[HN Gopher] Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
___________________________________________________________________
Meta plans to lay off 10k employees
Author : darnfish
Score : 948 points
Date : 2023-03-14 13:14 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.fb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.fb.com)
| samsolomon wrote:
| What is the value in announcing that layoffs will take place over
| a period of months instead of doing it all at once? That seems
| like the worst possible outcome for both the company and it's
| employees. Morale is going to be terrible and Meta is going to be
| left with everyone who hasn't (or wasn't able) to switch jobs.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| It's to put pressure on people to perform and sacrifice
| themselves, their personal lives, their family etc. It's the
| same reason so many tech companies start to do quarterly
| reviews, so every 3 months your manager will hold over your
| head the threat of 'not meeting expectations' and putting you
| on a performance improvement plan.
| mattboardman wrote:
| Mark lays it out pretty simply in the letter. People don't
| want surprise layoffs. They'd rather know ahead of time what
| leadership's planning. It's a tough pill to swallow but this
| is what a lot of people asked for.
| college_physics wrote:
| its quite depressing but it applies to much of corporate
| structure and incentives.
|
| how much more performance can you squeeze from an individual
| that:
|
| i) is not intrinsic to who they are (hence visible when you
| hire them - if its not the right profile just don't hire
| them)
|
| ii) is not tied to your own bloated structure, toxic culture
| and messed up processes and hence none of their fault
|
| is that 10%, 20% extra performance? is that sufficient to
| satisfy the "markets"? when its your vision and business
| model is what is really the problem.
| [deleted]
| saos wrote:
| > I recognize that sharing plans for restructuring and layoffs
| months in advance creates a challenging period. But last fall,
| we heard feedback that you wanted more transparency sooner into
| any restructuring plans, so that's what I'm trying to provide
| here. I hope that giving you a timeline and principles for what
| to expect will help us get through the next couple of months
| and then move forward as we implement these changes that I
| believe will have a very positive impact on how we work.
|
| Their employees wanted that
| g051051 wrote:
| If it encourages people to leave voluntarily, it could save the
| job of someone else, and save the company the costs of a
| layoff.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Legal requirements in some countries?
| capableweb wrote:
| > What is the value in announcing that layoffs will take place
| over a period of months instead of doing it all at once?
|
| It seems like that's what Facebook employees wanted, so that's
| what they get. I'm no fan of Facebook in general, but at least
| it seems like the guy is listening to the employees on
| _something_.
|
| From the press release:
|
| > I recognize that sharing plans for restructuring and layoffs
| months in advance creates a challenging period. But last fall,
| we heard feedback that you wanted more transparency sooner into
| any restructuring plans, so that's what I'm trying to provide
| here.
| awinter-py wrote:
| meta is building the future of human connection, and as every
| student of neuroscience and brain development knows, sometimes in
| order to connect you also have to _dis_ connect. in this essay I
| mabbo wrote:
| Ignore the fluff piece. The reality is you're being laid off
| because the company can make more money by taking your salary and
| buying government bonds.
|
| When your team got spun up to work on this project, interest
| rates were low and it was a sound investment to try this project
| out. If it was successful, it might have made/saved a moderate
| amount of money. It made sense to invest in it, compared to all
| the other options available at the time.
|
| But alas, inflation soared and interest rates rose faster than
| predicted, so now the bonds are a better bet than you and your
| team doing whatever it was you were doing. According to this
| spreadsheet, it wasn't nearly as profitable as the bonds.
| froidpink wrote:
| If I am a Meta investor, and I see they use my capital to buy
| government bonds, why would I invest in them? I'd just buy the
| bonds myself.
|
| Meta is supposed to be a Tech company and invest the capital
| they have in technology plays
| boveus wrote:
| I believe that is the point the OP was making. If you're ROI
| on employee X is 3% of the investors' dollar, the investor
| would simply buy a bond since the ROI on the bond is higher.
| Because of this discrepancy it no longer makes sense to keep
| employees or business units with a 3% ROI or an ROI lower
| than what the expected return on a bond is.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Hard to make money adjusted for inflation buying government
| bonds that are still negative in real terms...
|
| Also, FB isn't buying treasuries...
| dx034 wrote:
| Government bonds yield 3-4%. I don't think they ever calculated
| with a margin of just 4%. It's true that liquidity has dried up
| to some degree and companies have alternatives what to do with
| their money, but it's not like they though they'd yield only 3%
| by hiring more people.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Closer to 5% now
| mrfox321 wrote:
| back down to 4.3 for short term t-bills
|
| yields dropped almost 1 point after depositor bailouts for
| SVB. the running belief is that the fed will slow down in
| response to fixed-income positions held by banks.
| oblio wrote:
| What maturity? I'm only seeing 3.XX% here:
| https://www.treasurydirect.gov/marketable-
| securities/treasur...
| notShabu wrote:
| I think this is really good intuition on what the Fed
| effectively does. When it's really easy to teleport money from
| the future, all that money competes in the present for a
| limited supply of good. This causes inflation and reduces
| margins and can cause profitable endeavors to become non-
| profitable "hobbies."*
|
| Increased interest rates suck up this money because now there
| is something better to do with that money. Why "Do Stuff" when
| the returns on doing stuff is less than the ultra high savings
| yield you are now being offered.
|
| It's virtuous when the stuff being done actually _is_
| destructive due to easy access to capital (e.g. 100 Ramen shops
| driving each other into further and further debt) but it 's
| also a ham-fisted solution. It disrupts long term planning,
| even relatively conservative ones like "buy government bonds",
| and also just punts the problem b/c it's reducing demand by...
| promising more money in the future.
| saos wrote:
| > In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization
| flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of
| this, we will ask many managers to become individual
| contributors.
|
| So basically more rounds of layoffs to come?
|
| > This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career
| perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates
| at least three days a week.
|
| Sounds like they pulling the plug on remote work
|
| Has Meta been found out as a company?
| yla92 wrote:
| > In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization
| flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of
| this, we will ask many managers to become individual
| contributors.
|
| I am curious what people think about this.
| makestuff wrote:
| "As part of the Year of Efficiency, we're focusing on returning
| to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles."
|
| I found this interesting, I wonder what the optimal ratio is. If
| the ratio is too high then eng is going to be hit hard, if it is
| too low then other roles are going to be hit hard.
| quux wrote:
| Headline: Update on our year of efficiency"
|
| Translation: We weren't efficient at all
| vesinisa wrote:
| > Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000
| people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we
| haven't yet hired.
|
| So in total this means about 16% reduction from what Facebook was
| aiming to scale to in December 2022 (86k staff). I wish the
| investors had put Zuck in his place and killed the Metaverse
| concept early, but it looks like these cuts are across the board
| and not impacting any particular project.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I wish the investors had put Zuck in his place
|
| Mark Zuckerberg has 55% of the company's voting shares, giving
| him majority power.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| The government should bailout FB. Think of the workers!
| frob wrote:
| > garbage collect unnecessary processes,
|
| I may be wrong and he may be actually referring to optimizing
| garbage collection on their servers, but this sounds like a
| callous and heartless way to refer to firing 10k people.
| justinclift wrote:
| "People" -> "Human resources" -> "Processes"
|
| Hmmm, wonder what the next step of "threads" will look like? ;)
| oblio wrote:
| Heck, let's go all the way with the metaphors. Execute, reap.
| postsantum wrote:
| No, that's the final form. The beginning of the Terminator
| movie takes place in 2029, when "terminate a process" has
| become an euphemism for killing humans
| Jensson wrote:
| So you would be happier if he said "I'm very sad and I take
| full responsibility"? People who judge based on word usage is
| why they write that fake crap.
| frob wrote:
| He just didn't even need to say it. It added nothing to the
| statement at all besides make him sound like a heartless
| android who sees people and hardware as the exact same thing.
| czbond wrote:
| As a heartless android, I understand his sentiment - but
| agree it could be removed to focus on the core message.
| andsoitis wrote:
| He is being authentic. That is not language crafted by some
| HR drone. I respect that.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| No he's really referring to projects being shut down as
| "garbage collection", and I agree it is super heartless. It's
| interesting that Sheryl Sandberg left in the fall and now
| official comms from Mark like this are much less human--you can
| really see the absence of someone like Sheryl who could say to
| Mark, "hey this sounds terrible to real people, don't do this"
| and not get fired for it.
| oblio wrote:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-
| im...
| czbond wrote:
| I read it as just internal company processes holding the
| company down or back. Large companies collect these as more and
| more controls are put in place to guide correct behaviors.
| mv4 wrote:
| Re: "As part of this, we will ask many managers to become
| individual contributors."
|
| Only the best managers will survive this.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Alex3917 wrote:
| The obvious question here is why a social network considers
| itself to be primarily a technology company that should be led by
| technologists. It seems like Zuck is trying to pull a WeWork
| here.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably
| still very much in demand) to look elsewhere
|
| Where? Just FAANGS are giving that level of salary and FAANGS are
| not hiring.
| biohax2015 wrote:
| They will take lower salaries then.
| [deleted]
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Besides the main stuff:
|
| Wow, I would not have guessed that Buck2 would be mentioned by
| name, and the only project done so.
| [deleted]
| julius wrote:
| How do they have sooo many employees. They are running a few
| websites and a bunch of apps. I can understand how they would
| need a hundred people for that. They have a massive userbase. So
| I can understand how they would need a thousand people just to
| deal with tech at scale and support.
|
| But how do you manage to have so many people that you can fire
| 10k ?! If I googled well, they appear to have 72k employees.
| Where did you find the management that thought having 72k
| employees is reasonable to operate a bunch of websites and apps
| ?!
| janalsncm wrote:
| It would probably be considered uncouth to send _Macroeconomic
| Changes Have Made It Impossible For Me To Want To Pay You_ , but
| in a way it's at least an honest, non-corporate ipsum
| explanation. It's also much more fun to read.
|
| https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-ha...
| williamsmj wrote:
| The most interesting bit of this letter to me is this one:
|
| "Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier
| in their career perform better on average when they work in-
| person with teammates at least three days a week."
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| wallaBBB wrote:
| Could someone save me from reading through it - Did Zuck take
| full responsibility? I really sleep better when CEOs state that
| they take full responsibility for massive layoffs.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'd rather hear what Ja Rule has to say!
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Where is Ja!?
| cleanchit wrote:
| For those who don't know: https://youtu.be/Mo-ddYhXAZc
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| Joshua, is that you?
| dekhn wrote:
| I dunno about anybody else, but Zuckerberg and Pichai both have
| writing styles with very little substance or convincing
| argumebnts.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| This is the 4th layoff announcement on which I've tried our
| Buzzword Bingo app:
|
| https://1fish2.github.io/buzzword-bingo/corp-bingo.html
|
| and still nothing! I think we need a new set of buzzwords.
| Southland wrote:
| > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier
| in their career perform better on average when they work in-
| person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires
| further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to
| build trust in person and that those relationships help us work
| more effectively.
| wootland wrote:
| > _our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in
| person_
|
| Nothing builds trust like callously laying off tens of
| thousands of people over multiple rounds of layoffs! Want a
| trustworthy environment? Earn it. Really though when he says
| "build trust" what he means is that he (Zuck) does not trust
| his employees unless he can see them.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > he (Zuck) does not trust his employees unless he can see
| them.
|
| You know that's not true. Facebook has offices around the
| world. No single person can "see" 80,000 people in any
| meaningful way.
| wootland wrote:
| His ideology and distrust is propagated down the managerial
| ranks. It's an entire culture built on distrust and
| exploitation.
| ASinclair wrote:
| > This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is
| still easier to build trust in person
|
| I chuckled a bit. This is coming from a Social Media Company
| whose product is about connecting online. What does it say
| about the trust between users of its platforms?
| Pyrodogg wrote:
| About as good as musk Tweeting that phone calls are better
| than tweets for actually connecting with some.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Well I mean, the simple explanation is online is still far
| better than nothing. I'm not sure anyone is expecting you to
| read someone's wall if you could just talk to them every day.
| enumjorge wrote:
| But given the choice, why would a company invest in VR
| headsets as a way to collaborate remotely if the company
| selling them thinks in-person is better?
| el_cujo wrote:
| I don't think those ideas necessarily contradict. If
| you're using VR to collaborate with someone on the other
| side of the country (or world) but you only need to
| collaborate intermittently, then remote collaboration
| just has to be "good enough" to offset the cost of travel
| even if in person would be ideal. Meanwhile, for their
| own employees who may need to collaborate daily, from
| their point of view they might think in that case it
| makes more sense to enforce in-person. I doubt Meta's
| stated goal (at this point) with their VR stuff is that
| you should never ever leave your house because VR is just
| as good, seems like it's more "this thing enables remote
| to be better".
| jayd16 wrote:
| Adding to what others have said, the headsets are
| actually MR devices. You can collaborate in person with
| shared virtual objects. I will admit that the software
| isn't there yet, but the vision is you could comfortably
| replace models and mock ups with richer virtual media.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| It can be that in-person is best, but isn't always
| possible. And then it can also be the case that VR is
| better than connecting over Web/Mobile, while also being
| far cheaper than a plane ticket.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Originally Facebook was all about only connecting with people
| you already know. So it's not as ironic as you are
| suggesting.
| gedy wrote:
| Yeah "it is still easier to build trust in person, so they
| can work together on collaborating via floating Wiimote heads
| in VR"
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment.
| Since Meta was hiring mostly new grads or junior leetcoders it
| makes sense that remote work culture at Meta hit some bumps.
| parzivalm wrote:
| > Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment.
|
| Blanket statements like this are trying to make a
| multifaceted problem into a single problem. I don't
| understand why we are always so quick to say underperforming
| remote junior engineers are underperforming because of remote
| work. Maybe the problem was Meta went half in on supporting
| remote as an onboarding ramp and teams did not put the work
| in to make sure Juniors thrived in a remote environment.
|
| Speaking from experience, If you are truly trying to be a
| remote company, you adjust as needed to support new
| employees, junior or not.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I think you both are correct. Take normal graduate, split
| spacetime continuum into 2 parallel universes, and let 1
| join same company remotely and onsite. Unless given
| company/team is very toxic, graduate who has gazillion
| questions every day and gets stuck even more will get them
| answered more easily if he just comes in person to seniors,
| rather than chasing calls/chats every time he is stuck or
| uncertain how to decide.
|
| Quick brainstormings, pair programming. I mean its not up
| to discussion, real world on site is more efficient. Now
| from perspective of senior always bothered by those pesky
| juniors with their stupid questions, loud environment etc.
| its a different story. Company can set itself up to be much
| more open to fully remote, but its a conscious and
| continuous process that needs to be accepted by all
| seniors, people tend to revert to previous way of working.
|
| Personally, I can see this also for seniors who are also
| onsite. In truly global teams, you are constantly chasing
| people and teams to do their work, approve processes,
| deliver stuff etc. Compared to person X who will respond to
| your email/chat in 4 hours it takes 1 minute including
| walking to get feedback, understand problem, manage
| expectations, push things further etc.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| But Meta is famous for its "Sink or Swim" cut-throat
| culture.
| papito wrote:
| How many people out there randomly zoom with their former
| coworkers that they never met in real life, after leaving
| their job?
|
| Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make
| connections and friendships - in person. You need to be
| around people, making friends over beers and community
| lunches, and learning social skills in a professional
| environment.
|
| Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public
| transportation"?
|
| Do companies take a productivity hit when people are in the
| office? Probably. And many openly acknowledge that, but
| asking people to come to the office two times a week is not
| some sort of wage slavery.
| mehlmao wrote:
| I've worked with people (remotely) in the past that I'll
| still hop on Discord and play video games with.
|
| Working remote lets me make connections and friendships
| where I live, and have more time to do so than when I was
| spending hours each day commuting.
| parzivalm wrote:
| > Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make
| connections and friendships - in person. You need to be
| around people, making friends over beers and community
| lunches, and learning social skills in a professional
| environment.
|
| No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but
| a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of
| friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that
| should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It
| enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to
| be created young workers that don't know any better. If
| you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone
| as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push
| you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can
| forge working/professional relationships virtually just
| as well, if you put the effort in.
|
| Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my
| argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is
| just that we make too many blanket statements. What works
| for you might not work for me, and these organizations
| trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end.
| You can have co-existence, especially in a company the
| size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office
| presence and remote presence.
|
| > Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like
| public transportation"?
|
| I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That
| being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people
| in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous
| job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of
| traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and
| I was in an area with supposedly great access to public
| transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about
| their workers' best interests they would do more to help
| invest in and lobby local governments to support public
| transportation.
|
| > And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to
| come to the office two times a week is not some sort of
| wage slavery.
|
| If you were hired with the expectation to come into the
| office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people
| were hired with the promise of being able to work remote,
| so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad
| situation.
|
| In general this animosity between office work and remote
| work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-
| exist.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make
| connections and friendships - in person. You need to be
| around people, making friends over beers and community
| lunches, and learning social skills in a professional
| environment.
|
| Okay, sure. But why does this need to happen in the
| workplace?
|
| And more importantly, why are you advocating for
| employers to unilaterally declare that this needs to
| happen in the workplace?
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| Connection doesn't need to happen in the workplace, but
| the reality is that most people spend a majority of their
| weekday waking hours working so would be great if
| building connections there were feasible.
| krona wrote:
| If that means only hiring at half the rate because of the
| longer onboarding ritual then that's a good a reason as any
| not to do remote onboarding for some companies.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| You cannot blame company policies for the poor performance or
| low motivation of individual junior developers. My team has
| hired multiple junior developers in the last 2 years, all of
| whom are 100% remote, and they've been doing excellent.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Right, and it's up to the team to go above and beyond to
| help them. Managers and senior devs need to step up and get
| involved more with mentoring and helping.In the office you
| can gage stress levels of someone who is stuck,lost and not
| asking for help. In remote they will just hunker down and
| work nights to try to push through, it happens more to
| junior than to senior (usually).
