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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#671

Post by maerF0x0 »

ergocoder wrote: post #652
maerF0x0 wrote: post #648

> > I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. He's not taking responsibility. Taking responsibility would look like him saying "And I'm going to personally give 1% of my shares to those who are leaving spread equally". Responsibility means being willing to sacrifice something personal to make it right (or less wrong). Zuck owns 13.6% of 2.687B shares, at a $104 a piece that 1% share would be about $30k pe…

Isn't it included in the severance packages? Just curious. Or you want the severance package to be 30k more?

Severance is a distributed load that all shareholders + employees bear. Taking personal responsibility means personal action to resolve. Not making a decision to use the resources of others for one's own guilt. (at least this is my own ethical framework)

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#673

Post by dbrgn »

propogandist wrote: post #432
dbrgn wrote: post #337

If 11k employees are 13% of the workforce, then Meta employed roughly 85k people. Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long? Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That's quite something.

Facebook folks usually make 6 figures, and most have a large portion of comp in stock based comp. The number is much larger.

I assumed that not every Facebook employee is a senior software engineer in California, but that they must have a lot of lower wage employees in non-tech jobs on other continents as well (e.g. for content moderation).

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#674

Post by alasdair_ »

It's amazing how similar this whole thing is to Stripe's layoff letter, down to the exact ordering of severance, PTO, RSU, career services, immigration details and the thing about everyone losing access immediately due to sensitive information but also keeping email access for 24 hours and the bit about recruiting being most affected. It's almost a verbatim copy.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#675

Post by hbn »

martius wrote: post #450
hbn wrote: post #420

> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable. Literally how could that acceleration be p…

I read this as "we expected to stay at the levels we were at at the beginning of 2022, but instead things went back (down) to the levels of 2019".

They specifically said "acceleration" though, not velocity

Meaning they expected to continue picking up speed, not maintain their speed

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#676

Post by jaywalk »

alasdair_ wrote: post #674

It's amazing how similar this whole thing is to Stripe's layoff letter, down to the exact ordering of severance, PTO, RSU, career services, immigration details and the thing about everyone losing access immediately due to sensitive information but also keeping email access for 24 hours and the bit about recruiting being most affected. It's almost a verbatim copy.

I was thinking the exact same thing. It's quite striking.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#677

Post by stillametamate »

obert wrote: post #650

Like with all lay offs, the move to cut discretionary spending and perks may also impact employee morale and motivation, and the decision to extend the hiring freeze may also limit potential growth within the company... it's going to get worse before getting better

Absolutely. The Meta campus is sad right now. Philz closed. The woodshop closed. Some of the perks from before the pandemic are gone. People are getting paid a lot less. Unless you actually believe in building the metaverse or can't find something comparable that's not sinking, there just isn't much reason to stay.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#678

Post by throwty345df »

sytelus wrote: post #666

Meta is burning $10B/yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E…

I watched a presentation in which it was explained that they got Microsoft to create a version of Office for their metaverse and other companies to do similar things. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is not doing this for free, so generally speaking I think their expenses include all the spending related to this kind of partnerships, which can add up to quite a lot when you have a whole ecosystem to build. This is not just software and hardware engineering. With this in mind, the $10bn figure looks much more reasonable and even disciplined for the goal pursued. Whether or not this goal is the right one is another question. I personally think Meta is misguided here and this aventure will fail miserably.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#679

Post by lbriner »

Sad but completely unsurprising. People should realise by now that when a company starts a massive hiring boom, it will inevitably bust. Why? Because as many have said already, if you have tonnes of cash, it is easier to hire loads of people rather than hire appropriate and effective people.

The fact that we are talking about such an enormous number just shows how many people are part of the hive but probably not really contributing much to the company overall.

The worst part is that some people who are really effective will get caught up in the layoffs paying for the inefficiency of corporate structures.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#680

Post by pb7 »

sausagefeet wrote: post #631
adrianmsmith wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought this https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590304422735015936 was a good explanation: > What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to…

This is a pretty poor take, IMO. I have not seen any difference in results of a CEO who "takes responsibility" vs "blames outside factors". Taking responsibility seems to be a cheap way to come off as a better person without actually doing anything differently.

Does it get tiring being this cynical all the time? Admit it, nothing he could have said would have satisfied folks like you.

This was a tactful announcement and a generous severance after providing a job with pay and benefits in the top 0.1% for potentially many years.

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