What happened to the metaverse ?I suspect maybe wasting all the resource wasn’t a good idea
The whole concept just didn't have any legs.
Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
611–620 of 923 posts
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#612This 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.
In other words: Nothing has changed.
Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.
"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.
But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”
What is this from?
I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#616Earlier 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
> Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
1 employee doing the work of 3 is I think is a stretch
but 1 employee doing the work of 1.1 employees from a year ago I think is almost certainly true - at least, me and everyone i work with is _at least_ 10% more productive, and using AI extensively
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[dead]
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#618Why would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.
Facilitates legal immigration. At least that was my case (not at Meta thankfully).
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#619Earlier 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…
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…
> In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere
I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what does it mean, concretely? What repercussions will he personally suffer?
People will snark him 30% harder for a week. I dunno what you expect, everyone wants to avoid the negative consequences of their actions, should we be surprised that the rich and powerful can actually do it?
No one is surprised, but why shouldn't it be called out and ridiculed as fake accountability and moral theater.