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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#231

I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.

I've been through 3 lays offs years ago and after the 2nd one I got pretty good at predicting the 3rd. It's basically a cookie cutter approach.

Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#232
post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

I do not believe the statement. Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible. My take would be: * They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity. * They are scared about falling share pri…

>expect to start loosing ad revenue

They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.

But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.

We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#234

IMO the Zuck just gave Elon a lesson on how to be a grownup CEO.

Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.

> Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.

I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).

It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#235
HR is annoying in most of cases. Their job should be (and could be) automated via bots.

My thought is, the reason is most of them lack of logical thinking skills, that's why they're HR in first place ?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#236
post #69

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave… I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR. Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company.

I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.

>Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

That's an interesting idea.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#237
post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended Who predicted this? The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.

>Who predicted this?

Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.

The laptop class genuinely believed we'd never do anything in-person again.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#238
post #116
post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history." "Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date." "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." "At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-com…

well they saw the postive feedback that the Stripe comments got and plagiarised it

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include Stripe, Klarna, Netflix, Uber, Robinhood, Snap, Lyft, etc. tech layoffs in recent months have topped 100,000 now.

Which is about how many people Google itself hired over the course of the Pandemic, for context. So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.

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