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 questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
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 wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
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.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
Back in 2020, $META was desperate to hire. Nowadays the tide has turned and interview process shifted accordingly. They are super picky now, even for those who nail every stage of the interview, folks are still routinely passed over.
So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.
The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.
The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.
inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.
Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
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.
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
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.
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
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 skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves.
but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
When Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount.
> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.
(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
one thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
Wonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.
I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.
I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
America is rich, but that money is spent on new problems we invented for ourselves. We subsidize farmers growing unhealthy foods, then subsidize buying those unhealthy foods through food stamps. Then we subsidize healthcare to address the consequences of extra obesity.
Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.
As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.
Similarly, I roll my eyes when people still blame Ronald Reagan for the current homeless situation in California. There's been plenty of time to correct that mistake and well???
But honestly, IMO America has become a joyless, directionless dystopia of soma and bread and circuses in the middle of a geopolitical knife fight to define the 21st century and maybe even hit the singularity. I'm not happy with the current management, but it was the same unhappy bunch talked about here that decided by voting or opting not to vote that gave it a second shot. Kinda deserve this, no? If no, I'm all ears for your one weird trick to fix America, go for it!
Yeah I know, downvotes incoming for such heresy. If you don't pick a side, then what are you even doing?
It's the housing prices and the affordability of life in general. We are all debt slaves now. I am 100% using 2020 as an excuse because it broke the market and sent housing prices up 50%+ in 6 months.
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.
There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As I understand it, happiness increases for most people as their income increases. However, this doesn't mean that a person is happy overall since there are other factors. So, it's not that money can buy happiness in a binary sense, but it's a factor and often a significant one.
The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):
“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.
It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).
I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
> With time, their intentions have become much more clear
Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.
Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.
The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)
One can only hope that he just fully turns to philanthropy a la Bill Gates sooner rather than later, and gives up trying to "connect" people (which somehow always turns into privacy nightmares).
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?
Sort of.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
Britannica:
> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Wikipedia @ 3:
> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties
Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!
Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.
This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.
Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).
Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.
Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?
Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live.
It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.
All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into.
Something tells me that the workers at Meta, if given a chance to have self-determination, would run a better shop than Zuckerberg himself.
> These workers have a better gig that 99% of Americans
Given that the cited 10% includes the folks who have to drive 2 hours each way to cook/clean in the campus kitchens... not sure that they do. Meta isn't all software engineers, by a long shot
Meta, as an organization, is not designed to produce anything useful. If someone at Meta thinks they could organize a programmer collective that would make its members good (or any) money, they can just walk out and do that. Computers are cheap, means of production are not limiting people's capacity to earn living with code.
Elections for executive leadership doesn't sound all that crazy to me. With 30+ years in the business I have witnessed my fair share of executive whackos that wouldn't have passed a basic sniff test if they had convince workers that they should be the one leading them.
>All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into.
One might almost say workers should... own the means of production?
Every programmer owns the means of code production (unless they forgot how to code without Claude). Turns out it's not necessarily enough to make money.
Yeah, that's the thing. You need the whole business to turn code into money, and you need this business to be run well, and either do what people with big money want it to do or to make lots of people with small money pay for its product regularly. Either way, it's not what autonomous programmer commune will do well in my opinion
It's usual for the programmers (or laborers in general, perhaps) to assume that their portion of the business does all the "real work" and the 60-70% "rest of the company" do nothing and add no value.
Although, Facebook doesn’t produce much, right? Some glasses I guess. “Workers should own the means of collecting data to influence people towards some sources of production” doesn’t have quite the ring to it.
You can get one Good Friday a year if you live in a country that treats it as bank holiday, or is Catholic enough that it's effectively a day off, even if not an official one.
You can get extra Fridays off if you move to a country with bank holidays that tend to land on Fridays, which is correlated with history of either communism or organized religion (much like the weekend).
But, if you want every Friday off, your best bet is to embrace hyper-capitalism and worm your way money so you can have four-day work week.
(Easier to achieve than the legendary four-hour work week anyway.)
TL;DR: the more opposing ideologies you can simultaneously hold, the more days off in a week you're morally entitled to :).
I have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI!
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
This isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.
So is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?
I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
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 questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
Totally. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if I had to pick a FAANG to put all my retirement savings into Meta would absolutely not be my pick.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.
