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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

#401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind) They never became anything more than the ad company

Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?

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

#402
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are. I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future. To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.

yeah, these big layoffs don't add up to me right now.

if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?

making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?

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

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone. Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China. Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovat…

You heard it here first, Zuck and his peers are brave generals in the battle against the Y...Chinese Peril and we are all...cannon fodder, I guess.

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought that Meta has in any way benefitted society is objectively insane.

Literally billions of people would disagree with you. The arrogance displayed here is astounding. And this is coming from someone who doesn't like FB or Zuck.

>The arrogance displayed here is astounding.

Projecting much?

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

#405
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind) They never became anything more than the ad company

The transition to mobile-first was a good call. Probably the last good call though. Oh, and buying Instagram.

And WhatsApp. And the VR glasses seem to be a success.

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

#406
post #380
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.

Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.

Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though

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

#407
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.

Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight. Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.

> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.

This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?

> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.

Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.

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

#408

I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.

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…

> A certain large company

Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

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

#409
post #255

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.

Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.

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

#410
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…

> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.

Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.

I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.

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