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I'm going to trust Meta's sample size of probably thousands
| over your sample size of "multiple".
|
| I had six juniors join my team remotely and three are
| amazing, two are ok (do useful work but need handholding),
| but one is pretty bad. However I don't know how that
| compares to non-remote hires so it could be that it's
| worse.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| This is really not a matter of sample size.
|
| If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will
| need to think about sampling, be careful about what you
| test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you
| don't know.
|
| Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a
| huge company messing with the lives of many people and
| claiming they know exactly what they are doing.
| november84 wrote:
| I totally get that, but it's important to look who's
| providing the information. I highly doubt the analysis
| was independent of bias.
|
| We know many companies want to push for back to office
| work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard...
|
| Some food for thought.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| I think they are not blaming individual junior devs, they
| are saying across their hires, they noticed a trend.
|
| You said your team hired multiple junior devs, I am gonna
| assume its less than 10 hope that is fair assumption. Meta
| has hired almost 40,000 people since 2019. Even a
| conservative estimate of how many were engineers, and
| distribution of junior and senior roles. I think it is fair
| to say they probably had enough people to draw meaningful
| conclusions.
|
| Perhaps individual teams, with careful hiring practices and
| team fit interviews can make sure juniors thrive even in a
| remote position. But on average, larger companies cannot be
| only staffed by super teams, and sometimes that means some
| people suffer to make sure the median employee has the best
| chance to succeed.
|
| Its not too far from having junior limited to some staging
| environments instead of production. Some juniors might be
| ready for the big leagues, but giving the keys of prod to
| any junior will probably cause some headaches on companies
| with 80,000 employees like Meta.
| bproven wrote:
| yep - it is the culture that determines this. Ive worked at
| full remote companies that took time to mentor juniors and
| it worked fine
| karmelapple wrote:
| +1 to this. Our small company hired our first full-time
| junior dev last year. They've been a fantastic addition to
| the team. We have also been doing 100% remote for over a
| decade, so our existing processes helped I imagine, too.
| But I've got another data point that a junior dev can
| certainly thrive doing 100% remote work.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| It's easy to assume other companies are incompetent, and
| your company is amazing.
|
| But it's harder to onboard at a company like Facebook than
| at a startup. Every company could have better processes -
| but when it takes months for even top-tier talent to be
| able to do basically anything - it can be extremely helpful
| to be in person during that time...
|
| And, sure, everyone is different. I'm sure some special
| snowflake will reply - but it isn't for me!! I'm speaking
| in general - as Facebook is...
| noisenotsignal wrote:
| Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding
| remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor
| onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going
| back to in-person saves having to invest in better
| onboarding. But that's just an argument that the status
| quo is easier - of course it's easier to keep doing what
| you're used to, and of course traditional onboarding is
| geared towards in-person! And that's quite unfortunate
| because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite
| successfully so there's possibly nothing inherent to
| remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.
| dongobread wrote:
| It does not surprise me at all that performance ratings are
| correlated with office presence, but not for the reasons they
| imply. The performance evaluation system at Meta is heavily
| biased towards political visibility and grandstanding and these
| are simply much easier to achieve in a physical workplace.
| guywithahat wrote:
| The irony is they're tip-toeing around this but it's been known
| remote workers don't perform as well for as long as I've been
| in the industry. There's a reason CEO's will often come in
| touting how they're going to promote wfh and then back off once
| they see the performance metrics their policy creates
| strus wrote:
| > it's been known remote workers don't perform as well for as
| long as I've been in the industry
|
| I've worked in the industry for 10 years now, and I don't
| agree "it's been known". Any measurable source of such
| claims?
| wootland wrote:
| > _it's been known remote workers don't perform as well for
| as long as I've been in the industry._
|
| It most certainly is not "known". I've managed remote teams,
| I've managed in-office teams and I've managed the same people
| in both scenarios. At no time was the office advantageous to
| innovation. Quite the opposite, it's a soul suck and once you
| free people to work how they are comfortable, their
| creativity will skyrocket.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I'm 2 decades into this career with the last 10 being remote,
| and I am as productive as I was in the office.
|
| It certainly takes discipline but I treat working from home
| the same as if I was in an office.
|
| I am at my desk during business hours. People can Slack me,
| email me, call me on Teams, whatever. Besides, everything is
| _logged_. Every line of code, pull request, login time, email
| sent, all of it. They know what I 'm up to.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Or maybe they lowered their hiring bar over the last few years,
| when employees had no choice to be in-office...
| paxys wrote:
| To me this sounds more like - engineers who have been at Meta <
| 3 years (so were hired remote) are performing worse than those
| who have worked there longer. Which...doesn't sound that crazy
| and doesn't have to be related to remote vs in-person at all.
| _Of course_ your tenured employees are better at their jobs.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Anecdotally... GOOG/Meta haven't updated their interview
| process significantly and it now just screens for quantity of
| leetcode grinded. This is likely a poor signal for actual
| engineering competence.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| This was the most obtuse portion of the entire diatribe, and
| further cements my rather low opinion of Meta leadership;
| they have all the data in the world, but have no idea how to
| make proper conclusions from it.
| agos wrote:
| I'm very curious as to what constitutes "performing better" in
| the context of this metric
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Selling more ads
| zpeti wrote:
| I wonder if the eventual result of all this work from home
| debate will be that it's something that's earned after a period
| of time. e.g. 1 day a week after 6 months of employment, 2 from
| 1 year, etc.
|
| That actually makes perfect sense to me from a practical
| perspective.
| callahad wrote:
| Gradual phase-in makes sense to me, too, but who's going to
| be in the office to mentor those folks?
| wootland wrote:
| It doesn't make sense because the biggest advantage to WFH is
| that people can live in a lower cost of living city (and
| companies can hire the best talent globally). Forcing people
| into the office even once a month means you're tied to the
| real estate market next to the office.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| More likely based on level than tenure
| concordDance wrote:
| Matches my experience.
| lapcat wrote:
| I wonder how that analysis takes into account the general
| craziness and stressfulness of the pandemic, which was the
| cause of many employees joining Meta remotely? Not to mention,
| Meta did a crazy total amount of hiring during the pandemic,
| ramped up very quickly, which by itself can lead to
| inefficiency.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| How many companies are going to copy meta?
| iamspoilt wrote:
| Does anyone else find the irony in this statement from a company
| that is pushing for a Virtual Reality social world since almost
| the beginning?
|
| > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier
| in their career perform better on average when they work in-
| person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires
| further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to
| build trust in person and that those relationships help us work
| more effectively.
|
| > As part of our Year of Efficiency, we're focusing on
| understanding this further and finding ways to make sure people
| build the necessary connections to work effectively. In the
| meantime, I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to
| work with your colleagues in person.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| So many though, all at once. This is criminal lack of forseight
| and mismanagement
| ar7hur wrote:
| "[...] garbage collect unnecessary processes [...]" At least we
| know some parts of the post were actually written by Zuck
| himself, not the PR team.
| whalesalad wrote:
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CkHjg5LJwpU/
| swellguy wrote:
| "I don't know what I'm doing, but I will figure it out in a
| transitory future period" Does Jerome Powell run FB?
| varispeed wrote:
| It's a good reminder that you a nothing for the corporation, a
| nuisance, a cost, a necessary evil.
|
| The moment they find a way to replace you and cut costs they
| will.
|
| This means, don't bother working more than you have to, after all
| you are not working towards your own private jet, but you are
| building wealth of people who don't have your best interest in
| mind.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Starts off saying how they're building tools to help people
| connect digitally as if they're there in person and the proceeds
| to say it's really shit and people should meet in person.
|
| The whole in office is better thing is a farce, but how can you
| buy into a 'vision' when they don't believe it themselves.
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| half the people there dont believe in the metaverse. That's
| their long term strategy that they've sink billions of dollars
| into.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| Sounds like a winning formula /s
| NickSingh wrote:
| Quick Question: why do the layoffs take so long? Like why is he
| saying for some groups it may take till the end of the year?
| Internally, doesn't that mean nobody has any morale or gets any
| work done for a proper year, since everyone remains jaded and on
| edge?
| scirocco wrote:
| Their website looks like a poorly designed lifestyle blog
| damsta wrote:
| I asked ChatGPT about taking responsibility for the layoff, here
| is the response:
|
| > The blog post does not explicitly state that Mark Zuckerberg
| takes full responsibility for the layoffs.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| Makes sense, they haven't had a CEO for a while now. When was the
| last time Zuck went into the office? 6 months?
| graderjs wrote:
| Ouch...the pain just continues
| bilekas wrote:
| This whole schpeel has actually put me in a horrible mood.
|
| I don't even have a FB account but every second line here is full
| of the type of gaslighting and bizspeak BS that absolutely nobody
| appreciates.
|
| > We do this with AI to help you creatively express yourself and
| discover new content.
|
| You mean destroy adolescent growing minds with more and more
| addictive short burst content from advertisers.
|
| > but with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure
| our company remains primarily technologists.
|
| So goodbye ethics councils, any semblance of internal discussion
| over our impact on the world.
|
| > Profitability enables innovation.
|
| Because investors LOVE taking risks on `innovation` during a
| downturn. /s
|
| More like they will push harder the methods which make their
| bonus'.
|
| Facebook/Meta has provided nothing beneficial long term, to the
| world. Let it burn.
| favaq wrote:
| "layoff" is a noun. I think you meant "lay off"
| itg wrote:
| In the "In-person time helps build relationships and get more
| done" section, looks like they're setting the groundwork to force
| a back-to-office plan.
| Octokiddie wrote:
| The word "efficiency" appears 20 times in this article. Yet not
| once does the author explain where all of the inefficiency - the
| layers, the fat, and the lethargy - came from. Nor does he
| explain the logic of culling employees now.
|
| These are not the words of someone who has learned lessons or who
| is interested in telling the truth.
|
| So here's a hypothesis: Facebook is not a "technology company,"
| it's an advertising company. And spending on advertising has
| cratered as businesses everywhere have pulled in their horns in
| response to their own falling revenues. Facebook lived large
| during the fake boom. It hired way too many people and a built a
| bloated, middle-heavy organization that is poorly-suited to the
| task ahead: taking back territory it's lost to smaller, nimbler
| competitors. Facebook management bought the economic lies being
| told hook, line, and sinker.
|
| The party's now over and Facebook faces major headwinds,
| including savage competition, declining revenue, and the
| aftermath of a hiring orgy gone wrong.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Yet not once does the author explain where all of the
| inefficiency
|
| "The author" is a bit of a strange way to refer to Mark
| Zuckerberg himself.
| world2vec wrote:
| Do you really believe Zuckerberg wrote this by himself? He
| probably just signed it off.
| lapcat wrote:
| By himself? No. I don't think the precise authorship even
| matters. It is represented as coming from Zuckerberg, as an
| official company statement: "Mark Zuckerberg just shared
| the following with Meta employees". Zuck publicly endorsed
| it as his views on the matter, regardless of the pedantic
| details of who exactly wrote which sentences. I don't think
| it makes much sense to distinguish the author(s) from Mark.
|
| When the President of the United States gives a speech, you
| don't analyze the speech as if it were the views of the
| speechwriter(s). Of course the POTUS is just reading from a
| teleprompter, but the writers are hired by the POTUS to
| write for him, as is the case with Zuckerberg too.
| whalesalad wrote:
| > So here's a hypothesis: Facebook is not a "technology
| company," it's an advertising company.
|
| Hypothesis? They've been an ad company for a long time.
| rchaud wrote:
| To paraphrase Steve Ballmer: "investors, investors investors".
|
| The 'efficiency' here is slashing operational expenses to boost
| earnings per share. That is a temporary boost, but one that can
| be repeated a few times.
| fatnoah wrote:
| Some part of it was highlighted with the mention of an org
| chart that is both deep and sparse. Many managers had only 2-4
| reports with the expectation that the org chart would fill out
| with hiring. Now that hiring has slowed dramatically, those
| levels won't fill out, so consolidation makes sense.
|
| There was also a lot of duplicative and overlapping work, which
| is mentioned as well.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Look at the section on being lean. He talks about that a lot
| zmmmmm wrote:
| > not once does the author explain where all of the
| inefficiency ... came from
|
| I think you need to RTFA ... it covers all those areas in great
| detail ... it's is one of the most detailed such posts I've
| ever seen like this.
| cbb330 wrote:
| Definitely agree. I'be never read a post from CEO level
| explaining very specific reasons and goals for their actions.
|
| I'm betting on Zuck here, and wish I could get this same
| level of specificity at my company.
| morph123 wrote:
| Meta still has so much talent, especially in the AI space. I
| consider them probably just as talented as the deepmind folks, if
| not more so. They can still achieve world domination for sure.
| prpl wrote:
| After 15 years of the talent acquisition arms race they all
| finally got what they wanted, and now they are happy to throw it
| all way.
| yafbum wrote:
| Layoffs will continue until the metaverse strategy is a roaring
| success?
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I think I've posted this before - but can't find it.
|
| We always used to joke that layoffs always come in threes. The
| first one never cuts deep enough. People do the bare minimum.
|
| The second one comes when everyone realises that the business
| actually is in trouble and does need saving.
|
| The third one is needed as the business has been so badly damaged
| by the layoffs and is now bleeding cash.
| [deleted]
| djha-skin wrote:
| > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier
| in their career perform better on average when they work in-
| person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires
| further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to
| build trust in person and that those relationships help us work
| more effectively.
|
| Realizing that this is an unpopular opinion, in person work is
| better for the business. Business decisions are being made around
| encouraging in person work, because relationships help at work.
| adamwong246 wrote:
| Therein lies the fundamental contradiction- Meta does not want
| it's own workers to work remotely, but they want to sell a
| product predicated on living remotely. They want their workers
| enthralled in real-life AND in the metaverse. IRL, they want
| their workers in their cubes and in the metaverse, in a
| different cage but a cage nonetheless.
|
| I'm not sure if anyone at Meta understand that very few humans,
| outside of Meta stakeholders, want this company to continue to
| exist.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Wow.
|
| Is it total reduction now of 21K of 86K approximately? 24.4%
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| There's a huge number of Product people on TikTok who seem to
| spend their whole day bragging about their cushy, low impact,
| high pay jobs. They're still around, too - I wonder how much
| longer.
| kenjackson wrote:
| But you also can't trust people on TikTok.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| I absolutely agree, but this comment [0] lays it out well.
| In a non-TikTok news article:
|
| "During her senior year at UCLA, Riley Rojas decided to
| pursue a career in Big Tech -- and she wanted to work for
| the best ... This week in #KeepingtheBalance, Rojas shares
| how she landed her job at Meta with a political science
| background. Spoiler: It took a whole lot of studying and
| manifestation."
|
| I worked my ass off in Engineering school, and as an
| engineer, to get into FAANG. She manifested with a
| background in Poli Sci. There's going to be anger about
| those optics. It's not surprising to see PMs decimated
| right now, based on the poor growth numbers, declining user
| engagement, and said optics.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33361622
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Yeah, when the PM's have no coherent vision for products
| and their suggestions are only harming engagement/metrics
| then its not surprising the next line is: "What would you
| say you do here?"
| kenjackson wrote:
| This goes w/o saying.
|
| I think the better question is what if the PM has a
| coherent vision and is helping engagement/metrics. Is
| delivering on the outcomes that leadership wants. And can
| do it all by 2pm?
|
| Our culture has become so obsessed with working for the
| sake of working. We talk about being outcome focused,
| rather than just doing busy work. But when someone is
| actually outcome focused then we want them to stay busy.
|
| I agree that if the person isn't delivering results then
| they shouldn't do the job. But if they are delivering
| results then why do I care what they do with their
| afternoons?
| kenjackson wrote:
| That post you link seems skeptical about her three start
| ups due to her being a political science major. But if
| you look at her LinkedIn account they appear to be actual
| start ups, just not tech focused. But it seems like the
| type of skill set that I would look for in a product
| manager.
|
| People who go out and make things happen are rare.
| Regardless of major.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| This interpretation rings hollow - if you've worked at
| any tech company, you've seen the hoards of people who
| manage to create meetings about meetings, grow their
| empire, and amass massive salaries with no relevant
| skills. A lot of it is about showing a record of "getting
| things done" - but things that don't matter.
| kenjackson wrote:
| If people are getting things done, but these things don't
| matter -- that's the fault of leadership. Leadership
| should have clear goals/OKRs/outcomes that they've agreed
| to. These people should be getting these things done. If
| they do these things and they don't matter -- it's likely
| not their fault.
|
| And this applies doubly so for a junior product manager.
| I was not long ago VP of Engineering and if my team built
| stuff, using best practices and on time, but what we
| built didn't matter -- I couldn't blame them. It's my
| fault. It's my job to make sure what we build matters.
|
| But if I can give a set of OKRs and you can drive to make
| those happen -- those people are gold. Now you can argue
| with me that the OKRs were bad. That's fine. Fire me. But
| the person that delivered it -- those people are worth
| their weight...
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| "It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate
| colleagues..."
|
| What kind of sociopath one has to be not to realize there's
| something very wrong about writing a piece like this?
|
| It's almost like Mark or whoever put it together enjoyed doing
| it.
| turbobooster wrote:
| Good, evil company yet hners love them for the salary $$$
| bluedino wrote:
| _Update on Meta's Year of Efficiency_
|
| Great title.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Raydovsky wrote:
| It's not just bloat. It's also shitty devs that create more
| work for everybody else.
| jstx1 wrote:
| That's not how they decide who gets laid off.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| It probably is sorry.
| zht wrote:
| Sorry what is a soy latte programmer
| Slighted wrote:
| A different version of "Soyboy" which itself is based off of
| the "Nu-Male" meme. Defining traits of a "Nu-Male" include
| (but are not limited to):
|
| - A lack of masculine and mature traits (Excessively self-
| conscious, weak-willed, a canvas for [Current trends],
| potentially narcissistic)
|
| - Beard-and-glasses aesthetic (Also previously known as the
| "Hipster" style)
|
| - Terminally online and outspoken. Slacktivists
|
| - Usually (but not always) "Leftists" with pronouns in their
| bio, LGBT+, BLM, Etc.
|
| - Usually (but not always) white, male, and lives in urban
| areas (Portland, New York, SF, Etc.)
|
| - Tries to come off as more intelligent than they usually
| are. Lacks perspective of the world at large.
|
| And there is no shortage of these kinds of people on social
| media and in large technology-oriented organizations and
| corporations.
| rvz wrote:
| Surely so-called 'programmers' here should be smart enough to
| know that the parent comment is talking about everyone here
| on the orange site.
|
| Ironically, you're pretending to be dumber than the
| 'dumbaccount'; proving their point.
| EToS wrote:
| Apparently, this.
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Soydev
| lost_my_pwd wrote:
| I think they are referring to this:
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Soydev
|
| Appears to be a derogatory term that, by diminishing the
| efforts and abilities of others, is used to make one feel
| better about one's self.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| It's 4chan gobbledegook that has no place in actual discourse
| [deleted]
| DrThunder wrote:
| Your comment has nothing to do with his/her point and also
| has no place in this discussion. You're trying to use an
| identity attack to dismiss the point.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| OP seems to imply developers that order soy milk for their
| latte are on average poor developers. I'd find that
| correlation to be quite unlikely.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's a sexist alt-right meme because they associate soy
| with estrogen. In this imagined causality, someone who
| consumes soy milk would be more feminine, and of course
| women are bad programmers.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| Sexist really? seems like you have a preconceived ideas
| in your head. Stop strawmanning. Also its not that
| serious.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Could you try to explain the link to soy milk? When I
| think of people who order soy milk, I think they are
| likely to be lactose intolerant, which then I would
| associate with being less likely to be northern European
| ancestry, which then I might associate that with likely
| to be harder working and maybe marginally better
| developers, so I'd guess the relationship might be
| opposite to your suggestion.
|
| Full disclosure I'm 100% northern European ancestry,
| 42.75% English, 37.5% Irish, 6.25% Danish. Plenty of hard
| working developers with similar ancestry to me, neither
| the less, the stereotype would be Asian developers are
| harder working, certainly the bosses often think that, to
| the point that I've observed what I would categorize as
| pro Asian biases.
|
| Anyway, I'm guessing soy latte ordering is likely
| positively correlated to developer performance. Not
| negatively as you suggest.
| Slighted wrote:
| >sexist alt-right meme
|
| Don't make me laugh. "Alt-right" is a stupid, nonsensical
| term made up by news corporations to serve as a
| convenient boogeyman, and the meme itself isn't sexist in
| the slightest. Elevated estrogen levels in men ARE
| detrimental for numerous reasons. This has nothing to do
| with women, period.
|
| Soy is associated with elevated estrogen levels because
| of phytoestrogens. Whether or not they actually affect
| the human endocrine system isn't clear, but you can't
| deny the customers of Soylent products all share...
| similar traits.
| rvz wrote:
| > It's a sexist alt-right meme because they associate soy
| with estrogen.
|
| ???
|
| > In this imagined causality, someone who consumes soy
| milk would be more feminine, and of course women are bad
| programmers.
|
| You're looking too deep into this. It is _you_ who is
| implying that.
| kshacker wrote:
| As a reader I did not know but it made me laugh since it tied
| in with a stereotype I may have had. I can speculate this to
| be gen X or whatever who is more concerned with the politics
| of doing work and fringe benefits than doing the work itself.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| Bingo, when i say soy latte programmer everyone knows
| exactly what I mean.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Riley Rojas/Jay Ersapah at SVB is a perfect example here.
| That was a real shitstorm - spend a lot of time on
| DEI/LGBT/ERG issues, spend very little time doing
| productive work.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It a programmer named Latte introducing himself in Spanish.
| papito wrote:
| "Let's just hire people and give them obnoxious compensation
| packages before another FAANG gets them" may not be a business
| strategy that works in the lean times.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| I a lot of ways this feels to me like Zuckerberg taking back the
| company after the Sheryl Sandberg years. There is no adult
| supervision any more and Mark is now unrestrained in living out
| his geek ideology that says engineering led companies are better
| and layers of middle management are fundamentally wasted. I have
| some sympathy for this viewpoint but I think it is all too easy
| to under estimate how special the whole culture of an
| organisation needs to be to actually make fully engineering led
| leadership work. I am not sure you can impose it from top down.
| But it will be very interesting to see how he goes at it.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Dear Metamates,
|
| I've had to make some hard decisions, to fire ten thousand of
| you. But don't worry I take full responsibility for this failure.
| yashap wrote:
| Life imitates art: https://youtu.be/u48vYSLvKNQ
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Though you bear the full consequences of my decision, fret not,
| my feelings are hurt a little bit.
| r00fus wrote:
| <insert Shrek/Farquad meme>
| abirch wrote:
| I take solace that you say you take responsibility otherwise no
| one would have known.
| karlmdavis wrote:
| "Year of Efficiency"? Hoo boy... is Zuck picking up his
| management strategies from a podcast/YouTube channel? I mean, I
| shouldn't/wouldn't be surprised by that but still, wow. Playing
| in the kiddie pool.
|
| (Strongly reminiscent of the Cortex podcast's "yearly themes".
| Which I like! But... I'm not running one of the world's largest
| companies, am I?)
| andsoitis wrote:
| I don't understand your sentiment. Calling out a top priority
| for the year so that everyone at the company knows seems like a
| good approach to aligning people across a large organization.
| deepakkarki wrote:
| > Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000
| people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we
| haven't yet hired.
|
| Wait so does that mean they'll end up with 10K less after hiring
| 5K folks? Which might imply that they'll be firing 15K people.
| przemub wrote:
| No, it means that they won't hire these 5K in the first place.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I'm reading it as 10,000 people being fired and 5,000 job
| openings, some of which may have offers out, being cancelled.
| rexreed wrote:
| They are firing 10k people they have already hired, and not
| hiring for 5k roles where they haven't yet hired. So 10k are
| leaving, and the planned 5k they were going to add will not
| add. This means they are losing 10k.
| pif wrote:
| No, it means they will not hire 5 k people they had planned to
| hire, and they'll let 10 k people go within their current
| workforce.
| owlbynight wrote:
| It's weird that several large tech companies all need to fire
| around 10,000 people at the same time. It's almost like the
| number is completely arbitrary and they're all soullessly
| choosing profit over their people because they can.
| golergka wrote:
| How is choosing the profit of an average american 401k holder
| over the salary of $500k engineer "soulless"?
|
| People tend to forget that through all the layers of different
| companies and funds, the average person who owns Facebook
| shares is less well off than an average Facebook employee.
| bradlys wrote:
| It's almost like the economic system which all these companies
| are based in demands profit over improving the lives of
| people...
|
| Weird.
| przemub wrote:
| "Year of Efficiency". Oh wow.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| They need to scale up and make a 5-year plan.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Definitely has some Maoist undertones
| admissionsguy wrote:
| With Facebook having lost much of its prominence, it's easy to
| forget that this guy still considers himself a king and a
| visionary in his little fiefdom.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Yes. That is one of the worst euphemisms of the year.
| pictur wrote:
| Companies should share these updates in a short and concise way
| rather than posting such and nonsense articles. Sharing like this
| sounds really absurd. I tried to read it, but when I saw that he
| was talking about speeding up build systems at one point, I
| couldn't take it seriously and continue.
| vsareto wrote:
| >Our efficiency work has several parallel workstreams to improve
| organizational efficiency, dramatically increase developer
| productivity and tooling, optimize distributed work, garbage
| collect unnecessary processes, and more.
|
| All the tools in the world but you can't have a quiet office
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| To be fair, i wouldn't be surprised if FB ended up with small
| team offices in a lot of locations.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| I wonder how much of this is the optics from the Riley Rojas
| types. That caused a real shit storm, and may have finally
| exposed upper mgmt to just how little most Meta employees do.
|
| She's still employed there though. I can't imagine she'll ever be
| fired, too much legal risk.
| [deleted]
| morph123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's an insult to have to read that much text for so little
| content.
| ozaiworld wrote:
| Metaverse was only mentioned 2 times.
| alvis wrote:
| The message is loud and clear "As I've talked about efficiency
| this year, I've said that part of our work will involve
| removing jobs". & no surprise, "future" has only mentioned 4
| times
|
| Mr Zuckerberg, what is the future of social connection?
| [deleted]
| _joel wrote:
| How many billion per mention did that cost?
| rchaud wrote:
| Reminds me of when Bill Gates wrote a book on the "Information
| Superhighway" (envisioned to be a MS-controlled walled garden
| like AOL) and then put out a revised edition a year later that
| replaced the term with "Internet". They still had their walled
| garden with Windows + IE for several years though.
| [deleted]
| anonymou2 wrote:
| you mean like github?
| tkgally wrote:
| And it was mentioned only as one item among others: "We do this
| with AI to help you creatively express yourself and discover
| new content, with the metaverse to deliver a realistic sense of
| presence, with new media formats to ..." and "Our leading work
| building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of
| computing platforms ...."
| nolok wrote:
| Coincidentally that's also the number of times it was used
| today, and the number of people with any interest in it !
