Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 923 posts

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

#661

Post by oblio »

konschubert wrote: post #619
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…

> 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.

1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere.

2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies.

3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.

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

#662

Post by jeremyjh »

hansmayer wrote: post #605
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.

> f 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300% If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some…

> Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex

This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago but it’s absurd now. I’m not going to convince you - but you really should give it a try.

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

#663

Post by oblio »

3form wrote: post #655
Schlagbohrer wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days. I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and t…

Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.

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

#664

Post by oblio »

johnvanommen wrote: post #563
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #524

Earlier 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…

> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles. I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom. Within 18 months I was unemployed. There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA an…

The number of tech employees worldwide in 2026 is probably 2x or more compared to 2001. Maybe even 3x. Things are not the same.

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

#665

Post by lumost »

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…

Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept".

The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.

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

#666

Post by eleventen »

janalsncm wrote: post #60

I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.

If you sort https://layoffs.fyi/ by date, the machine started turning in 2020. But it did indeed kick into high gear in 2022.

This was the big one I remember:

https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-emplo...

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

#667

Post by hansmayer »

jeremyjh wrote: post #662
hansmayer wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> f 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300% If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some…

> Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago but it’s absurd now. I’m not going to convince you - but you really should give it a try.

> but you really should give it a try.

That's cute, I hope you enjoy that high, it's really impressive at first - fyi -I've been using GH Copilot since early days (invited to early access) AND paying it for my entire company ever since MS published the first commercial plan. All the way to the latest entshittification drama with Opus 4.6 being pulled away and Opus 4.7 taxed at 7.5x rate. Yeah, its great for quick tryouts or similar. But using it in wider scope, with complex reqs and dynamic environment? Complete shitshow.

> This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago

Browse my comment history. There were people just like you, 6, 9 or 12 months ago telling me exactly the same. Some also threatening that I would "be the first to go away". Like I said, cute actually :) You know in January Dario Amodei announced again, AI would write ALL code in 6 months. Do you see it happening?

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

#668

Post by liquidpele »

hdndjsbbs wrote: post #646
ninjagoo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> here 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 Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? > speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Al…

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long? Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

Yes, they do. In fact, they have several competing committees to market the concepts internally through armies of PMs and TPMs and KPIs and efficiency metrics tracking. Also your AI token use of course.

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

#669

Post by konschubert »

oblio wrote: post #661
konschubert wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere. 2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works eve…

I didn’t say that Waymo will be a commercial success or that there won’t be copycats more successful.

But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.

Post reply on HN