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Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#31

Post by epicureanideal »

gregjor wrote: post #25
onion2k wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I agree.

Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments...

But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool.

And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#32

Post by fortylove »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #28
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.

AKA "unregretted attrition"

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#34

Post by norman784 »

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.

A bit off topic but it has to do with R&D, how twitter invest almost 2B in R&D and there are no visible new features with that investment (well this year it seems that they started to add new features, but they doesn't worth 2B, edit tweet, I saw something with gifs?). I'm not a twitter user, so I cannot 100% sure but to me it sees like the same twitter back en 2010 or 2012 (when I first used twitter.

So my questions, is the R&D money invested to keep engineers happy? I mean they can for sure experiment there without any worries.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#35

Post by louistsi »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #28
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.

Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#36

Post by abdabab »

gregjor wrote: post #25
onion2k wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> "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 "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?

See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that.

Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#37

Post by Liquix »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #28
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.

Firing means press attention, severance packages, and accountability. None of these are desired by the business. It is absolutely malicious.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#38

Post by sideshowb »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #28
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.

It genuinely sounds like a synonym for "constructive dismissal".

Makes me wonder how they avoid being sued ?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#39

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

bushbaba wrote: post #15
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.

Google has been trying to diversify for over a decade. They are still mostly an ads company.

And they are doing everything they can to remain such. They have established themselves a reputation of a company which is shutting down services left and right, so it makes very little sense now too try any of their new offerings.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#40

Post by Double_a_92 »

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).

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