Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#311

Post by FooBarBizBazz » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

theginger wrote: post #80

protastus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting laid off and getting fired are different things.

The law (in many places) gives protection to workers being laid off which it doesn't give to those being fired for inadequate performance. But when a company can change a target value and huge number of people are fired instead of being laid off people need to push back.

Is it any surprise, when the law creates an incentive like this for constructive dismissal, that constructive dismissal becomes the standard practice (even if it is supposed to be illegal)?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#312

Post by wa_throwaway » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 3:59 PM UTC

ak_111 wrote: post #294

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).

> And the app doesn't look like it changed that much...

You didn't intend it, but that is a complement of the highest order. Thanks!

Those who've worked on large systems over many years will understand what I mean.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#313

Post by jollyllama » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:02 PM UTC

hellojesus wrote: post #280

jollyllama wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.

I figured this was done purposely to drive users to native apps, where more device data could be collected than could be through a standard browser.

You're probably right. Now management can reap the reward of sic'ing thousands of engineers on data collection rather than fixing the deficiencies in their product. Too bad for the engineers, though.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#314

Post by avisser » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

pyb wrote: post #233

mjburgess wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…

There's adverse selection at play in FAANG hiring, but I think it goes like this : any ambitious engineer would wants to "make a dent in the universe" is never going to spend months studying LC, system design, or whatever to get into these places. Not only do they prefer building actual projects on evening and weekends ; but they know their time at FAANG would be wasted anyway. In 2022, few people go to big tech beca…

If you want to make a dent, you work somewhere else, build something great, then get bought by FAANG.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#315

Post by spaceman_2020 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #235

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries here in India shot up 100-200%. 35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. All the while their companies remained unprofitable. Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.

>>35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. Indian here and can confirm. This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India. Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars. Software on the ot…

> Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors.

My uncle is one of the leading lung specialists in the country. When Covid happened, his expertise was crucial in setting up the processes and best practices for dealing with everything from patient isolation to treatment protocols.

It was because of hundreds of doctors like him that literally millions of lived were saved.

do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#316

Post by snotrockets » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:09 PM UTC

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #265

tarsinge wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1]. [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2022/09/10/why-apple...

iMessage has a lot of users if you count people with iphones who very occasionally try to send a text but end up using iMessage. I count as one but it still is completely irrelevant to me. WhatsApp is where everything interesting is.

there's still infrastructure in place to support you. there's a cost per user and cost per message, and you contributing to the former even if not to the latter.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Post by clpm4j » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:11 PM UTC

happymellon wrote: post #279

e-clinton wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rephrase as “In the US, only iMessage is relevant”

Which is surprising considering how bad it is.

In what way is iMessage bad? It works amazingly well from my perspective.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Post by spaceman_2020 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #310

bluedino wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why so many Indians move to the US to work as doctors.

After moving to US they still resent software people. It's not just money. They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people[due to their degree requiring long and expensive academic training] compared to engineers in general. Which isn't true. And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel ins…

I reckon a part of this is the relatively relaxed learning curve to coding (not software engineering). As someone who taught himself how to code last year, I can tell you that it wasn’t particularly challenging to put together a product that the average lay person would call “software/app”. So much of the work has been abstracted away by actual engineers.

I can imagine how someone who doesn’t understand the complexity involved in scaling software or managing millions of users would think of coding as “easy money”.

Its certainly much easier to make money quickly - you can go from a complete newbie to a fairly well paid frontend dev in under 2 years. A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#319

Post by lm28469 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

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

> I’m not an expert at how facebook diversifies its income

It's virtually all ads revenue, something like 97% of their revenues is from advertising

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#320

Post by bluedino » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #310

bluedino wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that's why so many Indians move to the US to work as doctors.

After moving to US they still resent software people. It's not just money. They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people[due to their degree requiring long and expensive academic training] compared to engineers in general. Which isn't true. And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel ins…

> They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people

Are they aware of, or perpetuate the stereotype of the CS/IT student who memorizes braindumps to pass certification exams or post simple homework questions online or on StackOverflow, asking others to do the work for them?

As an aside, I work with a lot of engineers/PhD researcher types who think they are the smartest, nothing could ever be their fault, their systems etc are fine and it must be something simple that some other idiot messed up...