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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

#131

Post by lamasery »

BurningFrog wrote: post #43
Ancalagon wrote: post #4

Re: > If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad > https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...

It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.

It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.

It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).

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

#132

Post by ineedasername »

trjordan wrote: post #20

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…

It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".

That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.

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

#133

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

jonatron wrote: post #42

I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.

Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.

The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.

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

#134

Post by shimman »

matchbok3 wrote: post #126
BoredPositron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.

Literally not true. Some bets just don't work. If a company tries to enter some new market and fails, they may use a layoff.

"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.

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

#135

Post by swiftcoder »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #70

Everyone at Meta should know the score. Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance. Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers. This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.

> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.

Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.

(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)

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

#138

Post by BoredPositron »

matchbok3 wrote: post #126
BoredPositron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.

Literally not true. Some bets just don't work. If a company tries to enter some new market and fails, they may use a layoff.

Sounds like a strategic mistake.

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

#139

Post by heathrow83829 »

trjordan wrote: post #20

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…

Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.

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

#140

Post by pydry »

Analemma_ wrote: post #102
thewebguyd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months. The domestic jobs aren't coming back.

I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?

>Why is this time different?

The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.

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