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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

#631

Post by nervousvarun »

alexjplant wrote: post #507
dlev_pika wrote: post #274

Is this what Zuck meant when he said he “takes full responsibility” for spending 80 billion in the wrong direction?

I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it. > Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus…

All true...been a huge fan since it originally aired. I was about the same age as the characters and doing the same work and got all the references and loved every minute of that show but looking back now overall I only feel regret for not buying BC when I saw this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU

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

#632

Post by phantom784 »

Ekaros wrote: post #527
sidcool wrote: post #451

Why would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.

Making it 2-5 years there sounds like reasonable pile of money. And I don't think getting fired in one of these big layoff rounds is too big black mark.

I've not worked at Meta, but I was at a similar scale of company for 2 years before being let go. Once you factor in RSUs, they essentially paid double what I've ever made anywhere else. Knowing how volatile those sorts of positions can be, I just saved & invested all the extra, which worked out quite well.

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

#633

Post by bux93 »

culi wrote: post #470
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…

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

Firing 10% every year is just good old Jack Welsh-style workforce intimidation.

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

#634

Post by oytis »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #596
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

Pretty sure it has for coding

Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.

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

#635

Post by SJMG »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #579
fevangelou wrote: post #560

Firing 10% of their workforce on the one hand. Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other. Get fired or get tracked. Well, isn't that convenient...

Introducing the tracking in such a public manner is probably a way to drive voluntary redundancies as it encourages people to leave.

This is my thought as well. Fewer severance packages.

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

#636

Post by joe_mamba »

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.

>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.

Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.

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

#637

Post by subpixel »

muragekibicho wrote: post #629
postexitus wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.

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

#638

Post by subpixel »

philipnee wrote: post #461
wjeje wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s go another step further! The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title. Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.

i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed. honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.

Stealing an idea is different from lying to people in order to steal their actual business, which is more like what Zuckerberg did.

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

#639

Post by compounding_it »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #505
wisty wrote: post #472

Earlier 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…

> notable exception of Apple

I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.

For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.

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

#640

Post by Twey »

muragekibicho wrote: post #629
postexitus wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And WhatsApp and Instagram were acquisitions, not creations.
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