Why would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.
Because they offer an attractive job/package relative to other opportunities... same as any other job people take.
Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
561–570 of 923 posts
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#562Earlier 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.
I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.
Meta was over hiring engineers from about 2015, if we're being honest.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas. But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find n…
> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.
Within 18 months I was unemployed.
There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.
But it all came back, and more.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl... There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography. Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China. Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#565Earlier 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 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it. Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs. Different scenarios
The only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need? I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.…
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#567If there's a number given, the reason is secondary.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.
Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!
That is one of my huge complaints about the current levels of AI investments. You can do pretty much anything you want if you got $150B to spend, and then you go burn it on being uncompetitive in the AI space. Then you have the $80B Metas Reality Labs spend on a failed virtual reality and a pair of Ray-Bans.
It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#569Earlier 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
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?
Lots of things, but he then chucked all the profits at a stupid idea that he even renamed the company for.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd li…
Meta basically "pivoted." The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot. That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.