Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by zurfer » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

loeg wrote: post #476

bandrami wrote: post #458

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

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.

salaries are opex, data centers are capex, you can't compare them in the same timeframe.

4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.

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

#592

Post by Barbing » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:09 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #583

aurareturn wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated

I wonder what proportion[1] of knowledge workers believe they have at least one colleague who the business would be better off replacing with software

and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it!

[1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models

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

#593

Post by DanielHB » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:10 AM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #205

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…

I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.

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

#594

Post by byzantinegene » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:11 AM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #366

janalsncm wrote: post #365

I wonder if the quality of YC applications will go up as more engineers find themselves in need of a job. It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.

This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before. I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.…

in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.

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

#595

Post by Yeri » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

zurfer wrote: post #591

loeg wrote: post #476

Earlier 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.

salaries are opex, data centers are capex, you can't compare them in the same timeframe. 4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.

4B over 5 years is still 4B. It's 0.8B/yr

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

#596

Post by DonsDiscountGas » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:18 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #583

aurareturn wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #1 hypothetical? If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees. In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets. Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated

Pretty sure it has for coding

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

#597

Post by DonsDiscountGas » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

wisty wrote: post #472

bandrami wrote: post #458

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

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…

They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.

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

#598

Post by noisy_boy » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

jastuk wrote: post #573

ergocoder wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Are you implying the 10% being fired are all bad workers? What if the house cleaner was not the problem here?

It is irrelevant if the workers did a good job. They are at the service and discretion of the house. The house, i.e. the owner, always remains. Until everything burns down. In case of Meta, pipe-dream, one can only hope.

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

#599

Post by AbbeFaria » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #555

AbbeFaria wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway. Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to ke…

What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability? I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.

In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.

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

#600

Post by pembrook » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 9:35 AM UTC

operatingthetan wrote: post #251

joenot443 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes. > The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 m…

I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.

It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.

If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.

It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.