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I noticed that too, very interesting how it's not mentioned at
| all. Maybe Mark is getting a clue his little bet is a failure
| and a joke.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed this. I wonder if it's next on the chopping
| block.
|
| Thing is, I don't think that people trust FB/"meta" with the
| concept. Most of the feedback I've heard from people IRL has
| been to the effect of, "it could be cool, but not if Facebook
| is behind it."
| iancmceachern wrote:
| They're never going to be able to hire top talent again.
|
| They're IBM now.
| jghn wrote:
| Last week: Post surfaces saying that on 3/14 there'd be a mass
| layoff of managers & directors. Many people react that no way is
| this true
|
| 3/14: Zuck posts that they're making their orgs "flatter", in
| other words laying off a bunch of managers & directors
| elicash wrote:
| Not sure what thread you're referring to. I suppose maybe some
| people did think this wouldn't happen? But Zuckerberg publicly
| announced he was doing this flattening over a month ago.
| (Though we didn't the numbers until now.)
| rwc wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35100251
|
| Or, if you prefer:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-07/meta-
| is-s...
| elicash wrote:
| Seems like people were only skeptical of the specific dates
| given by an anonymous Blind user, just on the basis that
| it's an anonymous user. That's likely a good thing, even if
| it happened to be accurate!
|
| They weren't skeptical that layoffs were coming aimed at a
| flattening, which makes sense since this was already
| announced by Zuckerberg over a month ago.
| jghn wrote:
| There were threads here, Reddit, and elsewhere. IIRC all
| pointing back to Blind. What I mention wasn't a universal
| opinion and apologies if I made it sound that way. But there
| was a much stronger segment than I would have expected
| thinking it was all a bunch of made up FUD
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| I don't think this is line managers and their managers. I'm
| reading this as the people in the 5 levels above THEM, but
| below Zuck.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Those are called managers and directors.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| I thought those are SVPs, EVPs, etc? "Manager" tends to be
| line managers, and Directors _their_ managers.
| oblio wrote:
| In many places you have 1-2 levels of regular managers,
| 1-2 levels of senior managers, then directors, maaaybe
| the first level of VP.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I wonder if he reused the letter from the previous round.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| From a quick scan this looks great to me. Cut the middle
| managers, useless diversity teams, focus on tech and engineering.
| Hope they build something great again.
| [deleted]
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Zuk should get rid of his foil board as a show of solidarity
| jmull wrote:
| This seems focused on making meta a more efficient organization
| that can execute faster and react more quickly. So that's good
| for the company if it's done well. But even so, I see further
| problems for meta.
|
| It's just not clear how the metaverse becomes something at the
| scale meta needs it to be to justify the R&D or to make an impact
| on its business.
|
| To me it looks like a technology really takes off when it gives
| people a _lighter-weight_ way to communicate and connect. The
| telephone takes off compared to writing letters because it is a
| much easier, more immediate way to tell people about things.
| Messaging takes off relative to calling people on the telephone
| because it 's an easier, more immediate way to tell people about
| things. Social media, including Facebook take off relative to
| hanging out because it an easier more immediate way to tell
| people about things.
|
| The new thing doesn't necessarily need to replace the old thing,
| it just needs to open up a new, easier, more immediate way for
| people to tell people about things.
|
| The best I see is if meta can make itself the gatekeeper of the
| de facto standard platform for VR games/entertainment. That's
| potentially a pretty big business -- because maybe VR can take
| over AAA content and shows. But is it really big enough to
| sustain meta? (It seems far from certain they would end up in
| such an advantageous position, but Oculus is a good start.)
| magicloop wrote:
| Meta is undergoing a standard phase transition. It was innovation
| fuelled previously, but now it is value fuelled (milk the
| existing machine, take care of regulators, be part of the
| establishment). Intel and IBM are similar examples.
|
| So Zuckerberg, to prevent this, has the right strategy - the
| pirates inside the organisation strategy. Jobs did this with the
| Mac project. The question mark really is whether the Metaverse
| can deliver to take over from the Social Media platforms it has.
| Even if you accept the promise of Metaverse, according to Carmack
| the execution has been poor. Normally you just buy your way out
| with promising startups when execution is poor but the regulators
| will be heavy with Meta nowadays.
|
| Meta has star power with AI/ML. But on Metaverse there isn't much
| consumer data to process (yet). So its innovation vector can't be
| realised.
|
| This effectively means the stars of AI/ML won't help Meta into
| the future. If they leave, it could be a good thing (if we are
| taking the value-fuelled hypothesis as their future).
|
| Meta I think will switch to a MBA-led approach to maximise
| existing value, shed its research aspirations, and switch to
| hiring the best mechanical/devices/hardware talent it can to
| improve execution on Metaverse.
|
| Under this appraisal of Meta, broad and wide layoffs, letting the
| superstars go is the right thing for the company. Unlocked from
| Meta, those engineers will forge the next great wave of tech
| companies. The future will be made over the next few months as
| those start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing. So I am
| most hopeful despite the bitter pill of current economic
| realities. In the short term there is real pain, particularly
| those relying on visas or the generous healthcare provisions from
| the company.
| MikeTheRocker wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you've said here, but I can't
| help but feel this reads like a monologue from a supervillain
| who feels righteous in burning the world down because they
| believe something greater will rise from the ashes.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >Normally you just buy your way out with promising startups
| when execution is poor
|
| So here's the thing. Who is doing better at this than Meta? Who
| could they buy? Regulation is a secondary issue.
|
| At this point, the Quests are pretty good gaming machines. Its
| the software that's lacking. MMAAAN has traditionally struggled
| with content creation. It took a long time for the streaming
| studios to get any decent shows. Apple, Google, Netflix and
| Amazon don't really have a good game portfolio to this day.
|
| They could possibly buy or spin up a bunch of game studios to
| crank out content but on the hardware side I think they
| actually are best in class here.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Exactly. There is no nice or correct way to do this. Lots of
| companies seem to go through this and come out fine on the
| other end as well.
|
| I worked at Nokia through their transition from being the
| largest smart phone manufacturer in the world to shortly before
| they sold off what remained of their phone unit to MS, who shut
| it down completely less than two years later. Basically, that
| probably affected many tens of thousands of people. I heard all
| the cliches and was on the receiving end of them. Two points
| here: 1) this is not personal even if it deeply effects you. 2)
| if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the
| problem. The last point here doesn't mean you are the problem,
| or the cause of the problem. But simply that your presence is
| no longer part of any solution to whatever the problem is.
| Whether you agree with that or not is beside the point. The
| fact is that, once companies get to this stage, there is only
| one way forward: let go of a lot of people.
|
| IMHO, Facebook is being to cautious here. They need to cut much
| more deeply than this and re-focus on their core products and
| modernize those. Facebook has been dead in the water for years.
| Whatsapp has an aging user group as well. Instagram seems past
| its glory. Messenger seems like a failed product at this point.
| Time to take it out the back and kill that. Revitalizing
| Facebook and Instagram will require some drastic changes. It's
| not going to magically start turning around without that. It's
| either continued gradual decline or finding some way to become
| relevant again.
| aierou wrote:
| Does AI/ML not unlock value for the Metaverse? Also, the
| layoffs are set to prioritize recruiting, management, and
| business personnel. That seems to go against the idea that they
| are switching to an MBA-led approach.
| jossclimb wrote:
| > The future will be made over the next few months as those
| start-up fevered ideas will actually get a footing.
|
| The trouble here though, is very few VC's have an appetite to
| fund now, especially seed / series A. They are too busy dealing
| with the overpriced and soon to fail cohort from 2020/2021
|
| I spoke with a VC just last week from one if the top five, they
| are yet to fund anyone new this year.
| XiZhao wrote:
| This is a great take on Meta -- in some ways there's an element
| of macro justice or a return to form in tech and innovation
| with this shift.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| woeirua wrote:
| It still blows my mind how many engineers are at Meta. What are
| they all doing? Seems pretty comfortable to say that they could
| lay off thousands more and probably notice no difference in the
| user experience or revenue of their products.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It it unfortunate for those people, but it is great for society
| as a whole that Meta is no longer wasting 10k engineers on
| their stupid ad platform.
| poniko wrote:
| Seems like its clear that it's AI before metaverse for FB now ..
| that has to sting for mr zuck.
| ar9av wrote:
| Zuckerberg is obsessed with cornering the market for the Next Big
| Thing. First it was radio, then TV, computers, cellphones, what
| could the next big thing be? It's got to be VR... because Mark
| can't think of anything else it could be.
|
| So even though people aren't willing to strap bricks to their
| faces now, once they understand there's no other Next Big Thing
| coming, they'll shrug and pick up a VR headset.
|
| Then after a month of ChatGPT hype he wakes up and fires
| everybody. What a clown.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I mean even I disagree with a lot of what Meta is doing, but
| you have to admit that there is viability there especially if
| the tech in those "bricks" can be shrunk to the size of regular
| glass
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| he's still going after VR though, its not like this is a pivot.
| Laaas wrote:
| > Then after a month of ChatGPT hype he wakes up and fires
| everybody. What a clown.
|
| They've been developing LLaMA for some time now presumably.
| Seems odd to imply they somehow missed this.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Maybe the next big thing would be a big bunch of interconnected
| small things. Who knows.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Zuck: VR head sets
|
| Elon: Satellite phones
|
| Samsung: The Moon
|
| Apple: Sat + VR
|
| Microsoft: GPT
|
| Is how I see it.
| seydor wrote:
| They did release Llama which is bound to become the linux of
| llms
| dx034 wrote:
| > Then after a month of ChatGPT hype he wakes up and fires
| everybody. What a clown.
|
| Changing course when you realize you were wrong has nothing to
| do with being a clown. Not defending Zuckerberg or the lay off,
| but for large companies it's always been one of the hardest
| tasks to predict trends. And many that go under do so because
| they hold on to old technologies and refuse to admit the world
| has changed.
|
| If Zuckerberg really changed the whole strategy because he saw
| VR won't go anywhere and ChatGPT has such potential, changing
| course drastically would be much better than holding on to old
| projects due to sunk costs.
| sharkweek wrote:
| "Do you care to know why I sit in this chair? Why I earn the
| big bucks?
|
| I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to
| guess what the music is going to do a week, a month, a year
| from now. Nothing more. That's it."
| danrocks wrote:
| "And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear a
| thing. Just...silence"
| adharmad wrote:
| Margin call is a documentary in more than one ways.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think he's brilliant or anything (getting into social
| media at that time was pretty lucky), but if I had a billion
| dollars and a successful company, I'd be looking for the next
| big thing too. Keep the good times rolling, and also, exploring
| is fun.
| college_physics wrote:
| I don't think Zuck particularly cares about the next big thing.
| As the debacle with Apple shows, there are existential risks
| here and now, not in some sort of FOMO
|
| Despite appearances, if the metaverse gambit in the current
| episode made any sense it was mostly as a defensive move: To
| obtain control over a _device_ so that you can datamine at will
| and perpetuate your business model irrespective of what other
| major actors might come up with.
|
| Think about it. If stars (you have little control over) align,
| device owners can flip a privacy switch here, introduce a
| policy there and annihilate your business.
|
| To paraphrase Ballmer: Devices, devices, devices
| mydriasis wrote:
| Anyone work at meta? How are the departments listed in the
| article defined?
| setgree wrote:
| I know that working in tech can warp your sense of reality, but
| it's really, really hard to imagine starting an email in which I
| announce that I'm laying off 10,000 people -- the entire
| population of my hometown and then some -- with "Meta is building
| the future of human connection."
|
| I just can't tell a story in which I would end up being a person
| who does that. It's too alien.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| You don't write that email by yourself. There are lots of cooks
| in the pot when it comes to writing this kind of message to a
| large corporation.
| tomgp wrote:
| And yet thay all apparently lack basic human empathy?
| five82 wrote:
| There's a reason why we're called "resources".
| [deleted]
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Legal is one of the main cooks producing the pot.
| setgree wrote:
| I'm really having trouble connecting the dots between
| potential liability and leading with "building the future
| of human connection"
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Damned if you do damned if you don't.
|
| We've seen the entire gambit of layoff messages in the past
| year. No matter how empathic they're written, people
| complain.
| nottathrowaway3 wrote:
| Good people remember though and hold a grudge if you
| insult them on the way out the door. People you want to
| hire in the future are watching as well. There's
| incentive to be classy (ex: Microsoft's
| https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-
| focusing...) unless the whole ship is going down.
|
| Edit:
|
| That being said, after actually reading it, the Meta
| letter is relatively classy. The HN comments made it seem
| worse than it was.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Some of them probably do, and I'd also bet that when
| responsibility for writing the message is diffused
| throughout a group, people don't feel the need to make it
| as nice as they would otherwise.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Why would they have any more compared to any other
| industry?
| izacus wrote:
| There's nothing better at diluting empathy and care for
| humans, not to mention creating evil, than diluting
| responsibility.
| AdamN wrote:
| Somebody else will make it sound empathetic /s
| eddieroger wrote:
| You assume this email is for the people who will be
| affected by the layoffs. It is not - it's for the investors
| and leaders who stay around. Empathy isn't part of this
| decision or the way it's carried out, unfortunately.
| fallat wrote:
| You're on the money. Like literally, empathy here would
| convey some sadness, or just "negative feelings", which
| would affect how the money feels. We can't have the money
| feeling bad now can we? Plus who cares anyway, we all
| know software monkeys don't feel. They just want to sit
| around all day drinking coffees and mashing little
| plastic chiclets! And the money is perfectly happy with
| this arrangement. /s
| eddieroger wrote:
| Just in case you or another onlooker comes by and assumes
| I agree with the morality of what I said, I don't. I
| think it's awful letting 10K people go for money, like
| they don't have bills too. But I don't live in delusion
| or the dark about these things. Zuckerberg posts this
| letter to inspire those who stay, not mourn those who go.
| Empathy, in this case, negatively impacts the message,
| which is Facebook is important and is moving to be a more
| financially sound company. Again, I don't like it, but my
| likes don't matter here.
| rchaud wrote:
| Perhaps their attorneys advised them not to use "making the
| world a better place".
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Someone was probably coached to "start with something positive,
| say the bad thing, end with something positive."
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| I don't understand the alienness can you elaborate. Maybe I'm
| alien.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| Despite the claimed intended audience, that letter isn't
| written for employees. It is written for shareholders. And
| judging by the stock price, it had the intended effect.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| GOOG is up 3%, MSFT, AMZN, APPL are up 2%. Snap is up 4%. FB
| is "only" up 4.5%.
|
| If you need to fire 13% of staff to get a 1.5-2.5% bump in
| price - that doesn't look great to me.
|
| Almost seems like the market is signaling that they don't see
| any growth potential for FB outside of canceling the
| Metaverse.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| up 6.5% now
| lordnacho wrote:
| Don't you have to subtract the fact that the entire market
| is up today?
| msm_ wrote:
| They did, they estabilished that the tech average is 3%
| today, and subtracted this from meta's 4.5%
| spacemadness wrote:
| My one hope in all this is that some tech workers who drank a
| lot of corporate kool-aid over the years, i.e. the "we're a
| family" managerial nonsense, will finally see the reality of
| the industry we work in and the real aim of quarterly
| capitalism which is profit and growth at all costs every
| single quarter. Your well being, since you likely attach it
| to work, is not part of that formula. You are expendable and
| will be sacrificed on the altar of profit at a moments
| notice.
| lr1970 wrote:
| Meta-verse => meta-worse
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| These people can be rehired in a year for 50% of what they are
| making now
|
| And many will be happy for the opportunity
| nothrowaways wrote:
| What is going on, is meta shutting down?
| lubesGordi wrote:
| Hard to wrap my head around 10k people. Just how big is Meta? The
| email talks a lot about eliminating layers of management, does
| that mean most of the layoffs will be managers?
