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

281–290 of 923 posts

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

#281

Post by snitty »

disillusioned wrote: post #275
rsanek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison. Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supe…

Apple also has an entire international retail arm.

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

#282

Post by dnnddidiej »

mediaman wrote: post #272
dnnddidiej wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.

I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.

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

#283

Post by idontwantthis »

Waterluvian wrote: post #239
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. T…

“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”

What is this from?

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

#284

Post by therobots927 »

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…

You’re painting with a pretty broad brush there.

“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”

If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.

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

#285

Post by pbreit »

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.

"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"

That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.

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

#286

Post by dlev_pika »

ardit33 wrote: post #160

I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there. I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rati…

It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.

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

#287

Post by Sol- »

lamasery wrote: post #112
matchbok3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign. To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps…

People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.

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

#288

Post by coldtea »

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 about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.

So? They likely already had too many in 2021.

>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.

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

#289

Post by cft »

jldugger wrote: post #155
booleandilemma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend…

There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.

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

#290

Post by lenerdenator »

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…

Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.

Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.

Mark needs to be shown the door.

Oh wait.

Mark's on the board.

And he has majority voting power.

... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.

Post reply on HN