Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue this is more a result of the defeat of Xerxes at Thermopylae.
Xerxes had a victory at Thermopylae
You say po-ta-to, I say po-tat-o!
2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
141–150 of 164 posts
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
No what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.
It's baffling that with current iteration of hype mania all of the lessons about metrics were thrown out of the window. Goodhart's law anyone? All of a sudden all of the terrible, horrifying methods of measuring lines of code, commits, tasks etc. resurfaced, like world was hit with an amnesia meteor.
You sweet, innocent child.
Managers understand that metrics are meaningless. The idea is to have something to point at to scare engineers into jumping higher.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the company is spending $100k to employ you, you need to deliver $103.8k/year of value.
Again you assume a year delay on a workers full salary before the company gets compensated. Cash flow rarely works like that. Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs, so uber doesn’t need an account with a full years salary for every driver somewhere at the start of the year. Get paid before the…
Do you see the broader point I'm making, which is that non-zero interest rates means delivering value isn't enough anymore?
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you advise making it so they can't fire you?
Not OP, and nothing makes it impossible, but from my experience in big companies, being visible is way more useful than being productive. I got further faster by just answering emails right away than by churning out code. I got constant kudos, which got me promoted, and invited to more meetings, which led to less actual work. All because I just started replying to emails sent to our group. In retrospect it feels pret…
Having worked in a very large company for the past two decades now, one of the best career advices I ever got is about how you measure if you are a „good employee“.
It is very simple: you are a good employee if your boss(es) think you are.
That’s it. Nothing else matters in terms of career advancement or retainment.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but youre just talking about semantics here. When Mark asks himself "have we been successful" your definition of success is irrelevant. If the lay offs were because of the company had no successes as the OP posits you have to reason from the decision makers definition of success.
Is your baromiter of success the acquisition of cash?
> Is your baromiter of success the acquisition of cash?
Who cares? In the context of layoffs, it's the definition the company uses that matters.
Your definition of success has no bearing on whether the company is going to do layoffs or not. The company's definition does.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
It's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.
Maybe the sycophantic behavior of AI models comes from rich people having them build to behave the same as their personal yes-men. A person accustomed to never hearing "no" won't like a machine that tells them off.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
also just another clear ripoff. they copy, they acquire, but they cannot seem to innovate.
Meta seem fairly innovative. Their r&d labs seem to produce some really cool things. The basic issue is none of it seems to be making any money when it ends up in products and services. Main reason there seems to be that their walled garden approach is tolerated at best. They just aren't very good at it outside of a feed.
Some things that Meta shares or opensources is discrete but amazing. lz4 and zstd and Yann Collet's work. io_uring (don't know if Jens Axboe is still there). And the open timecard projects, and overall OCP work.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
I am not huge fan of Meta but I wouldn't dismiss them quite so much. I think reels is probably doing pretty well, and despite being cringeworthy FB itself is still going very strong. There are a lot of behind the scenes AI work improving their ads.
There are absolutely a lot of high profile failures though, with the metaverse being #1 (along with the name change to boot!)
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#149From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place. I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse. If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the…
The duct tape people are generally drowning under all the work they're doing, and they'd be fine to keep doing other productive stuff.
There's always going to be duct tape stuff around, and you don't want the people who can actually fix widgets to wind up running around with their hair on fire applying duct tape to keep it running without any time to fix widgets.
And when there's too much duct tape jobs going around the widget fixers may take a look at it all and decide they don't get want to get stuck with applying duct tape once all the duct tape appliers are fired, so they just skip to some other job.
You're always going to have some duct tape.
Re: 2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March
#150META rumoured to be purging by Tuesday. Calls locked in.
Is that the only reason they announced it early?