Apple also has an entire international retail arm.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.
Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.
Different scenarios
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.
> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America.
Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
Neither needs a lot of innovation, just some maintenance. How many developers do you think Telegram has?
Except those are both done.
WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"
That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
I worked at Meta and they're spot on.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
The bureaucracy at Google has grown and grown. And then grown some more. But it is nowhere near as bad as the GP makes it sound.
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
I wonder if that's still the case.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
I've also worked (and currently work) at a big tech company and personally this has not been my experience. I'm sure it happens but it's not typical.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
Because you have to pay people more to do boring or evil work vs meaningful or exciting work
Yeah. This is part of why I wasn't excited to work at G after my first time there. It was very boring
You’re painting with a pretty broad brush there.
“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
"couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks"
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 wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
Again??? Phew glad I don't work there. I hate that constant worry.
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.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
Yeah, like I don't ARA could build a mobile app for ordering at a cafeteria, period.
“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”
What is this from?
Moreover, he has no idea what those laid off people actually did or who they are
Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.
As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
With the way people get added and removed from big tech, why is having worked at these companies still considered a badge of honor?
if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
My experience as well, both at Google and Meta. Very positive and well-organized. I also got feedback from the recruiter on each interviews.
2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.
This seems a bit ridiculous, that’s only 5-6 years ago. Things change, but the mechanisms and culture isn’t entirely different.
Back in 2020, $META was desperate to hire. Nowadays the tide has turned and interview process shifted accordingly. They are super picky now, even for those who nail every stage of the interview, folks are still routinely passed over.
Market was so hot SNL did a skit where Meta just started sending paychecks to people as a recruiting tactic.
That SNL skit never happened, but the market was so hot it could have.
You had interviews scheduled longer than 45 minutes?
If it was the exuberant period of overhiring from around that time, then you're talking about a different company who interviewed you back then
The recruiting process has barely changed since then.
So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.
What does a pilot or doctor or cop do in terms of interviews, take homes etc.?
Last time I talked them they also wanted an NDA just to interview, which was just insulting and dumb so I kept my existing big tech job instead
The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
What is your point exactly lol. You'd prefer longer interviews? More, less?
I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.
The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.
inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.
Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
Is this what Zuck meant when he said he “takes full responsibility” for spending 80 billion in the wrong direction?
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
There is nothing "cowardly" about it.
Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
Not saying you are wrong, but you could argue they made their big move with the Metaverse. Then again with those crazy AI contracts to ML people.
Maybe Meta missed on those big plays and now there’s too much pressure to make another.
I don’t know if I believe that, but worth considering
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
AI isn't contributing to the layoffs though
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
Toxic = green brokerage accounts for those in charge
It would also be green for everyone else's brokerage account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.
found the ceo
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
Literally not true. Some bets just don't work. If a company tries to enter some new market and fails, they may use a layoff.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
Sounds like a strategic mistake.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
Because hiring people and paying them a salary is somehow hurting those people?
With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you
Care to explain? Rather than these jugemental one-offs?
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
> profitable work for a set of people
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
Sadly a lot of people see profit as the only incentive.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
If it's easy to find a job why would I care if I'm laid off? Just get another job.
No, of course not. How silly. As an employee who's been laid off a couple times I greatly prefer an economy where it's easy to find a job.
I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.
Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months.
The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
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.
Hot take: their quality is possibly a reason these people were unable to leave their country in the first place.
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
Remote coordination tools are no longer utter dogshit.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
>Why is this time different?
The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
AI: actually an indian
Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
I think this is broadly correct too.
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.
Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?
this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
That said, IMO they are right...
Imagine a world where people could just be happy with returns on investments. Even treasury bills.
Can't we all just be happy?
If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.
It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
It must be true what Schopenhauer said: "Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become."
> It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains."
Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.
When is it ok to lay people off?
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.
BIG FAX
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
Given the same trend at Oracle and Amazon (1), it seems large corporations are cutting costs ahead of bad news... and that news isn't about AI.
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"
Punchy FTW
... 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 skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves.
Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.
They are probably reacting to the general economy.
The scariest thing is that people with this amount of responsibility was caught by surprise.
Don't worry, these CRUD app software artisans will land on their feet somewhere.
