Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by jiggawatts » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.

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

#262

Post by Macha » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:33 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.

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

#263

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #254

dnnddidiej wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?

"couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks"

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by midtake » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

Don't worry, these CRUD app software artisans will land on their feet somewhere.

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

#265

Post by pembrook » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).

Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.

Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.

Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.

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

#266

Post by hintymad » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.

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

#267

Post by screye » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

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

#268

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

mrbombastic wrote: post #150

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saturdays are communist. Sundays are far-right.

What do i have to be to get Fridays too?

You can get one Good Friday a year if you live in a country that treats it as bank holiday, or is Catholic enough that it's effectively a day off, even if not an official one.

You can get extra Fridays off if you move to a country with bank holidays that tend to land on Fridays, which is correlated with history of either communism or organized religion (much like the weekend).

But, if you want every Friday off, your best bet is to embrace hyper-capitalism and worm your way money so you can have four-day work week.

(Easier to achieve than the legendary four-hour work week anyway.)

TL;DR: the more opposing ideologies you can simultaneously hold, the more days off in a week you're morally entitled to :).

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

#269

Post by oytis » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

rsanek wrote: post #255

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

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

#270

Post by mpweiher » Thu, Apr 23, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #243

pipes wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing spe…

> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.

Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.

I wonder if that's still the case.