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

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

#721

Post by Brystephor » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

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…

Meta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range.

Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either

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

#722

Post by StilesCrisis » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 2:56 PM UTC

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

I was in two different Google orgs and neither one used any sort of agile methodology at all, and in fact I almost never heard agile even discussed. Some teams arranged their bugs "kanban"-style but that was up to the individual team; it wasn't a company-wide decision.

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

#723

Post by 52-6F-62 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

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…

But do you really think they accidentally over-hired to the tune of tens of thousands of individuals? Across these companies the numbers are close to 100,000 people. Maybe much more.

That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some.

I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims:

    1) drive salaries down through fear and contest

    2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs')

It's rudimentary electronics physics. Such physics is regularly applied to economic systems modelling to achieve predictable outcomes (usually making more money).

Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.

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

#724

Post by canes123456 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #337

dron57 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.

Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight. Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.

That has been the talking point since facebook launched.

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

#725

Post by eloisant » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #649

wakawaka28 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.…

> There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. “Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.

Also there isn't one profile of software developers.

At least 3 tiers: the FAANG level, the mid-size tech companies, then all the developers working for non-tech companies/administration or in IT service companies.

Even in those categories, workers aren't swappables.

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

#726

Post by alex1138 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

NickC25 wrote: post #704

AdamN wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.

>Meta is fundamentally a media company You were soooooo close. Meta is fundamentally a targeted advertising company, not a media company.

Are they even that? Their modus operandi has been to steal user credentials. Ads (which aren't targeted at all, the ads aren't even good, according to what people have said) are just an excuse to gather more data (Facebook syncs with your phone, it wipes out addresses in your phone book). It comes down to Zuck and who he is

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

#727

Post by eloisant » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #418

rao-v wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?

Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.

They used the Facebook app to spy on smartphone users and detect Instagram and WhatsApp success to decide to buy them.

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

#728

Post by shermantanktop » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

coredog64 wrote: post #699

malfist wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see this firsthand. Execs who are openly hostile to and distrusting of their own middle management.

These were supposed to be farsighted geniuses who took credit for their stock performance. But they made the most obvious blunder: opening a Pandora’s box that they can’t close.

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

#729

Post by canes123456 » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

postexitus wrote: post #613

lmm wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.

You are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.

Makes money, implies profit and not revenue

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

#730

Post by philipnee » Fri, Apr 24, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

degamad wrote: post #488

philipnee wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Search was not novel, but PageRank was novel.

was it actually? I don't know the full technical behind this but wiki does suggest: "A search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services, designed by Robin Li in 1996, developed a strategy for site-scoring and page-ranking.."

This is before Google.