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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

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

#621

Post by cheschire »

dbgrman wrote: post #522
culi wrote: post #470

Earlier 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

its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs. There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

More like “we need to lower median salary”

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

#622

Post by steveBK123 »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #517
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?

My observation is mag7 got less picky in hiring.

Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.

And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.

And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.

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

#623

Post by steveBK123 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #616
bandrami wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right I think orgs are unclear how to wield this yet though

In my 20 year career I’ve rarely been on a team with more than 3-5 people on a team or within region on a team.

So at that scale it’s not really reducing a team member on a given team still. But you get more productive which is notoriously hard to measure in SWE, so yeah. It’s possible that translates to iterating faster or closing tickets further down the backlog which is useful but not per-se staff reducing.

Maybe in mag7 where you have massive engineering orgs the 10% can impact a given team more..

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

#624

Post by Planktonne »

matchbok3 wrote: post #384
wolvoleo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place? If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership. I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached. Don't forget…

There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone. Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China. Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovat…

Is Meta innovative?

They make products, sure, but output isn't the same as innovation.

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

#625

Post by AbbeFaria »

mschuster91 wrote: post #614
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…

> 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.

At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.

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

#626

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

gostsamo wrote: post #540
loeg wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're thinking of AWS/Azure/Oracle? Meta isn't selling their compute.

Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity. You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the sam…

These games are far more dangerous to the industry than "AI now = badcode future".

They're a suicidal bet, because they assume cloud LLMs are efficient and inevitable.

Neither of those is true, or even likely, and we're going to see the consequences by the end of the decade.

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

#627

Post by margorczynski »

dbgrman wrote: post #522
culi wrote: post #470

Earlier 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

its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs. There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

I think it is also a matter on how the Meta stock comp works - and that people hired during the slump in stock price became very expensive once it came back up.

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

#628

Post by bnj »

Yeri wrote: post #595
zurfer wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I read it right, the 4B ballpark figure is based on total annual per employee cost of 500k * 8000 employees, so the figure is actually 4B/year. 20B over five years.

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

#629

Post by muragekibicho »

postexitus wrote: post #608
culi wrote: post #470

Earlier 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

Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.

This comment put everything into perspective. I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years.

I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.

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