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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

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

#711

Post by kilroy123 »

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.

I would say the Quest 2 and 3

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

#712

Post by sph »

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.

Oculus? Not created, but if you buy a VR headset, Meta Oculus is one of the top choices.

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

#713

Post by hartbook »

aurareturn wrote: post #578
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…

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.

if you start a sentence by "if" that's the hypothetical

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

#714

Post by alexjplant »

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…

> the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.

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

#715

Post by Anon1096 »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #64
nobleach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat) My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have change…

2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.

I interviewed in the past 2 years and my experience matches the parent. Very professional and the interviewers were great to talk to. Same with Google.

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

#716

Post by Waterluvian »

Tade0 wrote: post #660
mkl wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge

Truly the US military is a logistics organisation which dabbles in warfare.

Historically and generally true. Which makes it a fascinating lesson to witness the major logistics issues happening today. Shows how even an institution like the U.S. Navy can be badly mismanaged by just a handful of the wrong people at the top. When's the next shareholder meeting? Surely there's a way to fire the CEO at this point.

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

#717

Post by joe_mamba »

vishalontheline wrote: post #706
joe_mamba wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Pretty easy. Get them to talk about a project they've managed and start poking holes. Who was on the team? How did they organize meetings? What were the bottlenecks? How well did everyone get along? What did they do to help grease the gears? Did they have to change the process? How did they like the software? Which software did they use? Did they have to administer it themselves? How did they deal with management cha…

From witching other managers, and via LLMs, you can literally learn and interview prep for all those questions on and lie. It's not difficult.

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

#718

Post by nneonneo »

jldugger wrote: post #155
booleandilemma wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend…

> virtual reality products with no legs

This is the most incredibly apt description of Horizon Worlds possible. How is it that I've missed this joke until now? Thank you!

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

#719

Post by amelius »

bandrami wrote: post #583
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.

Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated

Ask professional translators.

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

#720

Post by canes123456 »

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…

It’s weird though because they could just cut the whole metaverse and it would matter exponentially more for profits and Wall Street. Maybe that is what this layoff is but I doubt it. They already laid off 10% of reality labs this year. Why do that if they were going to kill it completely.

There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels.

I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.

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