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > We are a technology company, and our ultimate output is what we
| build for people. Everything else we do is in service of that. As
| we've grown, we've hired many leading experts in areas outside
| engineering. This helps us build better products, but with many
| new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our company
| remains primarily technologists. As we add different groups, our
| product teams naturally hire more roles to handle all the
| interactions with those other groups. If we only rebalanced the
| product teams towards engineering, those leaner product teams
| would be overwhelmed by the volume of interactions from other
| groups. As part of the Year of Efficiency, we're focusing on
| returning to a more optimal ratio of engineers to other roles.
| It's important for all groups to get leaner and more efficient to
| enable our technology groups to get as lean and efficient as
| possible. We will make sure we continue to meet all our critical
| and legal obligations as we find ways to operate more
| efficiently.
|
| How should this be interpreted? They're getting rid of all the
| Agile Coaches?
| [deleted]
| bagacrap wrote:
| Interactions with other groups = PMs I'm thinking
| _the_inflator wrote:
| It is so ironic, that Facebook, the once sponsor of gems like
| Farmville to playfully interact with people and fostering
| discussions around lunch photos, totally lost sight of community
| building.
|
| While today everybody wants to integrate GPT-4 into a customer
| facing app to increase community interaction and value to the
| customer, the company famous for its social graph has nothing to
| offer to foster integration or community building.
|
| Even bing, the somewhat competitor now finally is the new shiny
| object and a direct thread to Google.
|
| While Meta still wants to build its Metaverse, people immerse
| into everything that gets connected to GPT-4. GPT-4 is the real
| metaverse.
|
| Ironic. Somewhat.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| For context:
|
| "In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and
| the biggest year of hiring in the company's history. In 2021, it
| added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the
| two biggest years of expansion in Facebook's short history."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| What an incredible amount of wasted effort in hiring that many
| people to then firing them 2-3 years later.
| dev_0 wrote:
| [dead]
| Laaas wrote:
| It is quite possible that the people they are firing aren't
| the ones they recently hired, but instead people who have
| been there for a long time but aren't meaningfully
| contributing anymore.
| acchow wrote:
| Many managers get promotions for how much the people under
| them accomplish. There is some adjustment to headcount, but
| the more you can get hired under you, the higher you can get
| promoted.
|
| This is the outcome of that.
| pera wrote:
| And 2019 was the year when they announced the cryptocurrency
| and the "metaverse" projects...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| as an aside, Instagram just announced that it's shutting down
| its NFT features.
|
| Safe to say that the web3 hypetrain is over.
| lkramer wrote:
| Replaced neatly by the AI one...
| BoorishBears wrote:
| At least the AI one isn't foiled by basic tenants of
| software devised in the 70s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_oracle
| capableweb wrote:
| How is that "safe to say"? Purely a guess, like anyone's
| guess.
|
| Looking at numbers, BTC went up 15.8% in the last 24h, up
| 16% in the last 7 days. Global marketcap of
| cryptocurrencies went from 804B USD in November 2022 to
| 1,121B USD today (~32% increase). If anything, it seems to
| slowly recover.
|
| Although I agree that NFTs are trash and should be
| forgotten about. But the cryptocurrency market as a whole
| seems to be more resilient than many think.
| oblio wrote:
| Long term probably 2 things will happen. Though obviously
| no one can predict the future.
|
| 1. Public cryptocurrencies will remain there as a sort of
| niche investment (betting?) vehicle. Something like "VWOB
| - Emerging Markets Government Bond ETF". Did you know
| about that one? Neither did I.
|
| 2. Private permissioned blockchains will be used in
| specific niches. Think Corda and some finance
| applications, whatever the commodities thing is called, I
| forgot its name.
|
| But the long tail of Bladogelitecoin and the likes will
| go poof once line stops going up.
| dx034 wrote:
| Crypto might stay popular, but I also don't see any
| indication that web3 will live up to the hype. They still
| haven't found real use cases that need web3.
|
| Crypto, however, will remain popular as long as
| governments don't ban it.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| BTC !== Web3!
|
| Neither are most other coins.
| rchaud wrote:
| Perception is reality though. The average person doesn't
| care about the difference between BTC and ETH and ERC-20
| tokens, it all looks like the same get-rich-quick scheme.
| People aren't reading whitepapers, every coin has one.
| They're evaluating Youtube thumbnails as their source of
| information.
| shuckles wrote:
| Reasoning about the usefulness of crypto currencies based
| on their quoted price on various fraudulent exchanges
| should not be a signal of anything. We should normalize
| on quoting non-spoofable adoption metrics to indicate if
| they're going anywhere.
| hnarn wrote:
| According to Gizmodo, Meta put $13.6 billion dollars into
| "Reality Labs" (VR) in 2022. Simply eye-watering. It's almost
| half of Iceland's GDP.
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| As impressive as that sounds, Iceland has less than 400k
| people, it's about the same size as Cluj, a city in Romania
| probably 0.1% of HN ever heard about :-)
| hnarn wrote:
| The reason I took the example is because Iceland is a
| developed western country that most people have heard about
| that happened to match the number.
|
| Sure, Iceland has a small population but their GDP per
| capita is almost 5x that of Romania.
| varispeed wrote:
| Couple of years ago I happened to work with a dev from
| Cluj. Awesome guy and very talented.
| varispeed wrote:
| and how much of that will "trickle down" to the workers?
| hammock wrote:
| Also for context.
|
| FB stock in 2020: 234 Today: 190
|
| FB revenue in 2020: $86 billion 2022: $117 billion
| adverbly wrote:
| Isn't that still missing a massive piece of context? What
| about costs?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The irony is that FB would probably be doing pretty well if
| not for spending $10B per year on the Metaverse.
| [deleted]
| arnon wrote:
| Revenue is nice but revenue-per-full-time-employee is a more
| meaningful metric.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Inflation adjusted revenue per employee even more so
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| meaningful for profitability, but surely having more
| employees can be of benefit to society.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Society should get rid of computers and construction
| equipment then. Everyone can have a lot more employees.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I mean that employing people for good wages and good
| conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it
| enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space
| for children.
|
| As opposed to some dystopia where an exceptionally
| efficient and low employee organisation makes all the
| money and there is no/limited distribution of that
| wealth.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The tech companies such as Meta that pay good wages and
| have good working conditions are able to do so because
| they are exceptionally efficient and require a relatively
| low number of employees to generate the outsize profits
| they do.
|
| So that "dystopia" can already be considered to be here.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| sure, but I merely wish to mention it within the context
| of "having high profit to employee ratio is good".
|
| Everything has trade-offs.
| dx034 wrote:
| Construction is actually one of the few sectors that
| hasn't become more productive per employee over past
| decades. Buildings have become vastly more complicated
| but there's comparably little automation.
| hnfong wrote:
| You might be interested in these:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE
|
| Not sure whether this is more common in the US these
| days. I know for a fact that a lot of buildings in China
| are constructed this way.
| hammock wrote:
| No need to get rid of computers and backhoes. You don't
| have to have work in order to have employees. At least
| that's what the parent seems to be implying
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Maybe employment isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe
| the goal is to build automation to the point that the
| moral imperative to labor isn't as imperative.
| rchaud wrote:
| If people are not working, they will have significantly
| more time to observe, evaluate and perish forbid, succeed
| in _changing_ the state of their communities, fellow
| citizens and elected leadership.
| oblio wrote:
| Oh, you optimist, I like you!
|
| In real life the goal will be to build automation so that
| the few owners of the robots can buy more 200m long
| yachts.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| No, they get the 200m yachts for building the capability
| first. There will come a time on our trajectory that
| artificial scarcity is such an obvious canard that we
| will move past it into a post scarcity world. I don't
| know how it'll be constructed, but the need to work being
| a moral imperative will necessarily fall away as it
| becomes obvious it's not necessary nor imperative nor
| moral. I think this is unavoidable, sans some sort of
| plateau or limiting factor or regression, and the rate of
| change I see makes it look like we aren't far away -
| although the realization of that the wizard is just a man
| behind the curtain may be.
| oblio wrote:
| You do realize that they managed to build artificial
| scarcity in virtual worlds through licenses, DMCA, NFTs?
| And morality or progress are not given under any
| circumstances.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| And that's why Zuck is wrong. The reality we exist in is
| not constrained by human constructs.
|
| Yeah I realize progress or morality isn't a given - I
| think I mentioned the offroads. But if things keep going
| in this direction we are heading now, I suspect we might
| actually get there.
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| > but surely having more employees can be of benefit to
| society.
|
| that is how the Soviet Union worked...they just cut to
| the chase and had the state employ everyone directly
|
| strange how an economy can fail with full employment...
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I used to live in the Soviet Union so I am well aware of
| its failings. Rather I mean that if a one-man shop makes
| all the money in the world then that can be also
| problematic. Employing people for good wages and good
| conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it
| enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space
| for children.
| hammock wrote:
| Feel free to add that value, this is a public forum
| arnon wrote:
| Revenue in 2021: 33,671 M USD
|
| Revenue in 2022: 32,165 M USD
|
| FTEs in 2021: 71,970
|
| FTEs in 2022: 86,482
|
| Revenue-per-FTE in 2021: $467,847
|
| Revenue-per-FTE in 2022: $371,927
|
| That's 21% less revenue per FTE.
|
| [1] 2022 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-
| news/press-release-details/...
|
| [2] 2021 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-
| news/press-release-details/...
| zip1234 wrote:
| It's 21% less but also those are quarterly numbers that
| you are showing.
| hammock wrote:
| Yes and Facebook probably has about as many contractors
| as they do FTEs, but that number fluctuates without
| making the news...meaning total effective payroll at
| Facebook is extremely shadowy
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Looks like Zuck has totally lost touch if he thinks the high
| priority projects are "metaverse" and "ai" related. At this point
| FB is just his passion project.
| neogodless wrote:
| "We are Metastasizing."
| anonymou2 wrote:
| the cancer of Facebook
| gausswho wrote:
| Should be past tense. What Meta is engaging in now is akin to
| chemotherapy.
| sytelus wrote:
| This idea of doing layoffs and then using it to fund stock
| buybacks is really catching on. We should call this "double
| booster" for stock prices even when company is clearly failing.
| cbb330 wrote:
| Wow, so much negativity towards this announcement. This reaction
| is genuinely surprising because I found this post both
| inspirational and insightful. I hope there are others who feel
| the same way!
|
| Maybe we can start a discussion on the content rather than our
| emotions from the headline?
|
| Some of the best parts here:
|
| > Today many of our managers have only a few direct reports. That
| made sense to optimize for ramping up new managers and
| maintaining buffer capacity when we were growing our organization
| faster, but now that we don't expect to grow headcount as
| quickly, it makes more sense to fully utilize each manager's
| capacity and defragment layers as much as possible.
|
| > A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster.
|
| > we're focusing on returning to a more optimal ratio of
| engineers to other roles.
|
| > I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility that
| this new economic reality will continue for many years. Higher
| interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more
| geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased
| regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of
| innovation.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > I found this post both inspirational and insightful
|
| Are you a venture capitalist? Most of us are rank and file
| employees.
| wobblyasp wrote:
| > This reaction is genuinely surprising because I found this
| post both inspirational and insightful
|
| I would love to understand how you see this as inspirational.
| fullshark wrote:
| Because they believe they are a 10x engineer and managers
| hurt their productivity by getting in their way most
| certainly, tale as old as time.
| cbb330 wrote:
| Arguments ad hominem are inappropriate for hackernews.
| Let's leave this type of argument to Reddit or blind.
|
| I understand your perspective though. layoff announcements
| trigger an emotional response esp. in an uncertain economic
| condition.
|
| To answer the question, I think it's worth explaining my
| perspective first. My company did "hidden layoffs" where an
| entire org was cut without any leadership announcement.
| Everyone freaked out, and we got no response from company.
| We found out about increased PIP quotas from blind. We have
| a mountain of technical debt hindering developer experience
| with no priority to address it.
|
| Zuckerberg in this article, is the exact opposite of the
| horrible leadership that I have dealt with on my job. This
| is why I feel inspired to see specific reasons for
| restructuring, with multi month transparent plans, and pre-
| determined goals. When execs preach of transparency, point
| them to this article from Zuck which is entirely public.
| This content shows a proactive culture, and is so so
| refreshing when my experience has been as an employee of
| reactive leadership.
| lja wrote:
| They are saying, "We are going to make our existing managers
| work harder, make the existing engineers deliver more because
| the $22 billion in profit we made in 2022 wasn't enough. We
| should consider how we can sacrifice more to make even more
| profit."
| cbb330 wrote:
| No I think Zuckerbergs words should be read at face value.
|
| Managers with small amount of reports will be converted to
| ICs and strong managers will be given more reports. The org
| will be more lean and will have less overhead per manager of
| converting work between layers.
|
| I'm summarizing above but in the article are specific goals
| to address this and I didn't pick up on any signs that
| employees should overwork themselves.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| [flagged]
| gardenhedge wrote:
| All the talk to a flatter structure, being lean, focusing on the
| tech actually makes me want to work at Meta. If only they would
| change their leetcode interview process!
| nbaugh1 wrote:
| Yeah they're gonna be real flat and lean with the 60k employees
| left after this 10k get laid off. I'm no operations expert but
| I'm pretty sure all this is going to do is free up some payroll
| funds
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| Me too. I wish I could work at a company where I dont have a
| "project manager" making more than I do for sending a few
| emails and holding a weekly project meeting. I've decided to
| practice leetcode if that's what it takes.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| It makes me think I'd get efficiently laid off within a year or
| so.
|
| I've worked at a few places that thought they were lean and
| flat as well, but they aren't. Someone in leadership likes the
| idea and goes on and on about it, but the actual structure and
| legacy of past structures creates a complete mess. The only
| thing that gets done is talking about how great the team is and
| how much awesome stuff is getting done. Then everyone gets laid
| off again.
| brap wrote:
| 1. Work at Meta 2. Be top performer 3. Get promoted
| to manager 4. Manage <5 people as a newbie manager
| 5. Get fired because you don't manage enough people
|
| Or, alternatively: 1. Work at Meta 2. Be
| top performer 3. Never get promoted
|
| I don't know, this doesn't make me want to work at Meta.
| Certainly not as a top performer.
| dx034 wrote:
| The best people I've worked with stayed in the same role for
| 20+ years without any promotion. They did great work, knew
| exactly what to do and didn't have to play the politics game
| to get some favorable review for promotion. I wish more
| companies would encourage that. Even in tech, the world
| doesn't change as quickly as we sometimes think.
| paganel wrote:
| I'm not in the demographic anymore to be hired by Meta, but
| I'd definitely choose the second scenario over the first one
| 10 times out of 10. Managing people is a chore.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| If you're a top performer, then you can make seven figures at
| $meta as an IC
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| I don't work at Meta, but if its anything like where I
| currently work, the ones who become "managers" have no
| correlation to coding performance, or perfomance at all for
| that matter.
| dagw wrote:
| Which is a good thing. You should be become a manager
| because you think you would enjoy being a manager more than
| being a coder, and are passionate about being really good
| at managing. Being good at coding doesn't mean you'll
| automatically be good at (or enjoy) dealing with admin,
| budgeting, resource planning and personnel issues.
|
| I've been managed by truly brilliant coders who just wished
| they could go back to sitting in their office and code. No
| one was happy with that situation.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| I didn't write it out, but our managers have no idea of
| the code at all. They have never been programmers. Hence
| the programmers sit around all day, like posting on HN,
| and not much gets done at all. But hey they are surely
| really passionate about managing.
| _djo_ wrote:
| At Meta and pretty much all other tech companies
| Engineering Managers have to have been decent programmers
| first, so I'm not sure what you're describing applies
| there.
|
| Cases where managers are appointed to oversee dev teams
| without having any engineering experience at all are more
| common in non-tech companies. Those situations can still
| work, but rarely work well.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Forgive me for asking, but why would you work at a place
| like that? Aren't you bored doing nothing?
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| It's my first gig, so my options are limited. Things
| might still shake up when people start asking where all
| the money is going. But I've also come to realize that my
| situation is not unique, there's a lot of non-work going
| on in modern tech.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Do you use scrum? How are people's capacities not being
| filled?
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| We do, they named the least productive yet most
| experienced gentleman to "teach lead" to lead the scrums
| because they started getting a notion that not much was
| getting done. This is the guy who love writing
| documentation (One A4 per week of 40h hour, about). The
| end result was nothing changed: "I am working on X", "OK,
| good good" and nothing really gets done. Then the
| customer started changing the demands 9 months into the
| project which justified the inproductivity even more.
| It's all around just a shit show.
| Insanity wrote:
| Depends on the location. I'm an Engineering Manager at
| $FAANG (MANGA?) and I moved into management after senior
| engineering roles. At the same time, I'm still
| programming a lot in my "free time". Your experience
| doesn't apply everywhere.
|
| As for motivation (I know no one asked): I genuinely
| enjoy the human aspect of the job and thinking further
| out into the future with product and engineering leaders.
| Plus I learned that I really enjoy programming when it's
| a hobby without the corporate overhead, and that it's
| less fun (to me) in a company.
|
| Not to discredit your experience - but it's not a
| universal truth.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| But if the managers were programmers, suddenly everyone
| would magically want to work instead of fucking around on
| HN.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| It's not about will, but the managers capability to
| oversee what is going on. Since they dont know anything
| about programming, they cant even really know if someone
| is slacking, or working really hard.
|
| That is, their capability to _manage_.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Huh? Of course they can. Is the person shipping what
| they're supposed to be shipping?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure. Same reason the State Department doesn't typically
| source its diplomats from the Navy SEALs. Different skills,
| different types of people.
| brap wrote:
| For most FAANG companies, it's IC -> TL -> TLM -> EM,
| unless you explicitly insist on remaining IC/TL (and then
| you're on the chopping block, because promotion trajectory
| for ICs becomes very, very slow beyond a certain point).
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > and then you're on the chopping block, because
| promotion trajectory for ICs becomes very, very slow
| beyond a certain point
|
| The former does not follow from the latter.
| fach wrote:
| This isn't true in my experience across a few FAANGs. And
| promotion is very slow on both tracks once you get to
| terminal level + 1.
| fingerlocks wrote:
| This isn't true. I personally know gray hairs that
| retired as ICs in at least three of those letters in your
| outdated acronym.
|
| It should be MAAAM by now- Microsoft is famous for the IC
| rest-and-vest to '55 lifestyle.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Personally, if I enjoy my work and my pay stays at or above
| market rate, I don't need title promotions.
| brap wrote:
| 1. Work at Meta 2. Be top performer 3. Remain
| in your role for too many years 4. Get fired because
| you're expensive with no growth trajectory
| gardenhedge wrote:
| You got me there :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > All the talk to a flatter structure, being lean, focusing on
| the tech actually makes me want to work at Meta.
|
| Do you take those claims as seriously as you do "Meta is
| building the future of human connection", "Year of Efficiency",
| and "Meta builds new ways for people to feel closer"?
|
| This is a PR fluff message about layoffs. I wouldn't take any
| claims in it at raw face value.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Its not fluff entirely. My friends who are in managment are
| now coding and some middle management people have quit.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This announcement says the layoffs and reorg will occur
| "over the next couple of months". They haven't happened
| yet.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Not sure what you are implying. They have asked many
| managers to start coding or leave a while ago, their
| title is still EM maybe will change to IC now.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm implying companies tend to come up with all sorts of
| great sounding PR fluff to explain layoffs, and that I'm
| generally skeptical of claims to be making orgs
| "flatter". If this statement specifically makes someone
| want to work at Facebook, I think their bullshit meter
| needs adjusting.
| anotherengineer wrote:
| i believe they're already happening. i have one friend at
| meta who's manager was swapped to an IC role already, and
| one friend who's an EM that's in the process of swapping
| to an IC role
| shuckles wrote:
| I've always found Meta's self deception about where they
| innovate really funny. I can't think of any social technology
| they brought to market which helps me feel close to those
| around me, besides maybe Facebook Events and Groups.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Same. Sounds like a place where actual work is respected.
| Fricken wrote:
| And you can feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing you're
| helping to make teenage girls suicidally depressed.
| [deleted]
| dx034 wrote:
| That's all of social media. I don't like what's happening
| there but I also don't see how Facebook engineers can
| change that. Closing Instagram just drives more people to
| TikTok which is arguably worse.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It's a real shame that people don't take pride in the craft
| of doing their best to dismantle democracy and creating a
| reaction, fearful, and constantly disoriented populace.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Laaas wrote:
| Meta isn't just Instagram, and Instagram isn't just
| suicidal tendencies. You could just as well do the argument
| with any big company.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| postsantum wrote:
| I get depressed readying about mind-blowing tech on HN
| every day and feeling old and inadequate. YC, what are you
| doing?
| dangwhy wrote:
| [flagged]
| walthamstow wrote:
| I thought 'layoff' was the noun and 'lay off' was the verb?
| testfoobar wrote:
| Sorry for the ones losing their jobs. Meta has been mismanaged
| for the past few years.
|
| Focusing on Metaverse while TikTok is continuing to increase user
| engagement is senseless. If I were Zuck, I would do three things:
|
| 0) Wind down Metaverse investment. Throw it back into research.
| Kill the product. Take the loss. He has controlling interest in
| the stock so he probably gets a few mulligans. So long as he
| presents a competent forward looking strategy, I think the
| investor base will still give him a few more chances.
|
| 1) Narcissism 2.0 or really, Instagram 2.0 - Merge Instagram with
| Reels. This is hard. The experience/monetization/product has to
| be just right to not cannibalize existing instagram advertising
| revenue or user traction. It would be easy to fall down the
| multiple message app mess at Google. The benefit of merging is to
| own the best global platform for every narcissistic creator on
| the planet - from movie stars to your dog. Advertisers want
| eyeballs. Narcissists want eyeballs, some want money. Truly
| understand why creators are on TikTok and entice them back to a
| better Facebook property.
|
| 2) Lobby to get TikTok banned. If Zuck can't defeat TikTok on
| product development then he can get it banned. Spend dollars
| lobbying politicians and demand results.
|
| I think Zuck still has a number of winning plays available to
| him.
| jahlove wrote:
| > Merge Instagram with Reels
|
| Are reels not already integrated into instagram?
| testfoobar wrote:
| The experience is messy. It is neither fish nor fowl. The
| blending needs a deep rethink and redesign.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| > 2) Lobby to get TikTok banned
|
| This happened in India, though it is not clear if it was Meta
| who lobbied or combination of other factors.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| > 2) Lobby to get TikTok banned. If Zuck can't defeat TikTok on
| product development then he can get it banned. Spend dollars
| lobbying politicians and demand results.
|
| That's their only realistic hope of seeing out the next five
| years. Get TikTok banned in the States, Europe and parts of
| Asia, then clone their app and launch in those markets to
| capture market share.
|
| It's an underhand business tactic, but there's nothing too low
| for Zuck I guess.
| coolbreezetft22 wrote:
| Yep, metaverse was the stupidest idea ever. I said it at the
| time back in October/November 2021 when the stock was at its
| peak and then proceeded to interview realizing I was on a
| sinking ship. Sadly since I suck at interviews I could only get
| offers for much lower than what I had even after the collapsed
| share price.
|
| "Year of Efficiency" immediately following "Year of Metaverse"
| succinctly captures how things went lol
| nerdo wrote:
| The real winning play is #2. Zuckerberg should more
| aggressively push for hate speech legislation to permanently
| shut down the Internet at large. Users should have to get a
| license from the DMV to post, for $35 renew in-person at DMV
| office or AAA. They can also opt for a RealInternetID for $50
| that has more security features. Also unlimited privacy
| violation, logging and tracking with zero recourse for users.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Funny ideas. But seriously, large companies employ regulatory
| capture to limit competition all the time. One mechanism is
| to require a high compliance burden before a product or
| service can be brought to market. This increases capital
| requirements and risk for any competitor.
| nerdo wrote:
| Correct. It's not enough to block access to the financial
| system and Internet hosting and routing services for
| competitors. The users themselves must be made to
| understand their place and not be tempted into any
| unlicensed activity. The current regime's not going
| anywhere so no rush, but no better time than now right.
| jeffy90 wrote:
| I wonder if Mark is worried that #2 will give momentum for
| other countries to ban Facebook
| monksy wrote:
| So when are we going to finally recognize Meta as a
| failed/failing business? Laying off 10k employees for funies
| (after the prior layoffs) isn't exactly a great reflection on the
| business org in a long term view or that their financials are
| stable.
| dnrvs wrote:
| "garbage collect some processes" is an incredibly poor choice of
| words to use in a post about laying off 10,000 people through no
| fault of their own...