The only part of Meta I care about is the PyTorch team. Are those people also being affected by this?
a bunch of them already left....
Layoffs.fyi is not looking good right now.
but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
Let me guess. Year of efficiency?
What happened to the metaverse ?I suspect maybe wasting all the resource wasn’t a good idea
Everyone at Meta should know the score.
Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance.
Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.
When Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.
(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
This is in addition to performance cutting just fyi. I get what you're saying but this isn't that
Neckbeards’rein is over!
one thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.
The real question for me is how the hell did this company reach $200 billion in annual revenue? Nothing about our economy makes any sense to me.
I came across this article recently and watching it play it out is wild: https://readuncut.com/the-survivors-paradox-how-layoffs-turn...
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
Wonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.
I bet they are worried about the class actions that the SC lawsuit opened up.
I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.
I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.
It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
"letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here..." is a sacrifice Mark Zuckerberg is willing to make.
The firings will continue until morale improves.
It's like the economy is struggling or something.
Is this what they mean to "Feel the AGI?"
AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.
> AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta
Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?
Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
Asocial Grumpy Interests?
Programmers only or across the company?
They don't have 80k programmers. That's total staff
Never at the head... Although the fish begins to smell at the head, as we say here...
Re:
> If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad
> https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...
America is rich, but that money is spent on new problems we invented for ourselves. We subsidize farmers growing unhealthy foods, then subsidize buying those unhealthy foods through food stamps. Then we subsidize healthcare to address the consequences of extra obesity.
Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.
The richer a country becomes the more expensive everything gets.
The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.
Huh, did anything happen in 2020? I'm wracking my brains trying to think of anything.
As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.
Similarly, I roll my eyes when people still blame Ronald Reagan for the current homeless situation in California. There's been plenty of time to correct that mistake and well???
But honestly, IMO America has become a joyless, directionless dystopia of soma and bread and circuses in the middle of a geopolitical knife fight to define the 21st century and maybe even hit the singularity. I'm not happy with the current management, but it was the same unhappy bunch talked about here that decided by voting or opting not to vote that gave it a second shot. Kinda deserve this, no? If no, I'm all ears for your one weird trick to fix America, go for it!
Yeah I know, downvotes incoming for such heresy. If you don't pick a side, then what are you even doing?
It's the housing prices and the affordability of life in general. We are all debt slaves now. I am 100% using 2020 as an excuse because it broke the market and sent housing prices up 50%+ in 6 months.
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
On the contrary, 2020 permanently changed the nature of many of my relationships and the same is true of everybody I know
Yeah, also first thing I thought about. What a shit time altogether right now.
It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.
That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...
There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As I understand it, happiness increases for most people as their income increases. However, this doesn't mean that a person is happy overall since there are other factors. So, it's not that money can buy happiness in a binary sense, but it's a factor and often a significant one.
The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):
“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."
Money can’t buy happiness, but being broke will certainly make you unhappy
Money buys you Freedom. A much more general category theory type framing.
Money fills your Maslow. After that, you are responsible for your happiness. And there sure are a lot of rich people who aren't very happy.
Or as Daniel Tosh put it:
"It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"
These comment sections are getting more and more useless by the day.
Maybe not, but poverty definitely causes unhappiness
Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.
Not if you pop in to the HN thread for that article, funnily enough.
It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.
It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).
Maybe but this happiness chart seems to reflect economic recessions (including some unofficial ones)
And little money buys even less. What’s your point?
The thing is that Americans don’t have much money. A few billion and millionaires skew the numbers horribly.
The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.
Not really the standard line anymore. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...
I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
> With time, their intentions have become much more clear
Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.
you would think being valued at billions of dollars for over 20 years now would give you at least a little validation
Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.
The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)
One can only hope that he just fully turns to philanthropy a la Bill Gates sooner rather than later, and gives up trying to "connect" people (which somehow always turns into privacy nightmares).
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?
Sort of.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
Britannica:
> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Wikipedia @ 3:
> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."
[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
While we're doing historical quotes:
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg
I think the “face book” was used prior to the name of the company for what you would call a college student directory. Like a yearbook.
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties
Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!
I’m pretty sure she’s ditching him
Meta products are pretty good specifically if you're a business owner who wants to advertise his product.
