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Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#291

Post by bamboozled »

pembrook wrote: post #172

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…

There was a time when it seemed like Facebook was the world, and like it was unstoppable. They hired a lot of people believing this.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#292

Post by searchableguy »

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

They tried in the past. They used to have a bunch of PAAS and SAAS services which were shut down and open sourced subsequently.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#293

Post by masterof0 »

yolovoe wrote: post #266
l33tc0de wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the Amazon horror stories on blind, I never reply to Amazon recruiters. Amazon's hire-to-fire strategy is now widely known

I work at AWS on EC2. It's really not bad. Very competent coworkers, technical leadership, plenty of principal engineers willing to help... Oncall's tough, and we definitely need more engineers but otherwise, you learn a lot

Lol, ex-Amazonian here, please cut the crap. EC2 is infamous for being one of the worst orgs in all AWS. Nasty stack ranking, abusing SDEs on visas, hiring L4s to fire them later, I personally known at least 3 folks that were let go from EC2 (Vpc) and then got into Google and Apple. Give me a break, there is a reason why recruiters have a hard time filling the headcount over there. And on top of that, ton of legacy code.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#294

Post by ak_111 »

pembrook wrote: post #172

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…

It is more crazy if you remember when they bought whatssapp it was less than 20 employees supporting a billion user.

And the app doesn't look like it changed that much since it started being supported by 10,000 employees (guessing).

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#295

Post by alisonatwork »

Bilal_io wrote: post #263
afpx wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, Amazon has over 13,000 open tech positions: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/tech-roles

I get contacted by Amazon recruiters very often. I either ignore them or say it's not the right time for me.

Two of these bozos contacted me on a personal address that I have never used for anything work-related, but does happen to be the email I have registered as my Amazon shopping account. When I wrote back and told them to stop spamming my personal address that had nothing to do with tech work, they said it wasn't their fault, because they had just bought the email list from someone else who had done the work to cross-reference my personal email address with my professional identity. As if that would give me any more trust in them as a company!? To me it just made me even more resolute never to work at any of those "big tech" outfits. None of them seem to care one bit about people's privacy.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#296

Post by gregjor »

abdabab wrote: post #36
gregjor wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

> "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that. > What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "…

Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice.

I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#297

Post by yolovoe »

masterof0 wrote: post #293
yolovoe wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at AWS on EC2. It's really not bad. Very competent coworkers, technical leadership, plenty of principal engineers willing to help... Oncall's tough, and we definitely need more engineers but otherwise, you learn a lot

Lol, ex-Amazonian here, please cut the crap. EC2 is infamous for being one of the worst orgs in all AWS. Nasty stack ranking, abusing SDEs on visas, hiring L4s to fire them later, I personally known at least 3 folks that were let go from EC2 (Vpc) and then got into Google and Apple. Give me a break, there is a reason why recruiters have a hard time filling the headcount over there. And on top of that, ton of legacy c…

Sad to hear. I agree with legacy code, tho it's not that bad on my team.

When was this? Just to confirm, you're referring to a data plane team and not a control plane team?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#298

Post by madduci »

pembrook wrote: post #172

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…

Many businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business.

Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#299

Post by nisegami »

munchbunny wrote: post #205
votepaunchy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I understand correctly, you are saying that 5-20% of your employees will quit after having a conversation simply noting that he or she will not be receiving a bonus or raise this year, or similar? That’s really quite tenuous, especially in this economy.

It’s not just that. It’s usually a combination of low bonuses/stock rewards, minimal raises, no promotions, uninteresting/less meaningful work, and less effort put into coaching them. Basically all of the stuff managers should be doing normally. If someone’s on the receiving end of all of those things they’ll usually leave sooner or later. Who wouldn’t want to?

Definitely sounds like constructive dismissal to me, but IANAL.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#300

Post by mschuster91 »

neilparikh wrote: post #200
mschuster91 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager that astronomical housing costs are the biggest factor in these absurd salaries, followed by healthcare. In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.

> I'd wager that astronomical housing costs are the biggest factor in these absurd salaries, followed by healthcare. The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are als…

> Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before.

I think it's actually both - when tech companies enter a new town, they tend to hire boatloads of people, placing pressure on local housing markets, and thus raising prices - and landlords or people willing to sell and relocate to take a quick and easy profit know that the new class of people has substantial money to pay.

What I was referring to was stuff like [1] or [2] - investors with no real option to park "dumb money" (aka funds that are structured to invest into low-ish risk markets) have discovered that soaking up residential real estate is a good way to invest that money.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/investors-bought-third-us-ho...

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