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| The fact that you can fire 10,000 people in a day without
| noticing just proves that capitalist efficiency is a lie. You
| still get the same stupid waste of resources as with any other
| system.
|
| What do any of these people even do? Facebook hasn't changed in
| the last 10 years. Instagram etc are all finished products. How
| can you have hundreds of thousands of people in a company when
| you don't make anything?
|
| You have to give them something to do so you get them to make a
| new UI because everyone always needs a new UI. But then oh no we
| need new servers for development so we need a new server team.
| And then we need a testing team for testing the UI and then we
| need HR for managing the new teams and accountants for managing
| the expanded payroll... And yet none of them actually achieve
| anything because it's a made-up project.
| communism wrote:
| That's the reason we should nationalize facebook. Indeed, all the
| problems are coming from managers. We should better elect them
| and establish communism. Also, meta should make a clip with
| people dancing and singing and how great it is to be fired from
| FB.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| People said twitter would fall over after all the influencers got
| fired but its still relatively functioning fine.
|
| Confirms my theory that most companies are just bloat 80:20 rule.
|
| Get rid of everyones whos not a nerd or directly sells product.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Twitter still working doesn't proof anything. There may be tech
| debt piling up and after some time they will need some
| combination of investments and surgery (dropping of non-
| critical features) to be able move forward without breaking
| everything.
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| I dont think so they probably fired people like her https://t
| witter.com/TMFSunLion/status/1585257328533995520?la...
|
| The company is fine.
| cr__ wrote:
| Tweets fail to send on the first try about a third of the time
| now
| dumbaccount123 wrote:
| Works fine for me.
|
| Maybe they need to rehire the button engineer to fix the
| button code! /s
| pastor_bob wrote:
| >We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech
| groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May.
| In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the
| year to complete these changes.
|
| Wow, that's a pretty long timeline from announcement to
| execution. Being told you _might_ be laid off some time in the
| next 10 months. I guess they 're hoping people quit?
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well, you get no severance if you quit, but if you sit at your
| desk and watch youtube all day you get a "pip" and 3 or more
| months paid time off if they let you go.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| You also burn bridges with many people if you do this though,
| which may not be a good long-term strategy if you're planning
| to stay in the software business. It is a small world in many
| ways.
| haunter wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35100251
|
| Flagged of course, "no way this is true" etc
| paganel wrote:
| That was my first though when I say this instantly get to the
| top spot.
| JCM9 wrote:
| Never fun for those impacted, but given Meta's poor performance
| this is expected. The history book is being written now on if
| Meta was a brilliant business for the ages or always destined to
| decline into a has-been tech play. Ironically now Zuckerberg is
| the old guard with stale ideas that he railed against so hard
| when Facebook was founded. My grandparents and their friends are
| currently the most active users on my Facebook feed. Most under
| 40 in my circle have left and most under 25 I know don't even
| have an account.
|
| If Facebook can turn things around then that would be truly
| impressive. Right now it's on a slow march to the sidelines of
| has-been tech. I don't think anyone is buying the whole metaverse
| thing, which just smells like someone missed the memo on Second
| Life. Facebook bet the farm there and the crops and livestock are
| looking rather ill.
| opportune wrote:
| I know people like to shit on the blue app, but Instagram has
| done a very good job at attracting younger users and feels like
| fb's main focus anyway.
|
| Ironically apple entering AR/VR may be the best thing to happen
| to Meta if it helps bolster the ecosystem. Meta may not be #1
| in the space for a long time, if ever, but they may be able to
| ride the wave to a strong #2
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| > stale ideas
|
| > whole metaverse thing
|
| pick one
| seattle_spring wrote:
| The "metaverse" so far has just been a shitty video game.
| What, in your opinion, isn't stale about the metaverse?
| yurishimo wrote:
| Meta's take on it is literally stale. It's VR Chat with more
| funding. The service itself is nothing more than a poor tech
| demo.
| [deleted]
| orcajerk wrote:
| Facebook is an intel front:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
| buzzert wrote:
| > The LifeLog program was canceled on February 3, 2004
|
| > On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook",
| originally located at thefacebook.com.
|
| If true, that's a pretty crazy coincidence.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I worked there 7 years. This is tinfoil nonsense.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Zuckerberg never had fresh ideas. He stole someone else's idea
| and that has been the only product he has ever made.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Most successful businesses aren't based on new ideas. All the
| big tech companies copied existing businesses, they just did
| it better.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _All the big tech companies copied existing businesses,
| they just did it better._
|
| I agree with this regarding their first product. Google
| wasn't the first ad network, Slack wasn't the first team
| chat, etc.
|
| Very few of them seem to have ever had a follow-up hit
| product (whether original or copied). Apple and Microsoft
| are the only ones I can think of that did it.
|
| Meta and Alphabet have only ever created profitable
| businesses by acquiring other companies. I'm not even sure
| anything is profitable at Alphabet other than their ad
| business (which I would now include with YouTube) and
| G-Suite.
| zip1234 wrote:
| There are very very few fresh ideas and even those require
| the vast majority of the project built on someone else's
| work. Taking something existing and doing it better is what
| business is all about.
| s1k3 wrote:
| This is true of every tech billionaire. They improved
| something that already existed.
|
| Rarely if ever do they true novel inventors dominate the
| market because when the market doesn't exist they have to
| create it, and also they're inventors not necessarily
| business men.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| Wasn't PageRank for instance a pretty novel creation?
| pb7 wrote:
| But search wasn't.
| MikusR wrote:
| Same can be said about Apple.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| this is cope
| xeromal wrote:
| Having fresh ideas isn't necessary of having a successful
| business.
|
| His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good moves.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _His acquisition of instagram and whatsapp were good
| moves._
|
| Acquiring your competitors to kill competition isn't a
| "good move," it's an obvious strategy that has existed for
| hundreds of years and is (rightly) illegal.
|
| We unfortunately forgot the lessons of the Gilded Age in
| this country, and incredibly anti-competitive acquisitions
| like that have been tolerated on too many occasions.
|
| It's easy to make "good moves" if regulators are ignoring
| you and you're comfortable with being immoral, as
| Zuckerberg always has been.
| xeromal wrote:
| I should clarify that I meant a good move for
| Facebook/Meta. I'm not commenting on the meaning of those
| moves outside of that context.
| morph123 wrote:
| Ideas are meaningless, execution is everything.
| jeltz wrote:
| Poor performance? Meta is doing great and just had one year of
| not insane growth. My take on why they have to fire people is
| that they hired way too many in 2020 and 2021.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...
| kqr2 wrote:
| It probably doesn't bode well that Cramer says Meta is
| 'rapidly becoming my favorite stock' :
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/14/club-meeting-recap-cramer-
| sa...
| ramraj07 wrote:
| And from what I remember, many of the retention models also
| got screwed up (people weren't quitting as often as before).
| troupe wrote:
| Was this because when people were allowed to work remote,
| fewer people quit to move to a different part of the
| country?
| mrtksn wrote:
| IMHO these hirings and firings are not about the present but
| about the future. Sure, Meta did great but Nokia also did
| great for a while after iPhone was introduced.
|
| What is the latest cool Meta product which promises a bright
| future for the company? Well, llama is cool but it's not
| product and today's greatest social media sensation is
| TikTok.
|
| I'm sure meta does have some great tech, in fact some of the
| work they did on VR with all these tens of billions of
| dollars is groundbreaking but that also failed as a product.
|
| Why would they keep the workforce configuration the same if
| their current state is probably not what they want to be
| tomorrow?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > What is the latest cool Meta product which promises a
| bright future for the company?
|
| Hum... Did the executives of all those large companies just
| happen to discover they aren't innovative at the same time?
| Or are they trying to prop-up their stock so they have time
| to exit on the prices created by the low-interest market?
|
| One of those is way more likely than the other.
|
| (But yeah, those companies have stopped innovating long
| ago.)
| hattmall wrote:
| I get the feeling TikTok has played themselves. Their
| format is super addictive, and it works, but the problem is
| that with something super addictive people lose interest
| sooner.
|
| It's not an actual drug so you can't just keep upping the
| dosage. I don't have the internal metrics and I'm sure they
| are still making gains, but I think their wave is going to
| be much smaller than Facebooks.
|
| It's still very popular of course but just judging by the
| number of times phones have been shoved in my face to watch
| a tiktok at social events recently vs a year ago I have to
| feel their is some level of decline. I also notice that
| even the younger crowd isn't using it as much.
|
| It seems to me that right now the most popular thing is
| sharing videos, both 3rd party and original within various
| group chats.
|
| I think there is social media platform overload, and the
| best way to keep in touch with people that actually matter
| to you and be sure they see your content is having group
| chats where you share things and then talk about it. Just
| my anecdotal observation, I'm probably wrong.
|
| It seems similar to the resurgence of piracy now that there
| are 50+ different streaming apps.
| blahgeek wrote:
| > with something super addictive people lose interest
| sooner
|
| Well, "addictive" literally means "cannot easily stop
| doing it"
| bobdvb wrote:
| I love taunting people by saying: "It's all just Vines"
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't think TikTok is any more addictive than the rest.
| If anything, TikTok doesn't make me feel missing out if I
| don't constantly check the App.
|
| I'm aware of the Chinese thing and how it makes some
| people feel but IMHO TikTok is healthy in in comparison
| with the Instagram or Reddit for example. You still can
| spend hours once in though.
|
| After years of stagnation with Meta, TikTok is a step
| forward.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| It's not about missing out but you get sucked in and
| there's no end. I don't use TikTok myself but I've gotten
| stuck with YouTube Shorts where 45 min easily fly by
| despite me disliking it. On all other social media
| platforms you reach the end and see content you read
| yesterday. On these video platforms it just goes on and
| on. Short videos are also a very digestable format.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think this is good, it's time we'll spent. What I
| struggle with is the need to constantly check what's new
| and never feel satisfied enough to move on.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > Meta is doing great and just had one year of not insane
| growth.
|
| This completely overlooks the changes that happened in that
| one year of not insane growth.
|
| Apple cut Meta's legs off and Meta has no indication on how
| they're going to regrow them. The Metaverse is flopping, FB
| is seen as a place for hate, youths don't have accounts, etc,
| etc, etc.
|
| Facebook is not the future of social media and Meta has not
| come up with a viable alternative.
| dageshi wrote:
| Tech companies are valued by how they dominate particular
| sectors/niches and the potential growth of that sector/niche.
|
| Facebook doesn't dominate social any more like it once did.
| It did so with Facebook itself then with instagram but TikTok
| is grabbing the current generation of new users.
|
| It can't grow like it once did and usage of its existing
| services will gradually decline.
|
| It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium
| after TikTok's short form video. Personally I doubt that but
| that's the bet they're making.
| rchaud wrote:
| Meta dominates the display ad market though, that is all
| they care about. Once TikTok is banned in America, they can
| grow it further.
| esskay wrote:
| TikTok's highly unlikely to get banned, and if it was
| then 10 new replacements would pop up overnight. Facebook
| isn't anything like TikTok and likely never could be.
| Instagram might get close but even then its not the same
| thing.
|
| Also the display ad market is only useful if you've got
| people to advertise to. The more Facebook continues to
| turn into 'social networking for boomers' the less and
| less they'll make.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| They have 2.9bn monthly active users.
|
| Like, I left FB five years ago (after staying there for 5
| years), and literally HN has been telling me that FB were
| doomed for all of that time.
|
| I totally agree that TikTok is a very strong competitor,
| unlike what they've seen before, but writing FB off right
| now is probably not the wisest long-term decision.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| How many in the US, and how many with desirable
| advertiser demographics. Selling reverse mortgage and
| pharmaceutical ads to boomer audiences turns you into
| television, where--at some point--the audience is going
| to pass on and leave it behind.
| r00fus wrote:
| A bit hyperbolic to say HN groupthink => "FB doomed".
| More like FB is over valued and their product has
| stagnated and alienated their user base.
| rejectfinite wrote:
| >and if it was then 10 new replacements would pop up
| overnight
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts
|
| already here
|
| and not a chinese company
|
| if Im gonna brainrot Ill use youtube
| deelowe wrote:
| TikTok isn't getting banned, don't be silly.
| jatins wrote:
| TikTok got banned in India. I don't see why it can't get
| banned in US given CCP's complete control over Chinese
| companies
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| India regularly bans sites.
|
| just last month
| https://www.npr.org/2023/02/14/1156726845/indian-tax-
| authori...
|
| USA is different
| [deleted]
| jq-r wrote:
| Is it silly? It's already being banned from US and
| European government devices. It is just one more sentence
| away from being banned for general population in those
| huge regions.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Were US and European government officials/workers really
| big TikTok'ers to begin with?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| There is big chasm between banning an app from fleet
| devices and banning both an app and a website in an
| entire country. Especially one that is so enormously
| popular.
| deelowe wrote:
| Yes it is. The government is just trying to get the data
| to stay within the US. TikTok only needs facilities here
| (and maybe some sort of air gap) to comply.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| they're literally just forcing them to build datacenters
| to keep the data for Americans in America (and Indians in
| India, etc). TikTok is already publicly hiring a ton of
| people for this
|
| Once the data doesn't leave America this is going to go
| away.
|
| This is not that much different than just complying with
| the type of regulations the EU has. The American version
| is just involving a lot more chest pounding and fluff
| because there's no existing laws to enforce to make them
| do this. So they just have to do it through threats and
| relatively minor policy changes (like banning on
| government phones).
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I'm honestly more surprised that any social media apps
| were ever allowed on government devices.
| wiremine wrote:
| > Tech companies...
|
| Is Meta really a tech company? It takes a lot of technology
| to do what they do, just like Netflix. But their core
| business isn't technology pre se, it's social media and
| advertising. I don't think they're the same class of
| businesses as Microsoft or Apple. Google is closer to Meta
| in terms of their revenue sources, but they have a much
| more diverse technology offering.
|
| They are trying to become a hardware company with their VR
| line, but it feels more like a hobby in the Apple sense of
| the term. I.e., a division with small revenues and without
| a clear growth path.
| dageshi wrote:
| Personally I'd say that if your company primarily builds
| its product(s) via programming then it's a tech company?
| djvdq wrote:
| So Google also isn't tech company. Their core business
| isn't tech but also advertising after all. Using your
| logic there are almost 0 pure tech companies.
| wiremine wrote:
| You could indeed argue that. I think there's a difference
| between the product and the revenue. Google still feels
| like they produce a number of technical products, even if
| their revenue is mostly driven by ads. GCP, Android, and
| Chrome would be examples.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You are right. We never called movie studios or TV
| Channels "tech companies" even though all their work is
| distributed and created by technology.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Did movie studios and tv channels employ large
| departments of researchers and engineers that developed
| and deployed the technology?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I don't know.
| rescbr wrote:
| Yes? It's not common anymore due to the technology
| maturing, but on its heyday the TV channels were on the
| forefront of technology. See the development of color
| television and much more recently (and I'm most familiar
| with it), the digital TV standards.
| f6v wrote:
| It's a public company that makes money. Why would it be
| valued differently than any other public company that makes
| money? Do people expect 10x growth?
| voytec wrote:
| > It's betting that the metaverse is the next social medium
|
| Apparently that's no longer the case: "Mark Zuckerberg
| Quietly Buries the Metaverse"[1]. Company name looks just
| silly at this point.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35023493
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Attention just in itself has zero value. If companies are
| paying Facebook to advertise there, that is where the value
| is. Personally I think social media advertising is a pure
| scam industry, but so many small companies want to play
| that casino, and Facebook makes that easy for them.
| djvdq wrote:
| > It can't grow like it once did
|
| 1 in 4 people on earth is using FB every day. They simply
| can't grow more too much.
| timy2shoes wrote:
| They go full Musk and colonize Mars so that they can
| achieve the exponential growth that investors expect.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| This is the most fundamental problem. In order to justify
| a "tech" P/E multiple, it has to be the case that
| exponential growth in the future is justified. For any
| MAMA (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet) company, this is
| almost certainly impossible. This means it is time to
| transition to being a boring, reliable stock, probably
| with a substantial dividend. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is
| ready to do that.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| PE ratios for big tech.
|
| Google: 20:1 Amazon: 100:1 Netflix: 30:1 Apple: 22:1
| Meta: 18:1
|
| (For the financially illiterate like me who wanted to see
| what various ratios looked like. Meta (Facebook at the
| time) used to have a 7:1 ratio when they printed money
| before they doubled headcount while revenue flagged. If
| it weren't for that hiring spree, they would be under
| 10:1 and not in the same class of "tech" multiples.
| [deleted]
| ashwagary wrote:
| >Poor performance? Meta is doing great and just had one year
| of not insane growth.
|
| Public sentiment is terrible and if that's a reliable leading
| indicator, the company will be in trouble if it doesnt
| continually diversify into products that distance themselves
| from the core brand.
| acedTrex wrote:
| I mean instagram and whatsapp are wildly popular
| ashwagary wrote:
| They are popular but anecdotally, if the general public
| is anything like me, they would be more likely to use
| those products if they werent owned by FB.
| acedTrex wrote:
| The general public does not really care one way or
| another about facebook the company
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| The conversations that I've been hearing point to the
| simplest way to kill TikTok: force them to sell to
| Facebook. As much as people dislike the spyware present
| in TikTok, they dislike FB's spying even more.
| bumby wrote:
| The metric you choose matters. If you would have chosen EPS
| it tells a very different story, especially for investors.
|
| Investors will tend to tolerate other faltering metrics for
| high revenue growth in startups, but that's not Meta.
| jeltz wrote:
| But EPS is doing great for Meta so I have no idea what you
| are talking about. Their only issue I can see for EPS is
| that they hired to many in 2020 and 2021, just as I said.
| bumby wrote:
| Tech is still valued as growth stocks compared to other
| sectors. If you look at the EPS, its trending down and
| growth is negative.[1] That's not "doing great" for what
| most investors expect out of a relatively mature tech
| stock that doesn't pay a dividend. In other words, why
| would I pay growth-stock valuation for something that
| isn't growing its earnings?
|
| (obviously, the analysis is more complicated than this,
| but you can see why investors may not think things are
| going gang-busters over at Meta)
|
| [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-
| platform...
| rnmkr wrote:
| [dead]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Poor performance is relative to what their peers
| (Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Microsoft) were accomplishing for many
| years in the 2010s.
|
| The market has separated these 5 pretty clearly now, with
| Meta trailing by quite a bit, Alphabet and Amazon in the
| middle, and Microsoft and Apple with a decent lead.
| Closi wrote:
| Meta is in the advertising business - why would we say they
| are they trailing Apple, Amazon and Microsoft?
|
| I don't really understand why we are comparing a company
| who develops social media applications and generates
| advertising revenue against Apple who generates most of
| it's revenue from selling Hardware, or Microsoft who
| generates most of it's revenue from licencing software.
|
| If we are saying that Meta are trailing Apple, we might as
| well say that Microsoft are trailing Saudi Aramco.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The market is not comparing their potentials now, but the
| market used to feel their potentials were similar in
| 2010s. Sorry for the terrible graph, it's the quickest
| market cap with all of them except Microsoft on it that I
| found.
|
| http://www.innovationkm.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/05/image...
|
| http://www.innovationkm.com/the-market-cap-of-faang-
| changes-...
|
| Another way to think of it is in the 2010s, a potential
| employee may have ranked a job at any of those companies
| as having similar security, but there is probably a
| different feeling about that now.
| Closi wrote:
| They aren't really in the same market though - so it's
| comparing apples and oranges.
|
| I get comparing Meta against Google, but why would we
| compare Meta against Apple? They are fundamentally
| different businesses.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The market compared their _potential_ during the 2010s,
| because everyone was growing by leaps and bounds and the
| sky was the limit. There is clearly no reason to do that
| now.
| Closi wrote:
| Plot the graph again but instead of comparing them to
| Apple and Netflix try comparing them to Johnson & Johnson
| and Porche.
| solaarphunk wrote:
| Facebook's ads business has been destroyed by Apple with the
| introduction of ATT. It's pretty clear this is a permanent
| shift downward in revenue for them, unless advertisers like
| them are able to improve ads attribution.
| ashwagary wrote:
| Don't you think Bing's search revamp will also eat into the
| FB ad business? IMO, there is enough contextual info
| supplied by users during queries to better target users
| with injected ads than competitors.
