> the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs
Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.
> So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.
If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.
But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.
Meta isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s on a slow and gradual decline into irrelevance. Ironically Zuckerberg has now broadly become the has-been geriatric business type he raged against so hard when Facebook began.
Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.
He was done with Facebook. Then he read Ready Player One and thought fuck it, why not?
It was a bet. It didn’t pay off. His billions might be tied to the value of the company but his millions are safe and secure. He can keep taking bets for a long time.
Meta is just an investment vehicle for him at this point.
Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?
Same reason people work at any of these big companies, money and prestige. You can be a terrible engineer, but if you have a few years experience at Meta it's going to make people think you must be a great one.
Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.
Is it expected to be hard? Meta currently employees a lot of people who are willing to be there for any number of reasons. If 2 years down the line Meta announces a hiring push offering the same or better compensation packages with the ones offering now I am sure people will flock to be there.
I think we should put behind us any discourse about companies risking their hiring pool by being hostile to the society or their own employees. People will definitely try to be hired at $company if it means six figure pay, doesn't matter the sector. We have plenty of examples for this.
You could have said this every year for so many years about so many companies. If people will work for Palantir, they'll work for Facebook. Facebook could be a lot worse and I think a lot of their employees would stick around.
I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.
You're confusing _evil_ with _cruel_. Palantir is the former, but from what I have heard they treat their employees well. They are attracting exactly the kind of people they want.
That's true and probably a kinda critical distinction here. Facebook is sort of making the bet that they can not only treat the world like shit but their direct employees too.
Certainly, everyone has "a number" they're willing to suffer for - but telegraphing the suffering ensures that number will be maxed out and morale/motivation will be rock bottom. So: you're paying a huge premium for underperforming talent. Destruction.
1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.
2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.
3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.
4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make
This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?
5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.
None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"
Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.
Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects
The curious thing about that is the transformation of the feed — it’s long since stopped being majority friend/follow posts and clearly is the algorithm picking whatever else it can come up with that will engage. This should mean personal network effects aren’t the moat anymore, for FB anyway.
I feel like making a system capable of delivering the amount of data that WhatsApp/instagram deliver to billions of people worldwide would take more than a weekend.
Not that I’d want to work there given what they do, but every time I’ve been contacted by a recruiter there, it seems like it’s within a month of a mass layoff they’ve had… which is maybe just because they seem to have mass layoffs every quarter now.
They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.
Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well. If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that with the AI tools used to AI-wash the dismissals, it’s easier than ever to bone up on economics and why it’s a bad idea to hire people without a clear view of the economic margins along which the employee will be profitable for the firm.
Someone made a great post about other companies who have shed their 'covid excess' but are still citing that period as a motivation for their decisions.
My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.
> “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.
The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.
Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.
>Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.
> the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs
Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.
See "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams. (That was even before Facebook became Meta)
"That's what the money is for" - Don Draper
Meta preys on kids, not just “people”.
This initiative will fail like the Metaverse did.
People actually use AI. People do not use virtual reality headsets.
What hurts is that these headsets in the right hands and backed by the right company could be so useful.
But who in their right minds trusts the people in Meta?
AI doesn't respond to ads by buying products.
People out of work don't either.
Even people with jobs don't go to FB or Instagram hoping to read AI-generated slop.
Meta is about to find out all the above the hard way.
> So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.
If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.
But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.
Meta isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s on a slow and gradual decline into irrelevance. Ironically Zuckerberg has now broadly become the has-been geriatric business type he raged against so hard when Facebook began.
Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.
He was done with Facebook. Then he read Ready Player One and thought fuck it, why not?
It was a bet. It didn’t pay off. His billions might be tied to the value of the company but his millions are safe and secure. He can keep taking bets for a long time.
Meta is just an investment vehicle for him at this point.
Yes Zuckerberg will be fine. The employees caught up in his misadventures, maybe not so much.
