Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 923 posts

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

#171

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

matchbok3 wrote: post #120
sdevonoes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think? The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The…

Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense. Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?

> profitable work for a set of people

I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.

Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.

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

#172

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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.

This is in addition to performance cutting just fyi. I get what you're saying but this isn't that

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

#173

Post by doublerabbit »

oxag3n wrote: post #118

Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live. It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.

> just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.

I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in? erlang, tcl and perl?

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

#174

Post by marcosdumay »

testing22321 wrote: post #149
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…

> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards. To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very q…

They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.

That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.

That said, IMO they are right...

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

#175

Post by autaut »

matchbok3 wrote: post #120
sdevonoes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think? The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The…

Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense. Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?

First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.

Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees

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

#176

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

matchbok3 wrote: post #120
sdevonoes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think? The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The…

Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense. Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?

Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.

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

#177

Post by tasuki »

mr_toad wrote: post #100
rishabhaiover wrote: post #34

I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.

> With time, their intentions have become much more clear Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties

Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!

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

#178

Post by aprilthird2021 »

ghaff wrote: post #142
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here

The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.

I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.

Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?

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

#179

Post by marcosdumay »

rbanffy wrote: post #137

Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves. Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.

They are probably reacting to the general economy.

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

#180

Post by lamasery »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #46
krapp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into. One might almost say workers should... own the means of production?

Workplace democracy would work better than democracy does anywhere else? And, of course, every tech worker already has a vote. As the saying goes: they can vote with their feet.

It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.
Post reply on HN