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| > now Zuckerberg is the old guard with stale ideas that he
| railed against so hard when Facebook was founded
|
| how is that any different than most of Silicon Valley?
|
| Silicon Valley is what people thought the future looked like in
| 1994
|
| It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is a
| limit to what you can do with websites and computers
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >It has taken Silicon Valley a long time to realize there is
| a limit to what you can do with websites and computers
|
| Through robots in there and I'm not convinced there really is
| a limit, it just becomes difficult
| RugnirViking wrote:
| These companies arent really robotics companies though.
| They have tried, but no successes yet
| rvz wrote:
| And the stock is up 120% since three months, of the low of $88.
| Obviously no-one bought it back then when they were expecting
| the stock to go to zero.
|
| Once again, Meta's death has been greatly exaggerated on this
| site.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| No one was expecting a business earning $20B profits per year
| to go to zero.
|
| What changed were the expectations of what their profit will
| be in 5, 10, 20 years.
| oblio wrote:
| > What changed were the expectations of what their profit
| will be in 5, 10, 20 years.
|
| The funny thing is, that's a bad bet. Large tech company
| profits can last for years and decades. The archetypal
| example is IBM. They've had some years or record losses,
| but overall, look at their yearly profits:
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/earnings/
|
| We're talking about probably more than $250bn of profits
| over 20 years.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| So... As valuation for those companies usually go, if the
| profit stays constant on real terms, the reasonable price
| to pay for the stock is often some 90% down from the
| peak.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Just having a profit is not enough to say something was
| or was not a bad bet. I doubt anyone is happy with their
| bet on IBM in the past couple decades. A riskless bet on
| SP500 would have delivered far greater returns.
| oblio wrote:
| It also depends on dividends. If IBM consistently gave
| dividends to its shareholders, that could add up to a lot
| of money.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| But it did not add up to a lot of money, compared to
| alternative, much less risky investments. In fact, it
| added up to a loss.
|
| https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
|
| IBM has objectively been a terrible investment for many,
| many years.
| ghaff wrote:
| IBM is a good dividend stock. That said, there are
| certainly stocks you could have bought and held over the
| past couple of decades (as well as many index funds) that
| would have had better returns overall.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Soon you'll all be fighting for your jobs. Many of you will be
| dying for your jobs. A few of you will be forced through a fine
| mesh screen for your jobs. They will be the luckiest of all.
|
| -- Zuck probably.
|
| I feel like 10K people are taking a hit because Zuck ruined VR
| for another decade with his very boomer like imagination and
| monetization strategy.
|
| Anyway, it's rough out there.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Zuck ruined VR for another decade with his very boomer like
| imagination and monetization strategy
|
| What do you mean?
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Go watch the launch of the metaverse and consider who would
| actually want to spend time and money there. Meta is trying
| to own vr like apple owns it's app store. But apple make a
| great set of products, that I don't like personally, but
| they are objectively good. Facebook is hanging on because
| it's got early market share from a long time ago, and it
| bought all it's competitors rather than out flank them. So
| it's lazy in mind and spirit and this is showing up in it's
| offerings in vr.
|
| Firing 10k people on the back of other layoffs just
| obscures that for a while.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Boomers were responsible for the late 90s VR hype train.
|
| This latest round is a re-run.
|
| VR was talked up like crazy then and fizzled.
|
| Zuckerberg is old enough to have been an impressionable kid
| when that was going on. I remember being very excited about
| it all.
| [deleted]
| justanother wrote:
| I remember installing the VRML plugin for Netscape and
| how it slowed my dual-CPU SPARCStation 20 to a crawl, but
| it was OMG The Future! and then one day nobody ever
| mentioned it again.
| ghaff wrote:
| I honestly don't remember a lot of VR hype but I've never
| been much of gamer so maybe I wasn't paying much
| attention. Various organizations, including the MIT Media
| Lab, have been playing around with VR for a long time but
| I don't recall VR being particularly notable in the dot-
| com runup.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Don't they have an enormous cash pile? How does that translate
| to poor performance?
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an "enormous
| cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital efficiently?
| [deleted]
| solarmist wrote:
| It depends, but investing wisely is very difficult and slow
| once you get into the billions of dollars.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I 'm no financial expert, but wouldn't hoarding an
| "enormous cash pile" be a indicator of not using capital
| efficiently?_
|
| Having an enormous cash pile is what allowed Apple to keep
| paying its employees when COVID shut everything down.
|
| Every good company has a cash reserve. The one I work for
| has a policy of maintaining enough cash reserves to operate
| for 18 months with zero income. It saved our bacon when the
| virus came around.
| Delphiza wrote:
| COVID did not shut down Apple's revenue generation.
| Revenue growth was staggering during COVID. Remember
| everybody buying electronics because of lockdowns? They
| may have felt less inclined to pay people while they
| weren't standing around in genius bars, but they didn't
| need cash reserves to keep them going.
| zug_zug wrote:
| Well they have some money in the bank, but culturally nobody
| thinks meta is the future (within USA at least). There is
| massive mistrust of their brand and any product they could
| ever make (be it lack of privacy or giving a terrible
| experience by over-monitizing).
| akudha wrote:
| There is massive mistrust of banks, comcast and a whole lot
| of other companies and even industries, among the general
| public. And yet, the same public continues to use their
| services, even when there are alternatives (at least in
| some cases, there aren't alternatives to many).
|
| Convenience and familiarity trumps other issues, even
| massive issues like privacy etc. You might be over
| estimating public's interest in giving their money only to
| honest, decent businesses - public gives their money to
| whoever entertains them cheaply and caters to their
| laziness.
|
| Nothing is going to change, unless we all vote with our
| wallets. But we have already voted, we knowingly support
| monster companies like Amazon.
| yurishimo wrote:
| You're right, but I don't see Facebook (or other Meta
| properties) approaching that level. Arguably, Whatsapp is
| the most successful in that area, but largely because
| they haven't done anything to further ruin their
| reputation. If/when Meta decides that Whatsapp is going
| to be their new focus and potential cash cow, they'll try
| and shove more monetization into that platform and the
| cycle of user migration will repeat.
| [deleted]
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Don't they have an enormous cash pile? How does that
| translate to poor performance?
|
| When you run a business, you look towards the future and what
| profit you're forecasting. You don't want to see decline in
| profits, you don't want to use your cash reserves to
| compensate for less profit.
|
| Facebook reported $23.1 billion net profit in 2022, a decline
| on the $39.3 billion made in 2021.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Meta owns Instagram and WA both of which have terrific and
| growing user base. How well are they able to monetise is a
| different question though.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| It's a little frustrating that they don't seem to break down
| earnings for Instagram and WhatsApp. My impression is that
| their monetization of Instagram is probably ok but not great
| compared to Facebook and their monetization of WhatsApp is
| probably awful.
| daveidol wrote:
| Growing user base because they copy and steal all their good
| ideas
| CameronNemo wrote:
| They don't ask how, they ask how many.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| that's why they have IG and the headsets which are younger
| abledon wrote:
| Discord is the the Facebook killer
| mfiguiere wrote:
| > We'll also have individual contributors report into almost
| every level -- not just the bottom -- so information flow between
| people doing the work and management will be faster.
| DethNinja wrote:
| I think it is fair to say that none of the large tech. companies
| except Apple managed to hire correctly. Should we also assume
| that they won't be able to fire correctly?
|
| I do believe problems about their talent pipeline or how they
| utilise it lays deeper than these hiring/firing sprees can solve.
| justinclift wrote:
| "Apple hired correctly" was a meme going around recently, but
| doesn't seem to be true:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34826369
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| A lot of companies are laying off large numbers of FTEs.
|
| Linked story indicates that Apple is laying off contractors.
|
| These are not the same.
| justinclift wrote:
| Not sure I buy that.
|
| If they'd "hired correctly", then even contractors wouldn't
| be getting laid off in large numbers.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The whole point of using contractors is you can drop them
| at a moment's notice.
|
| Why would you bother predicting labor demand in the
| future? That is the contracted entity's problem.
| pb7 wrote:
| Apple has a lot of contractors working in roles that
| companies like Google and Meta opt for FTEs instead so it's
| similar.
| biggc wrote:
| Is anyone laid off with this message, or have they just set up
| the entire company to worry that they're being laid off.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| From the text it appears at least some of these people are
| quite literally warned of their potential firing with this
| message.
| kyledrake wrote:
| Zuck should lay himself off, he's directly responsible for most
| of the problems the company is having right now. He endlessly
| makes the wrong choices for the company on privacy, UX, staffing
| and decides to do a botched pivot to VR instead of trying to
| improve any of that.
|
| He has lost the trust of his users and someone new needs to focus
| on restoring that as a precondition for anything else they do
| being successful. Facebook isn't Civ 5 (one of his favorite
| games) but he operates it like it is, and if he keeps treating FB
| like a video game full of NPCs he'll have plenty of time for the
| next Civ game.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| A lot of snippets in here that feel like Mark is stating some
| uncomfortable truths for many who have enjoyed the world of tech
| during the low interest rate environment.
|
| "In person work is more effective"
|
| > Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely
|
| "To remain a company that values tech we must lower the influence
| of people who don't value it"
|
| > As we've grown, we've hired many leading experts in areas
| outside engineering. This helps us build better products, but
| with many new teams it takes intentional focus to make sure our
| company remains primarily technologists.
| fxleach wrote:
| If you take the stance that in-person work is more effective
| (an "uncomfortable truth" as you call it), then it would seem
| to reason that engineers who transferred to remote work would
| see a decrease in performance, but that is not the case as you
| also mention.
|
| It seems like the real issue may be the hiring process between
| remote and in-person engineers, or biases in evaluating in-
| person vs. remote engineers.
| jmholla wrote:
| I wonder if they considered the fact that most of the people
| they hired remote were hired during COVID.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| The real issue may be one of the ones you mentioned. It could
| also be that employees who spend at least some significant
| time in person are more effective than those who are and
| always were fully remote.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Internet Rule 289: Thou shalt complain about layoff announcements
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Did Zuck use ChatGTP to write the letter? It sounds so
| soulless...
| ribs wrote:
| Why they heck does an American use the word "bespoke"? It's
| freaking CUSTOM, Mark, we are Yankees, cut the shit.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| I think ChatGPT will include the phrase "difficult decision" and
| the word "talented" on the task to write a layoff communique. The
| "flat structure" goes along the Elon "show me the code" rant when
| he acquired Twitter. IMHO managers are the spotters in the race
| and drivers are the coders and dev-ops the mechanics. To ask that
| the spotters have to take a few laps around the course during the
| race is idiotic right? You can replace the spotters with machines
| as long as you don't mind a few drivers going up in fiery crashes
| every now and then. I've seen that implemented. It requires a lot
| of work-visas.
| amrrs wrote:
| >Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers
| who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote
| or remained in-person performed better on average than people who
| joined remotely. This analysis also shows that engineers earlier
| in their career perform better on average when they work in-
| person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires
| further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to
| build trust in person and that those relationships help us work
| more effectively.
|
| Looks like the age of pure remote work is done for big
| corporates!
| saos wrote:
| It was always going to happen. It was for a season to protect
| people from covid and lessen the spread of it.
| rob74 wrote:
| Not so sure... remote working was a thing already before
| Covid (just think of the millions of hours wasted commuting
| daily, not to mention the tons of CO2 emitted), Covid simply
| accelerated what seemed to be an inevitable evolution to a
| revolution. Now we have arrived at the "counter-revolution"
| stage, where the powers that be (managers) try to turn back
| the clock to the "good old times". Let's see if they will
| succeed...
| rob74 wrote:
| Also,
|
| > _I encourage all of you to find more opportunities to work
| with your colleagues in person_
|
| ...I wonder if these layoffs will be an opportunity for
| managers to get rid of some of those pesky employees who insist
| on working remotely - with the welcome side effect of
| "encouraging" the remaining ones to "embrace" the return to old
| ways of working with more enthusiasm?
| caskstrength wrote:
| > ...I wonder if these layoffs will be an opportunity for
| managers to get rid of some of those pesky employees who
| insist on working remotely - with the welcome side effect of
| "encouraging" the remaining ones to "embrace" the return to
| old ways of working with more enthusiasm?
|
| Yeah, to me that also looks like a thinly veiled threat "get
| back to the office or prepare to be laid off".
| lephty wrote:
| Interesting hypothesis. If it is true, what does it say about
| social networks like FB if in-person networks provide better
| trust building than online ones.
| black_13 wrote:
| [dead]
| auggierose wrote:
| > we don't build services to make money; we make money to build
| better services
|
| That's either a lie, or Mark has a serious misunderstanding of
| what "better" means.
| hylaride wrote:
| Free advice to future managers:
|
| You don't need to write a novel with these. Also, writing an
| email about how you're going to can a bunch of people over the
| coming year and then droning on about how the results of that are
| going to be so much better (and insinuate that the current setup,
| which is 100% a management failure, was a poor setup) is
| insulting.
|
| Also, this is a 2nd round barely 6 months after the first and
| it's going to happen over _months_. This will be great for morale
| and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still
| very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
| l1silver wrote:
| What if your A players are tired of carrying the load for the B
| and C players and cherish this news?
| IMTDb wrote:
| > will likely only cause your A players (who are probably still
| very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
|
| As other have said: is there such a high demand right now ? And
| if you know and feel that you are an "A" player; and so far you
| have seen "C" players getting laid off, you might actually feel
| that the average level of the people you interact with
| _increases_ which makes you want to stay _more_.
| hylaride wrote:
| It's not white hot like it was 1-3 years ago, but if you're
| qualified and experienced, yes there very much is still
| demand from non-FAANG companies.
| dangwhy wrote:
| taking 50% paycut isn't easy.
| hylaride wrote:
| The way FAANG stocks have performed, you've already taken
| that if you work for one considering how much of their
| total comp tended to be RSUs (with the exception of
| apple).
| dangwhy wrote:
| Facebook gave out refreshers and bonuses even this review
| cycle.
| andsoitis wrote:
| While that might be true:
|
| a) the technical challenges at these large tech companies
| are probably way more interesting
|
| b) compensation is very likely better
|
| c) you are working with many many more peers who are super
| talented
| dx034 wrote:
| Aren't technical challenges at smaller companies usually
| much more interesting? Pay is worse, but smaller
| companies usually offer much more freedom to implement
| your ideas and shape the company.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| It depends on what you mean by "smaller." At the majority
| of smaller companies, it's just CRUD app stuff, probably
| in C#, with significantly less freedom (often beholden to
| very non technical middle management).
| rewgs wrote:
| I'm the sole developer at a non-tech company, and I have
| near-complete freedom _because_ management is non-
| technical (and humble enough to admit that). I really,
| really enjoy my current job. Not saying that 's the norm,
| of course -- just adding a data point to the convo.
| dx034 wrote:
| Is that bad? You can solve interesting challenges in C#
| with CRUD stuff. Nothing that scales to millions of
| users, but there are challenges other than scaling.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _At the majority of smaller companies, it 's just CRUD
| app stuff, probably in C#, with significantly less
| freedom_
|
| This is a very strange point-of-view.
|
| I've worked in "small" (~100 employees or fewer) business
| my entire career, and _not once_ was it strictly CRUD
| stuff in C#.
|
| The freedom is debatable, I guess, since I have no
| experience at larger companies, but I certainly never
| found that my freedom is confined. Most often there is
| opportunity to contribute anywhere and everywhere, and
| management is happy to have the help.
| quacked wrote:
| I'm not a dev but still highly technical, and devs
| turning their noses up at "CRUD stuff" always makes me
| laugh. It reminds me of the musicians I know who won't
| play in certain styles because it's not "meaningful" or
| "true to their artistic vision". Bud I was at your last
| gig, you don't sound _that_ great even when you 're
| playing "meaningful" music.
|
| Similarly, most of the devs I've worked with that are
| obsessed with "exciting" work still turn out pretty
| questionable stuff, and their careers would probably be
| better served if the built out a "simple" CRUD app, took
| it really seriously, and then examined the effects of
| their design on other teams.
| Jensson wrote:
| > smaller companies usually offer much more freedom to
| implement your ideas
|
| Not really, if I come up with a novel algorithm or a
| different architecture to do a task better at Google then
| they will give me the chance to implement it even if it
| takes months or years. Small companies doesn't care about
| your ideas, they just want a cog that can give them a
| basic website because that is all they need, novel things
| doesn't help them.
|
| If you mean "novel product ideas" then sure, but we
| aren't product managers we are programmers so our ideas
| would mostly be related to architecture or algorithms.
| dx034 wrote:
| Then you've been at different small companies than I
| have. Obviously if you're the only person in tech at that
| company it's hard to do groundbreaking stuff. But small
| tech companies solve challenges everyday. And being able
| to directly convince the CEO (who is often technical at
| these companies) can make decisions much quicker than at
| large companies.
| Jensson wrote:
| > small tech companies solve challenges everyday
|
| Yes, just not challenges that requires ideas to solve.
| They are mostly just following the same path every other
| tech company went, re implementing the same systems. To
| them it doesn't matter if the system is better or worse,
| they just want a system since going from 0 to 1 is huge,
| meaning that they wont give you time or resources to
| implement your idea, they just want a cheap idea.
| bumby wrote:
| The technical challenges may be interesting, but are the
| strategic ones? I.e., do you think most people would
| choose to work on problems that optimize ad spend vs.
| something like, say, healthcare if all else was equal?
| HEmanZ wrote:
| Why work on ad optimization when you can work on
| insurance billing optimization?
| bumby wrote:
| haha point taken. I would argue "insurance" isn't
| "healthcare". But this somewhat underscores my larger
| point. The SV mindset is almost solely focused on
| maximizing revenue, whether that's ads or insurance
| billing. My point is that there are other, possibly more
| interesting, problems to work on if you relax that
| constrained viewpoint.
| samrocksc wrote:
| None of these are really factual points. Big Shops are
| place where you just get stuck being a YAML jockey and
| bantering in RFCs.
| troupe wrote:
| Very good point. There is a big difference between random
| layoffs and laying off the bottom 20%.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Yeah, but you now have to pick up all the work they were
| doing.
| dx034 wrote:
| In most big companies I've worked at, I thought I could
| identify the people who made everyone slower and were a net
| negative to productivity. However, they never seemed to be
| the ones threatened to be fired. Often they were really good
| at playing corporate games so that it was really hard to
| justify firing them, while the ones fired were junior
| employees who had great potential but weren't as good at
| politics yet.
|
| So while FB certainly intended to fire underperformers and
| increase average performance, I doubt they were able to
| identify the right people for that.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I thought I could identify the people who made everyone
| slower and were a net negative to productivity. However,
| they never seemed to be the ones threatened to be fired._
|
| Or maybe you're not as good of a judge of these things as
| you think?
| dx034 wrote:
| Could very well be. Especially in large companies, it's
| very hard to judge the importance of some roles and
| people. That's why there are always complains about how
| promotions work, no one has figured out how to value the
| work of an employee.
|
| Don't know much about Meta's HR department, maybe they're
| really good at that. But in the end we're all humans and
| never unbiased when we make those decisions.
| syntheticnature wrote:
| Indeed. While one should always look to check on other
| biases in play, in my experience "F" players survive
| layoffs almost as often as "A" players, and it's those in
| the middle that get hit. (Sometimes this may be because the
| "F" players aren't getting paid as much, and are therefore
| cheap.)
|
| Not to mention that the remaining "A" players may each be
| saddled with the work of ten laid-off "C" players because,
| as far as management is concerned, programmers are
| fungible. Why not have their 10x programmer take care of
| it?
| brap wrote:
| The novel isn't for employees, it's for investors
| avrionov wrote:
| Correct. The stock is up 5% this morning.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Stock always goes up after layoffs. Hell, the stock goes up
| after _rumors_ about layoffs.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So, if you approach 0 employees asymptotically, the stock
| will approach [?].
| mywittyname wrote:
| I sincerely hope this new thesis you've unleashed on the
| world is called the DeathArrow in business schools across
| the world.
