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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

#861

Post by alex1138 »

wjeje wrote: post #429
adi_kurian wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth. In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops. The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billio…

No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition. They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t. There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.

Zuckerberg copied Snapchat like... 5 times at least? It should have signified to EVERYBODY he has sociopath-like behavior (in fact apparently on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, Snapchat content got demoted, or something) and how he is absolutely the same person that was willing to fuck the Winklevosses ("in the ear")

But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21114106

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

#862

Post by cindyllm »

alex1138 wrote: post #861
wjeje wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition. They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t. There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.

Zuckerberg copied Snapchat like... 5 times at least? It should have signified to EVERYBODY he has sociopath-like behavior (in fact apparently on the Zuckerberg-owned Instagram, Snapchat content got demoted, or something) and how he is absolutely the same person that was willing to fuck the Winklevosses ("in the ear") But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway" Ed…

[dead]

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

#863

Post by squirrellous »

postexitus wrote: post #734
canes123456 wrote: post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes money, implies profit and not revenue

We have revenue breakdown. Where is the profit breakdown?

Ha, probably nobody at Google even knows the exact cost of each of those business lines.

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

#864

Post by bandrami »

ljm wrote: post #675
bandrami wrote: post #458

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.

The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess. Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.

It's weird though: everybody wants to be seen to be building data centers but nobody is actually willing to put down the money to do this (except Oracle and I think it's universally agreed they're probably going to be destroyed by this). Half of the deals announced to begin in 2025 still haven't started yet, and that's with a very generous definition of "started" that basically just means "broke ground". Now some of that is an unexpected wave of populist datacenter opposition gumming the works (though I would argue that should have been expected and mitigated), but a lot of it is just a plain old lack of steel, engineers, and power, which are things everybody knew about before these deals got inked.

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

#865

Post by matchbok3 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #797
matchbok3 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm tired of this American exceptionalism. Success is not only about money. It's about making a positive impact on the world for everyone. This is where the big tech companies deeply fail. America poisons the world with pollution (eg pulling out of Paris Agreement), misinformation, promoting discord as 'engagement', unnecessary military engagements and screwing up the rest of the world. And really, abdicating 'leader…

Billions and billions of people willingly use these products. Are you saying they use them because they are bad for them and they don't like them and don't value them?

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

#866

Post by jupp0r »

nradov wrote: post #818
sharadov wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech debt and maintainability were important because time was of the essence in another era. If the cycles get compressed by say 95%, to hell with it, just trash the old and write everything from scratch, start from a clean slate each time?

That may be good enough for consumer facing systems. Rewrites seldom go well for enterprise systems of record because the code embodies a lot of undocumented but critical requirements. If you start vibe coding from a clean slate then all of that knowledge is lost and you've created an even bigger problem.

I don't think that needs to be true either anymore. Exhaustive specifications and comprehensive test suites are easily created now too. That's why I think software engineering will not go away, it will just change drastically.

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

#867

Post by wakawaka28 »

sureMan6 wrote: post #494
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.…

Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire

Of course the judgement about whether people overhired is subjective on a per-company basis. My point is, you can't hire people who don't exist, and the ways to get people into the industry are limited. All other things equal, we would expect massive overhiring to be matched with very low unemployment in the industry, and the correction should not go below some baseline.

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

#868

Post by wakawaka28 »

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.

That might be true but how many of these people are there, really? I'm not convinced that many companies are hiring these barely-qualified people.

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

#869

Post by wakawaka28 »

chabons wrote: post #504
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 my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate. A number of my current…

You may be right but it's not high pay alone that draws in people from other industries. Standards must be relaxed to accept people from unconventional backgrounds. When conditions tighten, many of these people are simply not competitive enough to get another job. When it comes to aerospace, defense, academia, etc., opportunities are more scarce in those fields than in software the past few years also. It is this, not just the pay, that drives people to software.

I'm not saying people with odd backgrounds can't ever make it. But let's be clear, these are not usually hot shots who can simply get any vaguely technical job they want. They get into software because it is traditionally very accepting of uncredentialled or non-mainstream individuals. The framing you put forward makes it sound like the people committed to software are chumps who have to take what they're given, and these interlopers are the real geniuses who leave for greener pastures with ease. That simply isn't true.

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

#870

Post by wakawaka28 »

computably wrote: post #585
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.…

> 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. SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that th…

We can both "yeah, but" this to death. You make some valid points but I think my observation generally holds. The supply of workers is not so elastic, at least if you have real standards for the workers such as college degrees and so on.
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