771–780 of 923 posts
As much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.
Sure but these are low-risk bets for him personally. When they don't work out 8,000 folks pay the price and he is still one of the richest people on the planet who will never have to worry about money, food, housing, or healthcare.
This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.
No, it's absolutely happening that way.
I work in tech in a senior IC role. I'm now expected to single-handedly do the work that I would previously have led a team of 5-10 people to do. The junior ICs, we aren't really hiring for. This is not specific to my company, it's like this across the board.
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Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right? And even if it's because the leaders of the compan…
If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.
The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.
So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.
This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.
As much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.
I think it is hard to call IG and WA bets. He simply bought the competition that was set to wreck his platform.
1. Larger acquisitions. IG was $1B for a 13 employee company. WA was $22B. We were all talking about how big those numbers were at the time, but looking back they seem like mid-sized acquisitions. Before, most companies would have looked at these numbers and tried to build it themselves, or underbid, or just not pull the trigger. Blockbuster and Netflix. Yahoo and Google.
2. He meet the user where they were. He made no meaningful and instant change to the apps. There was no rebranding. They still have their own login screens and apps. Many casual users might not notice their major platforms are owned by the same company. Compare this to more old-school tech companies like Oracle buying Sun, or a national cellphone provider buying a regional one, or whatever happens with AOL-Time-Warner-Discovery.
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Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders. Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person. Mark needs to be shown the door. Oh…
Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?
The real issue is that our systems allow for one person to effectively control hundreds of billions of dollars of capital with absolutely no one to provide any consequences if they make bad decisions with that capital.
If we really are setting this up as a for-profit, publicly-traded company, how does that system of corporate governance enforce any sort of way to make sure that Zuckerberg's ego doesn't get in the way of doing things right? Basically right now it's a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
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Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept". The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
The network effect is still there, they have billions of users who are on Facebook because friends and family are on Facebook.
There are really just a handful of people from my extended social circles still actively posting to FB/Instagram and that traffic is mostly drowned out by slop content.
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There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone. Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China. Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovat…
You have brain poisoning from reading too much slop online. >But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company
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If you hire a house cleaner, and the house cleaner doesn't do a good job, would you fire yourself from the house? What repercussions will you personally suffer?
If I had a roommate who spent huge swaths of our monthly budget on house cleaning we didn't need, I might tell them to go find another place to live. Or to stop stretching metaphors.. The investors should be mad that the layoffs were even necessary.
Also, Zuck controls 61% of the vote for Meta. Investors knew that it was his show when they invested
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It is about AI. The news is "the AI is far less monetarily lucrative endeavour than we thought but don't worry, we already fired enough people to compensate for the loss"
... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month. Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrocket…
Could probably replace fair few of executives and higher management tho, why pay sycophants six figures when all you need is LLM sub