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| give man a Nobel
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Revenue (or profit) per employee is always the metric to
| use, where employee >= 1, since there is no use making
| 0.01 cents if there are 0 employees.
|
| WhatsApp famously had ~50 employees for ~$16 billion in
| acquisition price.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| What was their revenue though?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Who knows / cares? Their product is the stock itself that
| was then sold to the acquirer.
|
| The show Silicon Valley has a great parody of this fact:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Limitless growth
| brwck wrote:
| Why stop a 0? If we can have negative interest rates, why
| not negative employment? Make employees pay you to work
| for them.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's a thing with certain types of
| internships.
| otikik wrote:
| Let me guess. You work in crypto.
| testfoobar wrote:
| And the press. You can assume that internal emails like this
| are leaked.
| Jagerbizzle wrote:
| It's publicly posted on fb.com
| capableweb wrote:
| After sharing it internally. Probably posted on fb.com as
| they know it would just leak otherwise, and the memo is
| written with the mindset of it being public regardless.
| dcow wrote:
| Why is the immediate response to criticize? Every single time
| I've seen layoffs discussed people always ask why it can't feel
| like more of a conversation and less like a bandaid getting
| ripped off (because it sucks to be part of the bandaid).
| Employees _want_ to be included in the conversation. It seems
| that 's exactly what is being done here. How is that
| _insulting_?!
|
| I mean we also hear the traditional rationale for why you can't
| announce layoffs in advance but it doesn't seem absurd to try
| it since there seems to be remarkably little data on the
| subject. Further, if you're considering letting 10k people go,
| I don't see how it's bad to have the loose ones leave of their
| own volition. I actually liked the tone and detail of this
| post. It certainly seems Meta is preparing to fix more than
| "100% a management failure"...
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| Conversely, if you're an A player you may be ecstatic in
| believing the company is finally getting back on track, and
| therefore want to stay.
|
| Something similar happened when Steve Jobs returned to Apple.
| He cancelled ~70% of the product roadmap and the engineers were
| thrilled that the company finally returned to a coherent
| vision.
| awill wrote:
| Where are they going to go?
|
| The market isn't good right now. Not many places that are
| hiring can give an offer that matches a FAANG
| newaccount2023 wrote:
| right...but what FAANG is still offering megabucks? why would
| they?
|
| HN seems to think it is the birthright of a good dev to get a
| $450k salary...just "because"
|
| look at it from the other side of the table...you have 300
| great resumes for a position...why do you have to offer a
| premium salary?
|
| counterpoint: these salaries were a blip and will never
| return in nominal form (let alone inflation adjusted) for
| many devs ever again
| awill wrote:
| Right. But the point is, if you're already at a FAANG
| earning a huge salary, and you don't know if you're going
| to get laid off, you can either a) wait and hope for the
| best, or b) leave and get a job at a lower salary.
|
| I think most would choose a).
| vkou wrote:
| > right...but what FAANG is still offering megabucks? why
| would they?
|
| Everyone who still has a job with them is still getting
| 'megabucks'.
|
| They, for the most part, aren't hiring, though.
| toddmorey wrote:
| Exactly. My first thought was how dystopian it is to start an
| email about layoffs during the "year of efficiency" with how
| your company is "building the future of human connection".
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Also, this is a 2nd round barely 6 months after the first and
| it's going to happen over months. This will be great for morale
| and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably
| still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
|
| Part of the plan is that lots of people leave on their own
| along with the 10k. For me, the real question is, how many of
| the A players can afford to leave? Salaries have to be
| declining many of the top payers have hiring freezes. It seems
| like even though they're in high demand will they be able to
| demand the same pay? And if they can't how many are willing to
| take the jump and leave for less money? They're called golden
| handcuffs for a reason.
| dangwhy wrote:
| > cause your A players (who are probably still very much in
| demand) to look elsewhere.
|
| Vast majority won't find jobs that are as well paying as
| facebook. FB is a leader in tech salaries which gives them the
| leverage to announce such a thing without losing people. People
| don't want to take paycuts and go somewhere thats also doing
| layoffs.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Good points. But there might be some start-ups tempting them
| with pre-IPO stock or they can start their own business.
| twawaaay wrote:
| It is a good point. But people still can be "looking
| elsewhere" as in searching _if_ they can find another job. It
| is exactly the thing I would do if I had _any_ chance that I
| would loose my job. I know my manager would never do it but
| with layoffs there are greater forces that he may not be able
| to save me from.
|
| And changing your availability and answering a call or chat
| from time to time does not cost much. It is not like there is
| any downside to it.
|
| And if an A player starts looking around great things
| sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position
| that would justify the salary. Or he may have already earned
| a lot at FB and may decide this is the time to invest in
| building a startup, etc.
|
| At my previous company I got in an argument with my boss and
| just changed my availability on LI. Just out of spite. This
| led me to an offer that changed my life. And there is a lot
| of people so much better at their job than I am.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > It is exactly the thing I would do if I had any chance
| that I would loose my job
|
| There is always a chance you can lose your job. There has
| never been a day since I started working over 25 years ago
| (well actually I spent my first year saving so it would
| have hurt then) that I haven't been ready to change jobs at
| the drop of a dime.
|
| > And changing your availability and answering a call or
| chat from time to time does not cost much. It is not like
| there is any downside to it
|
| You should be doing that all the time regardless.
|
| > And if an A player starts looking around great things
| sometimes happen. He may get hired at much higher position
|
| That happens most of the time anyway because of salary
| compression and inversion even if you are just a journeyman
| "full stack developer".
| bradleyjg wrote:
| FB pay at this point is highly dependent on when your RSU
| basis was set, no?
|
| If you joined from 9/2020 to 1/2022, you've taken a serious
| pay cut versus your nominal offer.
|
| Unless there have been adjustments that I haven't read about?
| fatnoah wrote:
| For someone who joined at the peak of September 2021, let's
| assume an L6 offer of $240k + 20% bonus + $1.1M in joining
| stock over four years. With no stock movement and meeting
| expectations, they'd make $298k cash + $275k stock, for a
| total of $563k. Now, with that stock down by 50% (ish) as
| of today, they're total compensation would be $436k. That's
| still a serious chunk of change, and while a $138k drop in
| compensation is nothing to sneeze at, they'll also be
| getting a new grant of $220k/4 years this month(ish), and
| every year hereafter, bringing their 2023 compensation
| almost back to $500k if the stock market doesn't move.
|
| So yes, it's a serious pay cut, but it's still amazing pay.
| Now, if they were bullish on the market, then it might make
| sense to try to move to another company that can come up
| with a 7-figure joining bonus and ride that appreciation to
| new stock heights.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Yes, I agree with the GP's main point that FB is still
| near or at top of market and that matters quite a bit
| more than HN sometimes gives it credit for.
|
| Just wanted to clarify that it's not quite what it was.
| Thanks for adding numbers.
| dangwhy wrote:
| Refreshers and bonuses weren't paused during this period.
| twblalock wrote:
| This isn't just an internal email, it's a press release.
| Everyone knows that if it was just an internal email someone
| would leak it, so they are writing it knowing that the public
| will see it.
| dsr_ wrote:
| The old joke is:
|
| Letter 1: Blame previous management.
|
| Letter 2: Announce a reorg/layoffs.
|
| Letter 3: Tell your successor to write three letters...
| [deleted]
| rchaud wrote:
| Top brass doesn't get fired anymore, no need for the 3rd
| letter these days.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Greg Becker would like a word
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In this case, the top brass owns more than 50% of voting
| rights, so no one can fire them.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| But since he's also a shareholder, it's in his own
| interest to self fire himself.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > writing an email about how you're going to can a bunch of
| people over the coming year and then droning on about how the
| results of that are going to be so much better (and insinuate
| that the current setup, which is 100% a management failure, was
| a poor setup) is insulting.
|
| Employees ask for transparency. This is what transparency looks
| like...
| vlunkr wrote:
| Its not transparency, it's marketing and guessing the future.
| lazide wrote:
| What do you think most upper management is exactly?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Its not transparency, it's marketing and guessing the
| future.
|
| You are wrong. During the last round of layoffs, employees
| asked to hear about upcoming plans before they happen. Mark
| Zuckerberg is literally responding to that request.
| shapefrog wrote:
| They are transparent lies ... not transparency.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| I'm sure Zuck really appreciates the advice of a random HN
| commenter. It's not like he has experience running one of the
| world's largest companies or anything.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| The fault of this lies in upper management. They're getting
| paid a lot of money to foresee these sorts of things and to
| plan for them. Hiring like crazy isn't planning, its just doing
| bare minimum to make it look like you're doing something. But
| this is also endemic to the Meta org: you can only rise up if
| you hire enough people below you. And the fault for that
| ridiculous requirement lies in Zuckerberg. Why are none of the
| upper management accepting that THEY failed? They should be
| laid off along with the workers. Including Zuckerberg.
| pdntspa wrote:
| The lack of self-awareness in corporate communications is
| suffocating, when instead it should be suffocating the folks
| who wrote these emails
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > This will be great for morale and will likely only cause your
| A players (who are probably still very much in demand) to look
| elsewhere.
|
| I imagine the vast majority of their ultra top-tier talent has
| left already unless Meta gave them gigantic bonuses.
|
| The stock is down ~40% from where a lot of their RSUs were
| granted - more than 50% of their pay comes from those grants.
|
| They've had a year of time to go somewhere else and make way
| more money - most of them probably took that unless Meta gave
| them a gigantic bonus to keep them whole.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This is a huge factor! In my experience having a whole bunch
| of stock can be a really powerful anchor to keep you in place
| at your job even if you're not 100% happy.
|
| If the stock tanks that vaporizes really quickly.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >They've had a year of time to go somewhere else and make way
| more money - most of them probably took that unless Meta gave
| them a gigantic bonus to keep them whole.
|
| But other FAANGS are not hiring. So where it's somewhere
| unless they planned to start their own businesses?
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| > But other FAANGS are not hiring.
|
| They are if you're talented enough.
| johntiger1 wrote:
| This is a toxic mentality; getting hired at FAANG has
| very little to do with your "talent"
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I can't think of a more toxic mentality then thinking it
| doesn't. In what way do you think talent doesn't play a
| huge role?
| checkcircuits wrote:
| The odd, perhaps not entirely coincidental, relationship
| between ivy league pedigree and job at FAANG. While
| there's a correlation between talent and ivy league the
| relationship is often tenuous. In my experience the
| difference between a new grad from MIT and a new grad
| from state school is almost zero in the professional
| world. Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to
| FAANG. This is not unusual. Look at Finance. However, to
| assert that "talent" plays a bigger role than pedigree is
| simply a falsehood refuted by the evidence.
| umanwizard wrote:
| > ivy league pedigree and job at FAANG
|
| I worked at FB and Amazon for six years total and the
| vast majority of my fellow engineers were from random
| mediocre schools (including myself, from the U. of
| Arizona).
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| I mean yes a lot of sub par metrics and proxies are used
| because people get really up in arms about using IQ
| tests; the best indicator Google ever found.
|
| > Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG.
|
| Citation? I haven't seen anything like that in the
| industry at all.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Talent is obviously subjective.
|
| If you define talent as the criteria by which FAANG
| selects from a pool of employees - then you're by
| definition correct.
|
| If you don't - then you disagree.
|
| If FAANG is paying top dollar and selecting for trash -
| you have to wonder why, though.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I'm talented at sucking up and playing politics like a
| harp. Like a freaking genius at it, seriously. Is that
| what you meant?
| kanyethegreat wrote:
| Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'm also curious
| where these people are going to earn massive comp.
| deltree7 wrote:
| There are two kinds of people
|
| * People who have built companies from 0 to $Trillion (making a
| lot of employees incredibly wealthy)
|
| * ^^ People who give free advice on the internet ^^
| usrusr wrote:
| > and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably
| still very much in demand) to look elsewhere
|
| I really don't believe that it's a given that Meta still needs
| them: the entire org was designed for "innovation", and that
| has certainly been the right call back in the day. E.g. back
| when they were still on the edge between buying and competing
| with whatsapp and instagramm on the product level.
|
| But Meta products have been beyond "salvation by innovation"
| for almost a decade now, what they need to maximize shareholder
| value is the cheapest setup to keep value extraction up and
| running for as long as the brands still do their thing. The
| innovation game is over for them, because the same brand effect
| that saves the platforms from dying immediately also taints
| anything Meta buys or starts. Even if Meta had a "Toktik" that
| had feature equivalency with Tiktok without even a microsecond
| latency, it would still be stillborn because people just don't
| want yet another Meta product in their lives (even to the point
| where they'd rather have a CCP product in their lives, brand
| awareness isn't exactly a field where logic applies).
|
| These days Meta is in the position comparable to that of a
| single-field oil extraction company that has no hope for
| getting claims on any other fields and that has its existing
| field already fully prospected and tapped. That field is far
| from empty yet, but they only need people to keep the pumps
| running, no prospectors, no drillers, no acquisition
| strategists. Those Meta employees that have been
| _traditionally_ considered "A players" they wouldn't want to
| lose and that might actually have been paid absurd sums only to
| keep them from innovating for the competition are all in the
| "prospectors, drillers, strategists" group and those have
| exactly zero value for the janitorial task of keeping the pumps
| running (edit: more likely negative value, not zero).
|
| (I know, this almost sounds as if I was saying that Musk's
| Twitter strategy of burning down the house and then trying to
| macguyver something useful from the rubble was smart, I'm a bit
| surprised myself. I guess I do think that the aggressive
| downsizing would have been the rational thing for Twitter to
| do, but certainly not as a "step 2" after "step 1: throw 44
| billion at previous owners". In hindsight, waiting for 44
| billion to show up has certainly been much better for previous
| Twitter owners than doing the downsizing themselves)
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Also, this is a 2nd round barely 6 months after the first and
| it's going to happen over months. This will be great for morale
| and will likely only cause your A players (who are probably
| still very much in demand) to look elsewhere.
|
| That may be the plan. There are two benefits of this: more than
| 10000 people leave your company, but you don't have to pay
| severance to them. And second, A players are compensated well
| and a layoff forces you to pay them hefty severances. If you
| think your A players do not contribute as much as they are
| getting paid, this is a way to push them out without paying
| that extra cash.
| blincoln wrote:
| I agree that the press release is way too long. I'd add one
| more specific recommendation for anyone who ends up in a
| leadership role:
|
| If you're ever in a situation where you need to lay off or
| otherwise end your relationship with employees, contractors,
| etc., avoid using terms like "garbage collect[ion]" in the
| press release, even if you think it's in a section that's not
| directly about the people you're letting go.
| noduerme wrote:
| Everything after the first section is _definitely_ written by
| an LLM, and not one named Zuckerberg.
| paganel wrote:
| > who are probably still very much in demand
|
| Honest question, but are they? And, just as important, is
| anyone other than a FAANG company willing to pay them the same
| high comps right at this moment?
|
| I can see a high-need-for-people/high-comp scenario still
| possible in some parts of finance, but with these recent events
| I'm not so sure anymore. I'm also sure that right now there's a
| high demand for people in anything related to MIC/the war
| industry, but I don't think they can provide the same high
| comps as FAANGs do, unless one choose to go the contractor
| route (which also comes with its pluses and minuses).
| hylaride wrote:
| Yes. At the moment, there very much is a shortage of
| qualified tech workers still. The market for them is now more
| "really hot" than "white hot".
| HervalFreire wrote:
| No. Only niche skills. Python and basic web dev is becoming
| common place. Supply given boot camps and lack of
| credentialism and the ease of learning software dev has
| increased by a lot.
|
| These layoffs don't happen in a really hot market.
| omginternets wrote:
| Boot camps don't qualify as supply, they qualify as
| noise. People who can actually _engineer_ using Python
| are rare enough that they remain well-paid.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| They do qualify. Boot camps generate a lot of noise but
| there is no doubt that out of that noise there are a lot
| of good candidates that significantly increase supply by
| a non trivial margin. Not seeing this is denying reality.
|
| People who can actually engineer in python is becoming
| more and more common place.
| omginternets wrote:
| >there are a lot of good candidates that significantly
| increase supply by a non trivial margin
|
| There's still a deficit of talent, even in Python. I
| don't see anyone denying this reality.
|
| But to your point, there _is_ a flood of bad candidates.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| >But to your point, there is a flood of bad candidates.
|
| How would you know did you hire these candidates to find
| out? Or did you dismiss them as bad because they didn't
| pass some brain teaser algorithm interview?
|
| Those candidates go on to get hired at companies with a
| lower bar for lower salaries and those lower salaries do
| influence the market.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I hire 10+ Python developers per year. You're wrong.
|
| If you yourself are a bad engineer or terrible at hiring,
| you might mistake the chaff for the wheat, but then
| you're doomed anyway.
|
| I think you're not talking from experience.
|
| The same thing happened with JS when that was peaky, and
| it'll happen in other languages too.
|
| What is old is new again.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| > I hire 10+ Python developers per year. You're wrong.
|
| I've been hiring roughly the same amount for 10 years.
| I'm actually really extremely good at modern python. My
| skills with python syntax are so good that I can do in 1
| line exclusively with generators what a junior programmer
| probably needs 10 lines and twice as much mutating state
| to pull off. My code is also likely more modular and
| neater then a junior but you have to realize none of this
| matters that much. My skill level with python is beyond
| the curve of what is necessary and so is any other
| developer that goes beyond 2 years with python.
|
| In the end every programmer I ever hired exclusively for
| python will hit this tier within 1 or 2 years, very few
| exceptions. Roughly half of the junior programmers I hire
| are actually already within this tier upon getting hired.
| Literally before hitting there first job. After two years
| the only thing left to pick up are some more unique
| patterns and tricks but that's it.
|
| I am 100% talking from experience.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Yes but the same timeline can be done for C, C#, Java or
| anything else.
|
| It isn't unique to Python.
|
| "Of what is necessary" is subjective. Regardless of the
| language or framework I'm hiring within they must have
| the same level of engineering skill. I've hired people
| for Python projects who were outstanding Go or Java
| programmers who never touched Python commercially.
|
| My point is the language isn't relevant to your
| arguments.
|
| That's why you're wrong.
|
| There's also plenty of Python developers two years in
| (that I've interviewed and rejected) who couldn't write
| me a decorator or explain MRO.
|
| There's plenty of 2-year Go programmers who can't deal
| with goroutines well.
| whstl wrote:
| The grandparent is clearly not talking about people fresh
| out of boot camp or doing basic web dev. The job market
| for junior devs has been cold for ages, with thousands
| people applying even for low-paying positions.
|
| As much as people like to think that developers are just
| cogs on wheels, companies still want experienced devs
| (experienced senior and above), and they are still
| difficult to hire.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Many senior devs over the last decade have been created
| by boot camps. With the recent lay offs the over supply
| is becoming more apparent. It is now really easy to hire
| senior python devs.
|
| Arguably python is so easy that junior devs aren't that
| far off from senior devs.
| alanfranz wrote:
| Purely Python devs, maybe.
|
| Start asking questions about Linux, or networking, or
| security, you won't find many that can answer.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| This^ is true. Arguably though the majority of web
| development doesn't involve the stuff you mention.
| Developers simply work within a framework. This Linux
| stuff is relegated to specialists... devops or security
| engineers.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| As someone who runs a team of Python developers, and has
| been a professional Python developer for 15+ years, you
| sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
|
| The difference between a junior and senior developer has
| nothing to do with the language. Regardless of the
| language the engineering fundamentals are the same.
|
| Also, there's a billion mile difference between a
| junior's code and a senior's in any language and this is
| true of Python as much as anything else.
|
| A languages syntactic or design simplicity is irrelevant.
| Even if it were not, Python's semantics make it
| particularly easy to write poor code and trigger
| footguns.
|
| I've written C, JavaScript, Rust, Go, Python, Java and a
| bit of Erlang ... Python is easily one of the easiest
| languages to make a mess in if you've not got a solid
| engineering mindset.
|
| I could go on, your comment was trash in so many ways,
| which experience would tell you.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| > As someone who runs a team of Python developers, and
| has been a professional Python developer for 15+ years,
| you sound like you don't know what you're talking about.
|
| As someone who's done 20 years of professional C++
| development along with 15 years of professional python
| development, as well as 10 years of professional
| javascript/react development on a systems that go across
| the stack from the lowest level of sensors and embedded
| systems to the browser front end I know what I'm talking
| about.
|
| I've also done rust, go, erlang, java, and I've also done
| a ton of haskell as well as lisp. I've been all over the
| place likely more than you.
|
| >The difference between a junior and senior developer has
| nothing to do with the language. Regardless of the
| language the engineering fundamentals are the same.
|
| This is beyond wrong. You've done C, you've done rust,
| then you must know that the fundamentals of systems
| programming is much more wider ranging then python.
| What's a pointer? What's a unique pointer or shared
| pointer? What's move semantics? What's the difference
| between stack allocation and heap allocation? What's an R
| value vs. L value? What's a borrowed value? What's
| virtual memory? What's an interface (arguably with the
| advent of annotations types are not more relevant in
| python but there is huge class of senior python
| programmers who don't use types)
|
| The above are programming fundamentals that a python
| programmer never needs to know. A python programmer can
| go from junior to principal and not need to KNOW any of
| the above simply because python abstracts these concepts
| away from the user. The fact that a python programmer
| doesn't need to know any of these things makes it
| significantly easier. For web apps a company is most
| efficient if they hire a mid level python developer over
| some principle python developer with 10 years of
| experience.
