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Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

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

#901

Post by loeg »

nazcan wrote: post #767
loeg wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of employees aren't getting laid off and continue to earn top of market pay. Even if you think layoffs are distributed randomly (they aren't), that has positive EV.

Positive EV for the employees vs. another company that pay less and has less lay-offs (assuming random)? I guess it depends on how much less pay the other company is...

> I guess it depends on how much less pay the other company is.

Levels.fyi is a reasonable starting point for comparison.

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

#902

Post by autaut »

loeg wrote: post #900
autaut wrote: post #899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t give severance to be nice, severance is hush money. To get the severance employees have to agree to forgo any legal claim they could have with the company. They have calculated that it’s cheaper to offer this money than to have to pay lawyers to defend the company from pissed former employees seeking to drag the company to court.

This is an entirely new claim from the one you made earlier and somewhat divorced from your original line of questioning around severance ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885133 ). Ultimately, regardless of whether the severance is generous or just a calculated ploy to keep former employees quiet, it comes out of shareholders' pockets.

It is not my claim it is common knowledge. The problem is users here trying to pretend that a standard legal practice is Zuckerberg taking personal responsibility. No he is just following the advice of his legal team.

On severance: > the reality is that severance payments are just as much about protecting employers as they are about helping employees. In today’s complex labor landscape, employers are acutely aware of the risks associated with employment disputes and potential lawsuits. By offering severance payments, employers aim to minimize their exposure to legal claims, maintain compliance with labor laws, and safeguard their reputation in the marketplace. This practice is not just about goodwill—it’s a calculated move within the broader context of employment law and labor regulations, designed to manage risk and maintain control over the employment relationship. Understanding the real motivations behind severance payments is essential for both employees and employers navigating the ever-evolving world of employment.

https://capclaw.com/employers-pay-severance-out-of-fear-of-g...

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

#903

Post by joe_mamba »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #896
joe_mamba wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work. Not a thing where I am. You can BS your way in these jobs and so many people did. There's no LEETCODE for management positions, just bullshitting smooth-talk and using your connections (nepotism).

Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions. There are real differences in the knowledge and work behavior of great PMs and the bullshitters, and it's usually not that hard to tease out the bullshit in an interview if you know what you're doing.

>Well, quite frankly, you work in a shitty place then that doesn't know how to competently interview for these positions.

I was talking about a country, not a workplace, and franky, so what? I can't change that. What I can do, is tell you how it is, and how the system gets exploited.

If you live in some magic utopia where things are different(the US maybe?), good for you, but this information doesn't change anything for me where I live.

Best I can do is adapt and exploit the system in my favor as well if I can the same the rest do, otherwise I get left behind by the unscrupulous clueless scammers who do.

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

#904

Post by Schlagbohrer »

jeltz wrote: post #880
jupp0r wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will change and most likely for worse. The new applications will be even buggier and worse than what we have now.

And worst possible outcome for the working class of humans is that we end up with AIs as our managers, being told to do what the AI recommends no matter what, or being in some way suborned to the AI.

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

#905

Post by kbar13 »

ghaff wrote: post #215
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process. Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?

Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.

we've seen that most of the people who are only in it for the money don't actually bring much value to the company. a lot of middling software engineers are actually a liability. unlike operational work, engineering needs to have a higher bar than just a beating heart and hands

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

#906

Post by chabons »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #869
chabons wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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, no…

> "[…] and these interlopers are the real geniuses […]

This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.

All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.

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

#907

Post by [deleted] »

alexjplant wrote: post #714
dbish wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#908

Post by dbish »

nradov wrote: post #810
ninjagoo wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team. > Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal. Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expect…

Enterprise methodologies like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) are explicitly designed around managing that friction. Developers may complain about the additional toil and process overhead it imposes on them, but for the organization as a whole this is sometimes the least bad option.

None of the important projects or FANGs build with frameworks like that, sorry. Project management frameworks are all larp and mostly used by slow moving firms from the past.

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

#909

Post by wakawaka28 »

chabons wrote: post #906
wakawaka28 wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, no…

> "[…] and these interlopers are the real geniuses […] This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere. All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a m…

That depends very much on what kind of software you are writing and how good you are at it. I do not think math makes as much sense as CS for general software jobs. It might not count against you very much, but I wouldn't go so far as to say you're on the same footing as someone who dedicated their entire studies to CS. There are way worse backgrounds you could have besides math IMO. I would not want to be an English graduate who switched to software engineering. I've heard of some of those people.

Software engineering is unique among engineering fields in that it accepts people without the right credentials, and sometimes without any credentials. Other engineering fields not only require matching credentials but also have professional certifications. I don't think I would enjoy taking those very much, but after seeing some of the crap that people get away with I have fantasized about having such a process to filter people out.

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

#910

Post by 3form »

sharadov wrote: post #753
3form wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days. I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and t…

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's what I'm expecting will happen, yes. My point further is that I believe it's a road to nowhere. It will be costly in time and money, and result in people involved not knowing what's going on in the project more than ever. The last point going unnoticed by the management of course, as they rarely know the project to begin with anyway.
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