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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

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

#531

Post by dcrazy »

autaut wrote: post #435
matchbok3 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have brain poisoning from reading too much slop online. >But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company

That obtained the cutting edge technology by buying an American company that had been founded to productize technology developed at an American defense laboratory based on a Japanese researcher’s work

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

#532

Post by fc417fc802 »

shreyansj wrote: post #342
cloverich wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doctor Rigorous formal education, multiple rigorous exams, then years of shadowing and training. I went through this process, and tech interviews are a breeze by comparison.

I think he meant - what's the interview process for a doctor while switching jobs.

That's presumably what he meant but the response is highly relevant nonetheless. Comparing credentialed and noncredentialed professions is apples to oranges here because the credentialed professions effectively consist of pools of prescreened candidates. Among those, MDs in particular have an absolutely grueling process before they can get started. Imagine if your surgeon (versus backend dev) was proud of being self taught.

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

#533

Post by Nemo_bis »

jldugger wrote: post #155
booleandilemma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend…

You don't need 80k employees to self-host. The Wikimedia Foundation does it with a team of few dozens SREs.

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

#535

Post by michaelt »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #517
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profi…

Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?

Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors.

If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.

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

#536

Post by ergocoder »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #503
wmf wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking responsibility doesn't mean paying people to do nothing.

So what does it mean, concretely? What repercussions will he personally suffer?

If you hire a house cleaner, and the house cleaner doesn't do a good job, would you fire yourself from the house? What repercussions will you personally suffer?

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

#537

Post by gherkinnn »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #250
stuxnet79 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.

This seems a bit ridiculous, that’s only 5-6 years ago. Things change, but the mechanisms and culture isn’t entirely different.

Remind me, was there a major event 5-6 years ago?

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

#538

Post by matwood »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #418
rao-v wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.

> keeping it successful

I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.

I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.

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

#539

Post by matwood »

Spooky23 wrote: post #385
akdev1l wrote: post #373

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

I think it’s hard to not have any kind of boss. There’s nobody to provide the critique needed to improve the products.

> to improve the products.

Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?

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

#540

Post by gostsamo »

loeg wrote: post #523
bandrami wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.

Maybe you're thinking of AWS/Azure/Oracle? Meta isn't selling their compute.

Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.

You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.

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