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…
Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
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Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
#132I 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.
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
#133I 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
Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
#134On the metaverse question: does anyone seriously believe Facebook can innovate, let alone build a new industry?
Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
#135Earlier 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/
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
#136Look how many people FB has to support their webpage. Insane.
Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
#137Earlier 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.
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…
Re: Meta Reports Second Quarter 2022 Results
#139Earlier 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.
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
2017 20,658 43% yoy
2018 30,275 47%
2019 39,651 31%
2020 52,534 32%
2021 63,404 21%