left because I was told that I'd have to move countries to finalize the conversion (because my location was a non-SWE site).

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the whole question with FB stock is whether you believe the Metaverse stuff will pay off. I give them worse than even odds, but better than a 10% chance, to be the ones who get it right.

They don't necessarily have to get it right. They just have to be geared up enough to fast follow whoever does get it right, or be an enticing M&A partner. My bellwether is how they respond to TikTok. Now with all that said, I think there's a snowball's chance in hell that VR headsets become as ubiquitous as cell phones. It won't happen until AR. It's like TiVo and Netflix.

> or be an enticing M&A partner

This is probably out of the cards for a generation. (At least in the U.S. and EU.) What Facebook fights with, they'll have to build on their own, a handicap not shared by their peers.

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#138

"Headcount was 83,553 as of June 30, 2022, an increase of 32% year-over-year." Like ... why? They hired 20 000 employees net in a year? And Zuckerberg now somehow says that they need to tighten the belt?

I suspect a few reasons, some of which are shared by all of the tech companies that over-hired: - Prestige. There are a lot of companies (especially VC funded startups) that have massively over-hired because a large headcount of high-end engineers is a signal to the market (and importantly, VCs) as to your seriousness. - Talent denial to competitors. If you don't want anyone to catch up in a space (say, VR) you can g…

I think another part of it is actually related to how you retain people, the more people you have the more they want to feel they can advance which is made easier by giving more and more people chances to build teams and from there to expand it to ever more specific niches

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#139
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing to 2021 can be misleading because the Covid year was a strange anomaly for digital businesses. That kind of profits may be a long way off for most of them. Meta's operating income (i.e. profit before taxes and interest basically) for this past quarter was $8.3 billion. That's roughly the same as Exxon did in its Q1. "Au revoir" seems premature when they're still raking in that much cash.

Also, they run three of the top five most used applications in the world. I love how people keep saying Facebook is dying, yet TikTok still doesn't have as many active users as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. The only application that does is YouTube.

TikTok is the most used app. It has more users than Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. It doesn't have as many users as the sum of the user totals of the three big Meta apps, but WhatsApp users aren't really monetizable, and there is a lot of overlap between FB users and Insta users now.

Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results

#140

"Headcount was 83,553 as of June 30, 2022, an increase of 32% year-over-year." Like ... why? They hired 20 000 employees net in a year? And Zuckerberg now somehow says that they need to tighten the belt?

Thinking they had an aggressive hiring for metaverse

Had a quick check of each q2 report, no figures in 2016

2017 20,658 43% yoy

2018 30,275 47%

2019 39,651 31%

2020 52,534 32%

2021 63,404 21%

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