It's a toxic sewer at this point. I used to think he scale was cool, I'm no longer impressed by it.
Now? NOW? Not 15 years ago?
Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.
This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.
Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).
Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.
Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?
> their intentions have become much more clear
The hunter Biden laptop story was censored - including in private messages - and Charlie Kirk was shown being shot in the neck to death to children.
There's nothing else to say.
Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live.
It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
> just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in, erlang, tcl and perl?
You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.
Just use lisp.
I'm still partial to Tcl from years in EDA - sign me up..
Haskell!
Now that I think about it, the Haskell Report did come out in '98...
Hey, erlang is brilliant
All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into.
Something tells me that the workers at Meta, if given a chance to have self-determination, would run a better shop than Zuckerberg himself.
These workers have a better gig that 99% of Americans. They certainly have "self-determination".
If they can run it better than Zuck they are free to try, believe it or not.
> These workers have a better gig that 99% of Americans
Given that the cited 10% includes the folks who have to drive 2 hours each way to cook/clean in the campus kitchens... not sure that they do. Meta isn't all software engineers, by a long shot
Huh?
What would they do with this self-determination? It's not that Meta is producing something useful you know.
maybe they could produce something useful with that self-determination? or are you being sarcastic?
Meta, as an organization, is not designed to produce anything useful. If someone at Meta thinks they could organize a programmer collective that would make its members good (or any) money, they can just walk out and do that. Computers are cheap, means of production are not limiting people's capacity to earn living with code.
Elections for executive leadership doesn't sound all that crazy to me. With 30+ years in the business I have witnessed my fair share of executive whackos that wouldn't have passed a basic sniff test if they had convince workers that they should be the one leading them.
We already have votes for leadership. It's called employment and market share.
>All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into.
One might almost say workers should... own the means of production?
Every programmer owns the means of code production (unless they forgot how to code without Claude). Turns out it's not necessarily enough to make money.
Code production is not code distribution nor code advertisement, nor code marketing in general, etc.
Yeah, that's the thing. You need the whole business to turn code into money, and you need this business to be run well, and either do what people with big money want it to do or to make lots of people with small money pay for its product regularly. Either way, it's not what autonomous programmer commune will do well in my opinion
It's usual for the programmers (or laborers in general, perhaps) to assume that their portion of the business does all the "real work" and the 60-70% "rest of the company" do nothing and add no value.
Although, Facebook doesn’t produce much, right? Some glasses I guess. “Workers should own the means of collecting data to influence people towards some sources of production” doesn’t have quite the ring to it.
The means of production are for sale, they can own them if they want!
But we don't pay for coding tools, we want them for free!
Workplace democracy would work better than democracy does anywhere else?
And, of course, every tech worker already has a vote. As the saying goes: they can vote with their feet.
It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.
That's a very un-american way of thinking... Didn't you get the last 100 years of propaganda against any kind of socialist thoughts?
You filthy communist!
We’re still on a startup forum, right?
Are we though?
Are weekends off un-american too because it came from worker movements?
Re: replies that one day off has been around much longer. Yes that’s what changed - the change was for 2 days off.
Saturday's off came from Exodus 20:8-11, about 1400 BC.
Saturdays are communist. Sundays are far-right.
What do i have to be to get Fridays too?
Be French, and get divorced?
Muslim?
You can get one Good Friday a year if you live in a country that treats it as bank holiday, or is Catholic enough that it's effectively a day off, even if not an official one.
You can get extra Fridays off if you move to a country with bank holidays that tend to land on Fridays, which is correlated with history of either communism or organized religion (much like the weekend).
But, if you want every Friday off, your best bet is to embrace hyper-capitalism and worm your way money so you can have four-day work week.
(Easier to achieve than the legendary four-hour work week anyway.)
TL;DR: the more opposing ideologies you can simultaneously hold, the more days off in a week you're morally entitled to :).
Where is there a successful socialist economy that produces innovative products that impact the whole world?
I'll wait for you answer.
The thought that Meta has in any way benefitted society is objectively insane.
I know it's implied, but you would be wise to add a /s
Quite a few folks on HN have developed a remarkably thin skin and no longer make the most charitable interpretation.
Would it be Mark's cloned AI who will call everyone 'personally' to share this news?
I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.
I have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI!
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
This isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.
So is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?
I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.