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Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

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Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#61

Post by snotrockets »

buscoquadnary wrote: post #4

It is sad but also was inevitable. The market could only sustain $150,000 a year salaries for grads fresh out of college for so long before someone somewhere along the way ran out of money. With rates going up there are places besides tech people can hope to park their money, the VC funding is going to disappear and with it some of the distortion of the market for developers. Just a reminder though this happened befo…

If I’m doing the math right, revenue is slightly more than $1,400,000 per employee. If at all, $150k is underpaying employees.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#62

Post by randomdata »

jstx1 wrote: post #47
epicureanideal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments... But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool. And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first parag…

I get the desire to look down on leetcode or on Facebook generally but do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They have billions of customers using their products all the time. This isn't done by useless people who know only LC and office politics. They have to solve technical problems that most other software engineers don't even know exist. Havin…

> do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers?

They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#63

Post by ZephyrBlu »

fny wrote: post #56
randomsearch wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 000 people out of 58 000 is “not a big deal”? It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided. Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.

They literally went on a hiring binge from 2020-2021, so... in my opinion, yes. Sure there's bleak outlook, but you have no idea how many people I know from different companies who jumped ship from some 2nd-3rd tier co to work for the big five or Zoom-like start up during COVID. Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than…

Exactly. A lot of people got a free lunch in the past couple of years because FAANG hiring (And the rest of the tech sector) went absolutely bonkers.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#64

Post by gamjQZnHT53AMa »

bayraktar wrote: post #58
louistsi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.

It could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. Right - it's actually far worse than outright firing or laying off people. As in, genuinely harmful to people from a psychological (and hence physical) point of view. All so the company can save a few dollars, and hit certain quarterly targets a bit sooner. That's why there's a name…

Sounds like you're suggesting to him that he gets himself put on the "managed out" list. I get your point completely, and agree with it to an extent. But if I put myself in that position, what would I do? I'd like to think I'd take the honorable approach you suggested, but I've also got bills to pay, kids to support, plans I want to achieve. Getting myself "managed out" at the expense of all of those things would be hugely problematic.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#65

Post by rajman187 »

randomsearch wrote: post #52
rajman187 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RealityLabs is a $10billion initiative with only about $2 in revenue (Quest 2 headsets come from here). RealityLabs Research is a large component and indeed the major R&D investment. This was spun out during the 2021Q4 earnings call when the different sectors of the company were reported separately for the first time, following the name change to Meta.

Think the OP is say - over the long term not since the recent somewhat desperate pivot. Similar to sibling comments: copying your competitors is not R&D, and neither is building a software library that’s an incremental improvement on an existing OSS library.

RL has been there since 2019 [1]. Aside from the previously-mentioned (and not necessarily incremental) React, CassandraDB, PyTorch, etc there is work in terms of egocentric data which is far larger than existing datasets [2], even more fundamental research related to mathematical optimization [3], and of course FAIR (used to be Facebook AI Research), which is now part of RL-R, who recently published work on language models [4].

It’s not all that well advertised but there is a lot of research that gets open-sourced so it’s a bit (understandably) naive to call it copied or incremental work.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs

[2] https://about.meta.com/realitylabs/projectaria/

[3] https://github.com/facebookresearch/baspacho

[4] https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#66

Post by d1sxeyes »

sideshowb wrote: post #38
ohgodplsno wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"managing out" This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.

It genuinely sounds like a synonym for "constructive dismissal". Makes me wonder how they avoid being sued ?

In the US, there's no federal law on constructive dismissal so there are variations, however, generally, constructive dismissal is not always the same as unfair dismissal, although we most often hear the term come up in conversations about an unfair constructive dismissal.

There are also a significant number of ways you can 'manage someone out' which are not any more 'constructive dismissal' than 'quiet quitting' is 'constructive resignation'.

For example, reducing flexibility in things like lateness policies, shift swaps, holidays, etc. is likely to be unpopular, but as long as it's applied fairly across all employees, would not likely be found as unfair, but may well result in people quitting.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#67

Post by paxys »

Firing low performers isn't a layoff. Several major companies like Amazon do this every 6-12 months, and it doesn't exactly make the news. While 15% might be extreme (and there's no reason to believe that will be the actual number) I don't think anyone can argue that Facebook has a LOT of fat that they can trim without material impact to any of their projects. Same goes for every other large company (Google for example) that has been overhiring for many years now and pretty much never fires people outside of the most extreme cases.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#68

Post by whoooooo123 »

A contact of mine who works for Meta says that this has been coming for a long time and no-one is surprised. They're also rescinding internship offers (now THAT'S shitty) and freezing hiring.

Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time.

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#69

Post by gsatic »

jmathai wrote: post #27
noncoml wrote: post #3

Maybe Zuck should put himself on PIP as it’s obvious he needs support. He had a money printing machine and managed to fuck it up.

I worked at Yahoo! when the company offered to acquire Facebook for $1.4 billion. Most thought Zuck was a fool to pass on that. He 300x’d it in 10 years.

He is still a fool. He says he wakes up everyday felling like he is getting punched in the stomach. What more proof do you need?

Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees

#70

Post by Jorengarenar »

mhoad wrote: post #60
jmathai wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Yahoo! when the company offered to acquire Facebook for $1.4 billion. Most thought Zuck was a fool to pass on that. He 300x’d it in 10 years.

And just think all it took was a couple of genocides, breaking society and becoming one of the most despised people in the world.

Genocides?
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