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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#581

Post by jrochkind1 »

nelsonic wrote: post #554

Facebook ("Meta") made $46.7 Billion in Profit in 2021. They have $42 Billion in cash. If the average engineer is paid $150k then these 11k people would cost the company 150,000 x 11,000 = 1,650,000,000 ($1.6 Billion/year) Mark Zuckerberg could _easily_ afford to keep these people employed and focus their efforts towards improving the safety of the platform e.g: stopping Human Trafficking, Drug Dealing and Child Abus…

When doing "how much staff costs" calculations, you typically have to add on ~30-50% on top of salary for employer's share of taxes, and benefits (health insurance in USA is very non-trivial), and other assorted overhead.

But your point stands.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#582

Post by jbverschoor »

roflyear wrote: post #426
hbn wrote: post #420

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable. Literally how could that acceleration be p…

FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people. Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful. Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous! Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ…

Small companies don't pay over 200k + perks for someone who just graduated

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#583

Post by nottorp »

kadomony wrote: post #382
ericd wrote: post #284

Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.

I mean, the "world-changing" stuff they're investing in is what directly led to this layoff. The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.

What's that metaverse? Never been able to figure it out.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#584

Post by [deleted] »

cnees wrote: post #455

"We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas [like] our long-term vision for the metaverse" Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.

[deleted]

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#585

Post by rjh29 »

buggythebug wrote: post #334

As a non-tech guy who follows the tech scene: 87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous. These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same. Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to "do good" after.

They managed with 7,000 in 2013. But a lot of things changed.

To continue to grow they needed to buy Facebook and Instagram. They scaled up their infrastructure - lots of system administrators. They needed more sales people and corporate campaign managers to get advertising in. More moderation, because governments started passing internet content laws. Spam detection. Customer support. Automated content blocking. More legal teams, because they are constantly under legal attack. Don't forget all these laws and what is acceptable or not changes by country - so they need a team in every country to handle that. Then there's VR, Meta AI, the 'Metaverse', and their whole R&D division.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#586

Post by FartyMcFarter »

sagebird wrote: post #395

While many are commenting that these layoffs are sensible given the situation, I am fearful that laying off approximately 13% of Meta employees will lead to a less connected world. I don’t think people fully understand the magnitude of step-backwards it will be in terms of people connecting in this world. Does Zuckerberg take responsibility for what this will mean to people who simply need to connect more through gre…

If this was sarcasm, well done :)

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#587

Post by hindsightbias »

tootie wrote: post #299
eschneider wrote: post #146

I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.

This is going to be a repeat of 2000, not 2008. There's seemingly no contagion and no secular stagnation. This is just unwinding of the cheap money era that flowed overwhelmingly into SV. You'll see a cooling off of red hot compensation, a lot of failed startups that no one ever understood and the ongoing crypto crash. This may end up being enough to trigger a mild recession.

You'd almost think cities and metropolitan areas are being thoughtful when avoiding the demands from those following the latest gold rush. But surely, that would be an unpopular opinion around here.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#588

Post by fredgrott »

I have a question...

If we assume that during the last 20 to 30 years that there has been no gain in actual real production efficiency increases(real reason for inequality is non-investments in actual production efficiencies by VCs and hedge funds); where is the call to re-align in VCs and hedge funds to investing in production efficiencies directly (I say directly as investing in climate green energy is an indirect production efficiency play)?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#589

Post by klenwell »

cnees wrote: post #455

"We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas [like] our long-term vision for the metaverse" Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.

I detest the Meta metaverse as much as the next Hacker News user. But there is one use case where I could see it luring me in. Virtual meetings. Really virtual social events or happy hours. Professional ones mainly with my remote distributed team. This would be the killer app in my view.

The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!

Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#590

Post by ThinkBeat »

What is the composition of roles that are getting fired? I naturally tend to think about programmers but Meta (and the other big tech companies that have had big firings) have roles all over the place

Are they mostly getting rid of programmers?

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