Well they hitched their wagons with their eyes wide open. Highly qualified engineers can't even feign ignorance due to lack of knowledge or education.
Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?
If one has already sold their soul to devil, what is there left to lose..
Same reason people work at any of these big companies, money and prestige. You can be a terrible engineer, but if you have a few years experience at Meta it's going to make people think you must be a great one.
I think initially it was the challenge, possibilities and money. Now... maybe just the money?
Great money and smart coworkers is what I hear
Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.
Is it expected to be hard? Meta currently employees a lot of people who are willing to be there for any number of reasons. If 2 years down the line Meta announces a hiring push offering the same or better compensation packages with the ones offering now I am sure people will flock to be there.
I think we should put behind us any discourse about companies risking their hiring pool by being hostile to the society or their own employees. People will definitely try to be hired at $company if it means six figure pay, doesn't matter the sector. We have plenty of examples for this.
You could have said this every year for so many years about so many companies. If people will work for Palantir, they'll work for Facebook. Facebook could be a lot worse and I think a lot of their employees would stick around.
I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.
You're confusing _evil_ with _cruel_. Palantir is the former, but from what I have heard they treat their employees well. They are attracting exactly the kind of people they want.
That's true and probably a kinda critical distinction here. Facebook is sort of making the bet that they can not only treat the world like shit but their direct employees too.
Idk, offer most people 300-500k and they will go eh, when can I start? You don’t know how many engineers in the world would take that.
Certainly, everyone has "a number" they're willing to suffer for - but telegraphing the suffering ensures that number will be maxed out and morale/motivation will be rock bottom. So: you're paying a huge premium for underperforming talent. Destruction.
A few thoughts on the layoffs:
1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.
2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.
3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.
4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make
This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?
5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.
None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"
Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.
Yeah! One of the most profitable companies in the world is just a message board and image host! I could build that in a weekend
That's what it is to the end user. All the magic of Meta is in the dark surveillance and targeting, which is invisible to users.
Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects
The curious thing about that is the transformation of the feed — it’s long since stopped being majority friend/follow posts and clearly is the algorithm picking whatever else it can come up with that will engage. This should mean personal network effects aren’t the moat anymore, for FB anyway.
people still send reels to each other. that's not a lot of connection but its addictive so they don't mind.
If people had to pay for it, most wouldn’t
I feel like making a system capable of delivering the amount of data that WhatsApp/instagram deliver to billions of people worldwide would take more than a weekend.
If you have unlimited money to throw on infra it really is not difficult. You could literally implement the entire thing with S3 and Firebase.
> image posting and message board app.
Such a nice euphemism for data grabbing / social graph building / spying / AI training machine!
Not that I’d want to work there given what they do, but every time I’ve been contacted by a recruiter there, it seems like it’s within a month of a mass layoff they’ve had… which is maybe just because they seem to have mass layoffs every quarter now.
They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.
Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well. If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that with the AI tools used to AI-wash the dismissals, it’s easier than ever to bone up on economics and why it’s a bad idea to hire people without a clear view of the economic margins along which the employee will be profitable for the firm.
Compared to recent trends it’s more like the entire 2010s was over hiring
> Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well
This is a convenient strawman for companies but I think it's no longer true that the people being layed off stem from that time: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
Someone made a great post about other companies who have shed their 'covid excess' but are still citing that period as a motivation for their decisions.
One benefit: People are no longer trying to pretend that Meta is some beneficent orgainsation
My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.
Recording employee's screens in order for an AI to determine whether you can replaced is some of the most dystopian stuff I've heard all year.
> “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.
The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.
Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.
Internet Doomsday Evangelist seems to be a role with infinite chairs.
>Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.
> So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.
Ouch. Great point.
I think meta should have done what musk did and ripped the bandage off.
What exactly are you referring to?
Twitter, I presume?
Presumably reducing the entire company to a set of core engineers.
And deliver nothing on the promises he made
Throw a Nazi salute?
Hey, that’s unfair.
He threw several.