161–170 of 403 posts
At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller.
(The AI work is one exception)
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Exactly. A lot of people got a free lunch in the past couple of years because FAANG hiring (And the rest of the tech sector) went absolutely bonkers.
Salaries here in India shot up 100-200%. 35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. All the while their companies remained unprofitable. Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.
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> Metaverse could be the next big thing and the long shot facebook needs. I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future. Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reaso…
The headset is the reason why they are doing this in the first place. Nobody expected people to buy a $300 iPhone in 2007 or a $500 iPad in 2011, but when they did they gave Apple money-printing machine that can also bankrupt competitors. Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before…
We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.
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If I’m doing the math right, revenue is slightly more than $1,400,000 per employee. If at all, $150k is underpaying employees.
Yes, the comments pointing out the supposedly too high salaries for tech workers are always hilarious + 150k is really not anything crazy wrt COL in large US cities
Does Facebook spend any sort of money on R&D? I just can't fathom a company that once had a near trillion dollar market cap, not spending any of their resources to try to find their next big revenue stream. They should have been able to pivot to a plan B, (or C,D,E... etc). If you point to their 3d ventures, well, I've never seen it in person, so they are doing a lousy job of marketing it.
A bit off topic but it has to do with R&D, how twitter invest almost 2B in R&D and there are no visible new features with that investment (well this year it seems that they started to add new features, but they doesn't worth 2B, edit tweet, I saw something with gifs?). I'm not a twitter user, so I cannot 100% sure but to me it sees like the same twitter back en 2010 or 2012 (when I first used twitter. So my questions…
From a financial reporting perspective, nearly all engineering costs will be recorded as R&D.
amazon manager here: it's the same with us. our director gave told us to manage out more people this year to hit our revised headcount targets for next year. there are no layoffs, just larger-than-normal targets for managing out people. I talked with friends across various orgs and the targets seem to range between 10% to 25% for different teams (as opposed to 5% for normal years).
"managing out" This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they need out of a job and folks are forced to just look for something better and then announce they're leaving with a 2 week notice.
Ironically, companies spare no expense when it comes to turgid, grinding performance eval exercises but ALWAYS kick honest discussions to the side.
At least facebook, it seems (?), is just cutting a bunch of folks rapidly rather than doing stuff like "managing out". That's better than the typical corporate 2-face behaviors.
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You don't have to like the man but, I think it's pretty clear that running any global social media company is miserable and filled with impossible decisions + people who will hate you no matter what choices you make. It sounds like many social media CEOs would agree that it's like getting punched in the stomach every day
I am worth 1/billion of his net worth and every morning when I wake up I feel like I am getting punched in the stomach.
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Meta verse could be the next big thing and the long shot facebook needs. It just happened that out of their control 1. Apple squeezed them out of ads revenue 2. Market went to shit I hate Facebook as a company but I don’t see them making strategic mistakes…. Everyone is getting fired everywhere
Name one new product that Facebook built from scratch (did not acquire), launched, and made a sustained success of since their original social network. The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate. I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach…
Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.
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"managing out" This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.
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"managing out" This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.