Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#171

Post by yobbo » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

roncesvalles wrote: post #158

pavlov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring graduates at $200k is a major part of where the money goes when you’re spending billions on unprofitable software projects.

It could very well be that they didn't pay enough . My hypothesis for why tech pays so well is because success depends very heavily on the quality of the talent, and a few people can be the difference between billions of dollars in lost money vs. a machine that makes billions of dollars in annual recurring income. It's hard to claim that a project failed because its budget was too big.

Income = Revenue - Expenses

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#172

Post by pembrook » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).

Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.

Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:

- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution

- A microprocessor and component design business

- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each

- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more

- a film & tv production business

- a massive physical retail store footprint

- a global e-commerce store

- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#173

Post by djohnston » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #118

They going to carry that culture into any new company they go. You can already feel the likes of discord getting dark patterned, ABtested and starting to die. Sorry to say it, but no matter the skill, if you worked at FB, you might not actually be a culture fit for many companys, who want to grow beyond local minima.

Are you indeed sorry to say it?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#174

Post by yaseer » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

pyb wrote: post #161

The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. 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 i…

It's interesting to see how Big Tech firms can struggle with innovation as they scale, but perhaps for different reasons.

Facebook has lacked innovation for quite a while, first relying on acquisitions, then brazenly copying other social media company innovations (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok)

Google innovates, then seems to give up on products way too early. It's almost as if their management culture has forgotten that new products need iteration.

Amazon, to their credit, have managed to innovate better than these two (e.g. AWS, Kindle, Alexa devices). They started off as a book store, yet somehow became a Tech conglomerate.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#175

Post by rightbyte » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:24 AM UTC

therusskiy wrote: post #148

With everyone criticizing Facebook for bad it is for society, are there examples of Social Networks that you think do good?

Most physical ones I guess?

Many online forums are kinda social networks.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#176

Post by marban » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:26 AM UTC

fortylove wrote: post #30

Seeing giants fall like this, where they achieve the highest peaks imaginable, but then struggle to find the next thing that is suitably big enough to satisfy expectations makes me never want to reach mega success status if I ever start a startup.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#177

Post by mjburgess » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:27 AM UTC

pyb wrote: post #161

The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. 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 i…

This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence.

As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the very worst programmers: in that sense of programming Peter-Naur called "theory building". An activity which is perhaps the most comprehensively demanding on the intellect. Not rehearsing the techniques and solutions of others, but innovating oneself in the face of ambiguity and ill-posed problems.

Perhaps the worst sin of IQ-test-like processes is that they use questions with answers to test intelligence -- which if it is anything at all, is what one uses in the face of the lack of questions with answers.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#178

Post by matwood » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

username_my1 wrote: post #19

jstx1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market could only sustain $150,000 a year salaries for grads fresh out of college for so long before someone somewhere along the way ran out of money. It seems a bit arbirtrary to pick high salaries as the reason for it. And to not blame spending billions on unprofitable projects like the metaverse, or having their profits affected by Apple's restrictions on tracking, or the steady decline in user experience. o…

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

The strategic mistake with the metaverse was the size of the investment, and going all in while appearing to ignore the rest of the business.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#179

Post by marban » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:29 AM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #172

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…

Adobe, on the other hand, with its ~26k headcount is juggling an astonishing range of products and services it seems.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#180

Post by matwood » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 10:34 AM UTC

rapsey wrote: post #33

noncoml wrote: post #3

Maybe Zuck should put himself on PIP as it’s obvious he needs support. He had a money printing machine and managed to fuck it up.

It is still printing money though.

Yep. FB has issues, but people are dancing on its grave a little too early.