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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

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

#321

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

JeremyNT wrote: post #73
swader999 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.

Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding. AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility. Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.

The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.

For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."

I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.

But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.

Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.

And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.

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

#323

Post by wolvoleo »

matchbok3 wrote: post #59
trjordan wrote: post #20

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury…

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?

> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.

I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.

Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.

I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.

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

#324

Post by pembrook »

mpweiher wrote: post #270
pembrook wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature. I wonder if that's still the case.

It was less true when I was there more recently.

But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.

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

#325

Post by doublerabbit »

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…

Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.

Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.

You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.

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

#326

Post by hintymad »

jeffbee wrote: post #235
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…

Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.

There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.

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

#327

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.

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

#329

Post by HoldOnAMinute »

killingtime74 wrote: post #228
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…

It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.

I would not have wasted my time and yours if Bon Appetit was running it.

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

#330

Post by jballanc »

pembrook wrote: post #294
snitty wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple also has an entire international retail arm.

And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution. The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use c…

It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
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