741–750 of 923 posts
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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.
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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.
> keeping it successful I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot. I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
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> 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.
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Let’s go another step further! The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title. Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
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.
Nobody else has this targeted focus.
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
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Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years. It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt. But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used…
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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.
How? In 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 (13%) In 2023, Meta did two layoffs, one of 10,000 (another 13.6%), one of 600 In 2024, Meta did a layoff (layoffs.fyi doesn't list the number) In 2025, Meta did three layoffs, one of 3,600 (5%), 100 and 600 people In 2026, Meta has done two layoffs, one of 200, and one of 8,000 (10%). If you can't correct overhiring in 4 years as a CEO, you've failed. If you repeatedly have to do >…
I do agree with your point about overhiring, its been way to long and this continues to be an excuse without any real evidence to back it up.
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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.
The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.
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I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.
Absolutely. Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they…
And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.
In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"
Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.
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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.
The amount of subscription driven media today is relatively a very small part of the industry.