Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by Anon1096 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

VoidWarranty wrote: post #368

drivebyhooting wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture) Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.

Hard to motivate people to work on things that destroy society. Money helps. Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.

Meta offices are pretty full at 5pm lmao. In fact they are still decently full at 7pm after dinner at 6. Baffles me why people just make up random crap in areas they clearly know less than nothing about.

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

#692

Post by red-iron-pine » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #664

johnvanommen wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

also add in that the single largest source of tech growth in the last 3 years has been building tools that will obliterate the need for tech employees.

replacing SRE-4s with AI is the point

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

#693

Post by red-iron-pine » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #556

bandrami wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think any company that is seen to reduce capex right now is going to be the Bear Sterns of this cycle

Is this because you think the market will short sell them, or because capex is so worthwhile right now that a company which doesn't invest will fall fatally behind?

"they're not even trying to catch up"

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

#694

Post by gordonhart » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

androiddrew wrote: post #630

Isn't this the same idea of the old Roman decimation.

Depends on who's making the call for who gets cut. A key part of decimation was that the doomed soldiers were beaten to death by their comrades to give the remaining 9 a bloody, lasting impression of their dishonor. If Meta makes everybody sit in a group with their ten closest coworkers and debate until they decide who gets cut it's a lot closer to decimation than if management suddenly shuts off 10% of employee computers.

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

#695

Post by NegativeK » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

dbish wrote: post #449

tech234a wrote: post #437

During mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.

A couple reasons I would guess: 1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time. 2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s…

Your points seem focused on the bottom line and short term extraction of labor from employees, versus actually building a long-term community of healthy, productive people.

Like this:

> will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

Maybe that's a good thing? [1]

I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.

[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.

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

#696

Post by mh2266 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

autaut wrote: post #581

mh2266 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're more upset about this than the typical Meta employee. Judging by... vibes, the main reason they aren't taking volunteers for these layoffs is that they might get more than 10% champing at the bit to take the severance. The 2022 RSUs at Meta have more than doubled since the grant price, and are mostly vested out now, ending Feb 2027, after which there will be a steep TC decline for people employed since…

>provide severance packages for those in the United States that include “16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of employment” That is a standard package and no way a FIRE or at least extended funemployment if they have children or a mortgage. But crazy level of sycophancy on your part

The money comes from the past few years of the stock going from 180 to 500-700, not from the severance.

E5s making $900k, $E6s making 1.5m… quite common.

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

#697

Post by zeroonetwothree » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

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…

I have seen some internal data from one large company that LOC went up 100% but actual features shipped to customers went up only around 10%.

Now not all the extra code is necessarily useless (you can imagine some refactoring or perf improvements) but clearly a lot of it is.

We still aren’t very good at knowing how to use AI judiciously.

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

#698

Post by alex1138 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

AI or not, I can't wait until the tech platforms decide they don't need any workers to actually, you know, work on their product, and so it gets worse and worse

Facebook is kind of a functionally useless product. The feed has always been a mess. You can get banned at any time, there's no account security, and so on and so on

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

#699

Post by coredog64 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #643

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…

How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.

It's the principal/agent problem: The overhiring is incredibly difficult to unwind because it led to the creation of empires. Everyone who is not a founder has more incentive to keep the empire because it props up their comp.

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

#700

Post by autaut » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

singpolyma3 wrote: post #687

autaut wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be better because it would create a more diverse work space where multiple employers complete for employees, instead of one company playing musical chairs with people

Having fewer jobs available would result in more employers? I'm not sure how.

A few companies get almost all investments. They start a lot of projects fast and close the ones that don’t work

If companies stuck to fewer projects, money would be invested in other companies focusing on specific products, you get a lot of companies and not the market concentration you got today (which is responsible according to few economists to a lot of the us labor market dysfunctions it is currently experiencing)