Live data from Hacker News

Meta lays off 11,000 people

about.fb.com

321–330 of 1001 posts

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#321

> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionai…

> Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making.

Which eventually leads to complete stagnation and nobody being willing and/or able to make a decision.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#322

> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionai…

What would him taking responsibility in practice look like to you?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#323
post #284

Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.

Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary? if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.

now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#324
post #56

As much as I dislike Meta's practices, this was well handled. Decent severance and support.

I thought so too. They did not have to be so generous.

Depends how you look at it. I think they are well aware of their reputation and probably does not want to make it any worse.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#325
post #32

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO. Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way. If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.

I don't see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day. The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it's been literally weeks since I had one. Lots of companies froze their hiring. The music is stopping, and there's a lot less chairs. Not everyone is going to find a new seat.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#326

Facebook has become the local town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere. Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?

They are indeed investing into groups, but ultimately the marginal gain there is marginal. The metaverse stuff also complements (i.e. it isn't a complete pivoting away from traditional social networking) all of the other connectivity (e.g. imagine a unique and persistent VRChat instance per group; you can have a meta-localverse) but also gives Meta its own platform. Mark is obviously incredibly pissed at the amount of leverage Apple has over him.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#327
post #32

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO. Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

>Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

Well I predict two things:

One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.

Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#328

I'd like to highlight this quote from the statement: > and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected Apple decisions + EU regulations?

Scapegoating. Replace "signal loss" with "TikTok" and "Most of our products suck" and you're a lot closer to the truth.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#329

Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail. Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope tha…

No way. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear. They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan. There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't…

> There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.

TikTok is a Chinese company and is major competition for Facebook

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#330
post #116
post #41

> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://…

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical: "Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history." "Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date." "At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth." "At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-com…

At least the last sentence reminds me of "The hard thing about hard things".
Post reply on HN