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

Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

futurism.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 403 posts

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#21

Post by [deleted] »

systemvoltage wrote: post #13
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…

Where does the budget for failed projects go? Server hardware? Think not. They go into paying exorbitant salaries (engineering and marketing).

[deleted]

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#22

Post by akmarinov »

username_my1 wrote: post #14
asciimov wrote: post #11

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.

What?! They built a phone, copied or bought every social media they could, invented lots of tech (DB, react-native…), they’re spending everything on the meta verse That’s why they hired so many people

The tech like RN, GraphQL, doesn’t really bring them any money.

And what is the metaverse really? How is it monetized?

That’s OP’s point, aside from Facebook, everything they have is acquired - Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus.

And even within Instagram, they constantly just copy other apps - Snapchat stories, Tiktok for reels, etc

Facebook can’t have an original idea to save their life

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#23

Post by fny »

Facebook employs over 58K people. This is not a big deal especially considering tech went on a *massive* hiring binge recently.

[0] Facebook had a recruiting crisis in 2021: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...

[1] Facebook aimed to hire 10K Europeans for metaverse in 2021: https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000...

People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#24

Post by jmathai »

robertwt7 wrote: post #17

I’m not an expert at how facebook diversifies its income, but their R&D has produced a lot of insanely good outcome in engineering area. Meta ML, React, React Native, etc, howbare they not building income over these tools? Vercel or laravel seems to be making huge amount of money by building dev tools around their frameworks. Regardless of what they have done, I hope everyone affected is okay

At Facebook’s market cap, vercel and laravel are immaterial in terms of revenue.

It’s very hard for a company of this size to find something to move the needle enough to make a difference.

Look at Google. YouTube is worth $120 billion with a B and it is dwarfed by their ads business.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#25

Post by gregjor »

onion2k wrote: post #7
buscoquadnary wrote: post #4

It is sad but also was inevitable. 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. With rates going up there are places besides tech people can hope to park their money, the VC funding is going to disappear and with it some of the distortion of the market for developers. Just a reminder though this happened befo…

Facebook stopped burning VC money a long time ago. They've been wildly profitable for years. Their success is largely because of paying high salaries to attract some of the best people, not in spite of doing that. The real issue seems to be that they're losing $3bn a quarter building the Metaverse (eg Reality Labs) at the same time as losing ad revenue because of things like Apple's antitracking changes and failing t…

"Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook got fat from advertising and monetizing the worst aspects of social media. Does that require the "best people?" What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#26

Post by fortylove »

tux2bsd wrote: post #16
thrwawayacc wrote: post #12

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).

Quoted post unavailable.

Not a very nice comment. Definitely not a good way to phrase a comment meant at helping develop the best.

FWIW, I think you used a comma instead of a period in your snipe. Would read better as:

>Use proper capitalization or people won't believe "amazon manager here". Well... maybe they will.

Or even:

>Use proper capitalization or people won't believe "amazon manager here"... Well, maybe they will.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#27

Post by jmathai »

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.

I worked at Yahoo! when the company offered to acquire Facebook for $1.4 billion.

Most thought Zuck was a fool to pass on that. He 300x’d it in 10 years.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#28

Post by ohgodplsno »

thrwawayacc wrote: post #12

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.

Post reply on HN