Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#341

Post by skyyler » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

c-cube wrote: post #329

skyyler wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see what you're getting at here but in this case, a lack of changes is NOT desired or virtuous. WA is being left in the dust by messaging platforms that actually care about shipping a quality product.

Says you. Lots of people like software that keeps working reliably over the years. I know I do. The only valuable updates to WhatsApp are when new emojis are added ;). For the rest it already works very well, why break it or redesign it?

Indeed, says me. I've never used whatsapp and I probably never will.

Other messaging apps introduce new features, like inline bots and the ability to not share your phone number to everyone you talk to.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#342

Post by osti » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

yolovoe wrote: post #297

masterof0 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not parent but can confirm vpc dataplane team is pretty good. Wouldn't want to work on control plane stuff though.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#343

Post by shxdow » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:03 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).

Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people. Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#344

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

jollyllama wrote: post #269

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'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.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#345

Post by masterof0 » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

osti wrote: post #342

yolovoe wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not parent but can confirm vpc dataplane team is pretty good. Wouldn't want to work on control plane stuff though.

Maybe things changed in the last 3-6 months? But from what I have gathered, from people just talking in slack channels, Blind, and friends who work there, is not good at all. People have received emails from L4s having nervous breakdowns after being bullied by managers and peers. If you want , you can search your mailbox.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#346

Post by jfrbfbreudh » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:09 PM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #315

kamaal wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 reall…

Do you think your uncle’s expertise is worth more than the developers in Taiwan who set up the contract tracing system that prevented tens of millions of people from getting COVID?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#347

Post by jcalvinowens » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:10 PM UTC

snotrockets wrote: post #61

buscoquadnary wrote: post #4

It is sad but also was inevitable. The market could only sustain $150,000 a year salaries for grads fresh out of college for so long before someone somewhere along the way ran out of money. With rates going up there are places besides tech people can hope to park their money, the VC funding is going to disappear and with it some of the distortion of the market for developers. Just a reminder though this happened befo…

If I’m doing the math right, revenue is slightly more than $1,400,000 per employee. If at all, $150k is underpaying employees.

Sir, this is capitalism.

I've never understood that viewpoint. It's equivalent to claiming a cashier is underpaid because $7.50/hr is a tiny percentage of the sales that go through their register.

The world doesn't work like that. You're paid based on the cost of replacing you, not the value you deliver.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#348

Post by mechanical_bear » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:20 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.

> Try to send a text but end up using iMessage

iMessage is the default SMS and messaging app on iPhones. It’s what most people use for texting as well as messaging on iPhone.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#349

Post by osti » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:34 PM UTC

masterof0 wrote: post #345

osti wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent but can confirm vpc dataplane team is pretty good. Wouldn't want to work on control plane stuff though.

Maybe things changed in the last 3-6 months? But from what I have gathered, from people just talking in slack channels, Blind, and friends who work there, is not good at all. People have received emails from L4s having nervous breakdowns after being bullied by managers and peers. If you want , you can search your mailbox.

Again not sure if you are talking about dataplane. I met many people there (even many new grad L4s in fact), who are very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do in that team.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#350

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #209

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…

Facebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.

[deleted]