|
| This is not the case for a language like C++
| ppoint wrote:
| I think the point you're missing is that senior engs in
| Meta do not just write code. Some of the senior engs
| almost do not write code at all. They design systems and
| move complex projects forward. So that's more of like a
| TPM/PM/mgmt skill there, in addition to excellent
| technical ability to write the code itself. In certain
| projects, especially in infra, writing code is usually
| the last part (and often the least complex one) of your
| avg large project driven by senior ICs; and often the
| code is written by engs across teams/orgs, not
| necessarily the senior eng themselves. So yea, deep
| language knowledge, while an excellent skill, is not
| something that defines a senior eng (at least in Meta and
| I presume in similar FAANG companies).
| HervalFreire wrote:
| >I think the point you're missing is that senior engs in
| Meta do not just write code. Some of the senior engs
| almost do not write code at all. They design systems and
| move complex projects forward
|
| I think your getting off on a different topic. Those guys
| aren't engineers anymore right? They're more technical
| managers; or architects.
|
| >So yea, deep language knowledge, while an excellent
| skill, is not something that defines a senior eng (at
| least in Meta and I presume in similar FAANG companies).
|
| I agree with this, but this is not what the others are
| talking about. The topic right now is about python
| developers. The more wider range role you're talking
| about here isn't a person with the title "Senior python
| software developer." Meta likely doesn't have that title.
|
| Additionally, if a company works purely within the python
| ecosystem of web development, the "architecture" actually
| doesn't get too complex. Most of this stuff is trivial
| too, I give it an additional year to learn it.
|
| If you're doing stuff with shared memory and utlra low
| latency applications then it's a completely different
| scenario, but you wouldn't be working in python if you
| had that requirement.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| C might have pointers, Python has efficiency gotchas.
|
| It might have heap allocation, Python has numpy.
|
| Rust might ...
|
| Even so, while there _may_ be more technical scope in
| some languages, or more immediate surface area, this
| should be true:
|
| A senior developer primarily in language Y should be
| technically capable enough to be senior in language Z
| with some degree of work.
|
| The language isn't relevant. Data structures, engineering
| mindset, pragmatism, intuition, maths reasoning, abstract
| thinking, ...
|
| These are things that make a senior developer.
|
| If I find a Python dev without this skillset at a high
| level they're not being put in a senior position because
| they'll add technical debt, cost and risk without even
| knowing it. They're a liability.
|
| Your "senior" Python developers don't sound senior to me.
|
| If you think you can promote anyone to senior or
| principal without the above, you're a liability too. Good
| job.
| amon22 wrote:
| Sorry but this is nonsense. Juniors can absolutely make a
| huge mess in python if let to their own devices. You seem
| to confuse the knowledge of syntax and language features
| with actual experience in designing software.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Let me spell it out. A junior dev is 1 or 2 years of
| experience away from a senior dev for python.
|
| For C++ it takes probably 4 or 5 years.
|
| This is not nonsense. This is real.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| Being a "senior dev" is a lot more than just language
| familiarity.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'll believe that when salaries start falling.
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Nobody gets salary cuts. What happens is that devs get
| laid off then companies hire at lower salaries.
|
| This is indeed what is happening right now.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| That points to a short term behavior. When things get
| dire, unemployment among devs goes up and salaries start
| dropping in general.
|
| I really don't worry about this stuff until it starts
| looking like the dot-com bomb again. I survived that,
| I'll survive this.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Every time there is a layoff announcement, I feel like half the
| comments are nitpicking over the language. It was too long, it
| was too short, language was too conciliatory, not conciliatory
| enough, yada yada. We get it. Managers are people too, they're
| not perfect. At this point, as an employee, I'd just ignore
| everything that was said (I know it's probably been wordsmithed
| to death anyway trying to find the right balance for all the
| various stakeholders), and only focus on the actions: are
| people treated fairly and with respect, both for those leaving
| and those remaining.
| batmaniam wrote:
| Layoffs are not something any employees can control. It's
| gonna happen or it's not. That's it. Without proper
| collective power, the only thing we can do is worry.
|
| You're right in that language doesn't matter. Hell even the
| delivery of the message doesn't matter. The only thing that
| matters is the severance or layoff package. That's the real
| meat. There should be a mandatory law that publishes all
| layoff packages so that everyone can see if they're getting a
| fair deal or not.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Yeah, but communication is a core function of their job. I
| write code - that's my core function. People _should_ get on
| my case if there are bugs in it.
| draw_down wrote:
| "The medium is the message." Yes, the nitpicking over
| language is silly. In some cases, actually sort of pathetic.
|
| It is true that these messages can be overwrought and
| whatever else, but it literally doesn't matter what the
| content is besides the fact that a layoff is happening. If
| you tell me I'm laid off with a smile or with a middle finger
| makes no difference, I'm still laid off.
| jasondigitized wrote:
| This "transparency" is a shrewd play to drive higher
| productivity through a Lord of the Flies work environment.
| duxup wrote:
| I worked at a company where the VPs loved to write long company
| wide emails. One time HR wrote "Why working at <insert this
| company name> is great Part 1". (If you write part 1 and part 2
| corporate emails you're already doing email wrong.) They did a
| layoff between the time Part 1 was sent and Part 2 was sent.
| The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that one.
|
| I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new
| company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers
| and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was
| on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go
| this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".
|
| He was so right. Scored a lot of points there, never heard an
| executive of a large company say that so bluntly before.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new
| company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers
| and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was
| on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go
| this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around"."
|
| You are being manipulated. No. The previous executives are
| not "jokers" - they made massive profits selling shares. They
| are being let go because, after taking their massive profits,
| the new company will soon fire the rest of staff - and that
| is hard.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm sure they made money.
|
| I didn't call them jokers, someone else did.
|
| I called them human garbage.
| mpweiher wrote:
| At a company I worked for I told the incoming manager that he
| would have to remove the entire management team he had
| inherited.
|
| Needless to say that didn't go over well.
|
| A year later they were all gone. And him as well.
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| giardini wrote:
| So were you the "last guy standing." or did you go
| elsewhere?
| mpweiher wrote:
| > "last guy standing".?
|
| Ahh, no. As I mentioned it didn't go over well. They had
| been mobbing me before and it intensified after. They
| were also blissfully unaware of what is legal and what is
| not, so pushing me out proved to be rather expensive.
| simplotek wrote:
| > The scale of absurdity was difficult to measure with that
| one.
|
| I have been told that one FANG which recently underwent a
| firing round barely took a break from their hiring rounds,
| and already started sending emails asking for volunteers for
| interviews even to teams which have just been decimated.
|
| One more story for the absurdity bucket.
| TheBozzCL wrote:
| Last week, I was contacted by recruiters from two separate
| high-profile companies that have recently fired people.
| Like I would even entertain joining them only to be first
| in line to the chopping block.
| cortoreblore wrote:
| What makes you believe you're not 1st on the chopping
| block at your existing company? There are no guarantees
| either way.
| omoikane wrote:
| Maybe the thinking is "they just got rid of a bunch of
| people, so they are not going to do that again soon."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It makes sense when you view it not as a strict immediate
| cost cutting measure but just a way to scare & threaten
| workers.
| duxup wrote:
| Not too surprising as the hiring people industrial complex
| that exists some places seem to exist / operate for it's
| own purposes sometimes.
|
| It's not that way everywhere but man when you run into it,
| crazy.
| roguas wrote:
| They did that to me themselves. They have festered the
| "hiring industrial complex" to outcompete for talent. Now
| this whole thing has to stay alive. They have to fire.
| Maybe the news about it will be enough, cause we also
| plan on hiring back.
| eastbound wrote:
| Can you just be on "fired leave"? Seems unnecessary to
| deprovision all the systems. I'm sure SAP can create a
| workflow for that and upsell it to the hiring industrial
| complex.
| hzay wrote:
| It makes sense if you think of this as pruning dead weight
| while also getting in fresh inflow of talented people (some
| of whom will inevitably not work out later).
| snozolli wrote:
| Why is management hiring people who turn out to be "dead
| weight"? Particularly with the ludicrous interview cycle
| employed by big tech companies these days?
|
| It's a failure of management to hire correctly and/or
| manage and develop people. Management is broken and
| incompetent and relentlessly scapegoats those below them.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Hiring is really hard. I try to be very selective, use
| work-like assessments and wait until it's painful to add
| headcount, but I also need to go fast enough to keep devs
| interested and not waste their time, and interviews at
| best are only a very rough proxy-indicator of what the
| future looks like. Firing is even harder.
| cpitman wrote:
| If you have a method for hiring exactly the right people,
| that those people will put up with (ie a process that
| filters out "dead weight" but does not filter out high
| performers), then that is a startup right there. But
| overall, no one has magical hiring process that doesn't
| involve finding out actual performance after they start.
| narwally wrote:
| Yep, google published a bunch of research about their
| hiring processes and it basically said "we've tried
| everything and nothing works... anybody else have any
| ideas?"
| brewdad wrote:
| Plenty of terrible employees interview well. Many
| potentially great employees don't interview well.
| hd95489 wrote:
| Terrible employees have lots of practice
| ferrumfist wrote:
| > pruning dead weight
|
| That wasn't my experience with the current layoffs at big
| tech. There was no effort to find positions for the
| engineers who performed well in the previous year(s).
| They just cut some orgs by the hundreds (I was in a call
| with 350+ other devs, many of whom are far smarter and
| more experienced devs than myself).
|
| They just started cutting "weight" at some point, the
| "dead" adjective was dropped during the previous rounds
| of layoffs.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| Smart + experienced != productive and valuable. It's
| possible to be good at your job and also dead weight.
| Motivation matters.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _and "all executive staff were let go this morning, I saw
| no reason to keep those jokers around"._
|
| Or you can do the opposite, like Boeing did: import all the
| managers of the firm you acquired (McDonnell-Douglas) into
| your own organization.
| duxup wrote:
| In this case the acquiring company made the right call, the
| acquired company executives were trash.
| throwanem wrote:
| So were McDonnell Douglas's.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I've heard aerospace companies have standing checks in
| place to ensure that they never go above being composed
| of more than Y% ex-Boeing employees be it
| management/design/floor workers so that they don't end up
| with the Boeing 'culture' creeping in.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >I was so happy when that company got acquired and the new
| company CEO showed up and announced that first level managers
| and below were all safe from layoffs, everyone above that was
| on a case by case basis, and "all executive staff were let go
| this morning, I saw no reason to keep those jokers around".
|
| Didn't the executives employ any anti-takeover measures?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| A good skill execs have is to negotiate extremely lucrative
| severance terms and have it written in their employment
| agreements.
| duxup wrote:
| I believe they all got paid good. I was a bit surprised
| at the animosity but the old CEO certainly seemed to burn
| bridges (I note how in another post) and I also suspect
| the old CEO took it really personal that he got beat by
| our main competitor.
| sklargh wrote:
| In the US a material perquisite of senior management
| roles are negotiable severance terms. Sad really.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So, if you are fired from enough workplaces for not
| working enough you get rich and don't have to work. :)
| usrusr wrote:
| "If they are good at being ruthlessly selfish for
| themselves they might be good at being ruthlessly selfish
| for the company as well."
|
| Makes me wonder if the opposite could become fashionable:
| "I trust myself to fly without the golden parachute, you
| might want to make that part of your consideration". At
| first glance that sounds quite compelling to me, but on
| the other hand, would I feel safer or would I feel less
| safe with a Taxi driver who does not bother putting on
| the seat belt? I think my answer would be less safe,
| event though a part of me wishes to be one who'd feel
| safer.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Let's extend the metaphor:
|
| if the execs are pilots, and the employees are
| passengers, then having parachutes for the pilots but not
| the employees constitutes a moral hazard.
| vkou wrote:
| It's only a moral hazard if the execs are working for,
| and are accountable to the employees.
|
| They don't, and they aren't. They work for, and answer to
| the owners.
| usrusr wrote:
| footnote: for certain values of "moral"
|
| (you are right though, the term "moral hazard" is
| surprisingly well defined and basically has nothing to do
| at all with the sum of its parts)
| dsr_ wrote:
| In that case, having parachutes for the execs is a moral
| hazard.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Speaking from personal experience, execs (most of them)
| are anything but risk takers. They are good wheeler-
| dealers, know how to navigate the land-mine filled org-
| chart to get things done. Not too different from civil
| servants. Those who develop risk appetite won't stay at
| such big orgs, they either go work at a startup or start
| on their own.
|
| So over a period (FB has been around for like 15 years
| now) an org accumulates extremely risk averse execs.
| baremetal wrote:
| "No one ever gets fired for buying IBM"
| duxup wrote:
| I assumed something like that happened behind the scenes
| but I never knew any facts. It was a publicly traded
| company and it was a good offer based on the stock price so
| I doubt any efforts to resist the purchase would have
| succeeded.
|
| I think more likely the new CEO's comment stemmed from that
| fact that 1. The old executive staff were in fact horrible
| at face value. 2. In between the time of the offer to buy
| the company and the closing the old CEO visited several
| locations presumably under the idea that he was there to
| keep everyone around / soothe the typical nerves about
| being acquired. But something else happened:
|
| Instead he took snide shots at the acquiring CEO. He noted
| that he was surprised the new CEO hadn't visited our site
| yet.... when at that point the deal hadn't closed, they
| were still technically competitors. New CEO straight up
| couldn't visit.
|
| I think old CEO was just a horrible person and salty he
| lost (mostly due to his own missteps) to his competitor.
|
| But that was par for the course with old company
| executives. They seemed to operate thinking they were so
| smart and really were as transparent as could be, almost
| childish.
|
| I generally feel disconnected / suspicious of executive
| staff... but these guys, they were human garbage as far as
| I was concerned, and I don't use that term lightly.
|
| My Fav examples:
|
| HR at one point sent out a series of long emails about a
| big change upcoming, but they didn't / would not say what
| the change was, it put a lot of people on edge. Then
| finally after the 5th or so email they announced that after
| HR spent thousands of hours in meetings and off site
| meetings ... they were renaming HR... that was it... it was
| like a joke, but they were serious. CEO and all the other
| executives of course had to reply all to congratulate them.
|
| One of the last meetings with the OLD CEO had an open forum
| where people could ask questions about the acquisition. Old
| CEO seemed to give the impression he had some idea what he
| combined company would look like / could do. Someone asked
| where he saw the new company in six months/ what it might
| look like. He responded "I'll be in Banff sking." That was
| it, that was his response....
| soperj wrote:
| > I saw no reason to keep those jokers around
|
| New CEO was Australian?
| duxup wrote:
| Nope, US, based out of CA, but he was from the Midwest.
|
| It was funny as when I met him a few times he responded the
| same way.
|
| "You're from Minnesota? Can I talk to you about hunting?
| They told me I shouldn't do that in California ..."
|
| I didn't hunt but I let the man tell his story ;)
|
| I usually feel pretty disconnected from executive types and
| so on but I liked that guy. I liked him so much I was
| suspicious all over again as that's not how I feel about
| those guys usually. He was actually fun to be around.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| I had an exec at my last job that came in like that. He
| was so transparent and likable that I immediately became
| suspicious. He had tons of stories so I assumed he was a
| bullshitter, but nope, it seems he had just been there
| and done that. I basically owe my career to that dude, he
| took a chance on me (I was about as low on the org chart
| as it gets) and it was the break I needed to show what I
| could do.
|
| Sometimes there are actually great leaders in the sea of
| self-serving assholes that populate the business world.
| monksy wrote:
| I had a CEO like that. He came in, hired media people to
| interview him in 4k things to send to the employees. He kept
| trying to host talks to talk about his great vision. Did a
| lot of shake ups, and tried to force product changes.
| Ultimately his vision lost a lot of money, the product he
| tried to will in to existance got canceled, and they had
| nothing but layoffs after layoffs.
| racl101 wrote:
| To be fair, unless the execs are also forgoing salary or
| bonuses, like Nintendo execs a few years ago for example, you
| can't really win with these layoff emails.
|
| If the emails are succinctly composed then people would
| complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try
| to assuage people enough.
|
| So they might as well write what they want.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Shocker that management taking away the livelihood of tens
| of thousands of individuals due to management failures can
| not be reduced to a positive email.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You mean blathering on with an email that was obviously
| micromanaged by someone that noone is willing to break out
| a red pen for? Only yes-men remain.
| goalieca wrote:
| > If the emails are succinctly composed then people would
| complain that the announcements were too curt and don't try
| to assuage people enough.
|
| Ive never heard that and I've seen short emails and nothing
| at all.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| even this one hints to this "people wanted more
| visibility and notice". You'll never make everyone happy,
| so it's a mistake to seek the "perfect communique"
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| That's the thing; the A players are still in demand (even Z
| players like me are still getting contacted for roles), and I
| wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge gamble
| on Meta's part.
|
| If I were there I'd be seriously considering a less volatile
| environment. If I were an A player, I'd be able to do so even
| easier and potentially find more meaningful work. This seems
| like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe up in the air
| ready to strike like this.
|
| With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that it
| might not always matter what you do or how good you are.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So exactly where are you going to find this "less volatile
| environment"? Other BigTech companies that are also doing
| layoffs? Unprofitable startups or other money losing recently
| public companies?
|
| Are they going to sully themselves and work as "enterprise
| developers" (note sarcasm)?
| fatnoah wrote:
| > This seems like a bad move for Meta, just leaving the axe
| up in the air ready to strike like this.
|
| That may be intentional. I could see a scenario where
| voluntary attrition helps them get reduce size more
| organically and with lower cost than a layoff. Meta is still
| huge and pays good money. They can handle a huge level of
| attrition and still have enough "A players" left over to work
| on the thing that truly require that level of operation.
|
| > With numbers in the thousands, it gives me the sense that
| it might not always matter what you do or how good you are.
|
| Fully agree on this. At that scope, it's broad cuts with a
| lot of meat going with the fat.
| noduerme wrote:
| > the thing that truly require that level of operation.
|
| After giving legs to avatars, is there really much work
| left?
| CountSessine wrote:
| _I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps
| them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost
| than a layoff_
|
| This is a terrible idea, though. It's always the desirable
| employees that have options that leave an environment like
| this, and it's always the less competent employees that
| hold on for dear life and stay.
|
| I've seen this so many times in my career. The A players
| will stay because they're attached to the things they've
| created, but the B players will leave and you're left with
| lots of C players.
|
| In the long run its cheaper to lay off people.
| raydev wrote:
| > It's always the desirable employees that have options
| that leave an environment like this, and it's always the
| less competent employees that hold on for dear life and
| stay
|
| Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though. Plenty of
| desirable people will stay because there's nowhere else
| to go that pays as well, and the "less competent" ones
| are likely still more competent than the industry
| average.
|
| These elite companies have now laid off hundreds of
| thousands of people. The idea that there's enough "low
| performers" to throw in the garbage should be obsolete
| now, and reveals a sort of wishful thinking "all those
| other people who lost their jobs deserve it, but not me,
| it will never happen to me"
| bmitc wrote:
| > Meta's hiring bar is pretty high, though.
|
| I'm not making any comments or judgements whatsoever on
| employees there, but doesn't Meta use the same terrible
| hiring practices that values so-called "leet" code style
| interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to
| produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta,
| Amazon, etc. do them at. (This is also not a comment in
| support of the layoffs. I think layoffs are a failure of
| management and executives.)
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _but doesn 't Meta use the same terrible hiring
| practices that values so-called "leet" code style
| interviews? Such interviewing practices are bound to
| produce poor results, especially at the scale that Meta,
| Amazon, etc. do them at._
|
| These two statements do not follow, why would "such
| interviewing practices [be] bound to produce poor
| results, especially at the scale that Meta, Amazon, etc.
| do them at?"
| bmitc wrote:
| By poor results I really meant a wide variance in hiring
| fits. If you are hiring based upon these "leet" style
| trivia interviews and for somewhat arbitrary team
| placement, then you are greatly constraining your hiring
| process to only filter on effectively a single vector of
| background and experience. So the high bar commented
| above only applies to that particular vector in that many
| may be great at a particular niche of coding but
| effectively randomized in other vectors of software
| development or other employee skills.
|
| Thus, it is only natural that you may have many people in
| the organization and on teams who are poor fits, either
| technically, culturally, etc., because almost all of the
| "leet" code stuff is irrelevant to most real-world work.
| If it is relevant, then it is usually only a small
| portion of the job. This isn't a judgement on anything
| other than the hiring practice.
|
| But like I said, I don't really know much about Meta's
| hiring process. It's possible that I'm misapplying this
| style of interview to them and misunderstood about if
| they actually use it. Amazon does, and I can confirm it
| was a miserable interview experience.
| watwut wrote:
| People who want to leave and have options, will consider
| those options either way. There is no way for meta to
| force them to stay. Even if meta announced layoffs with
| all the list of names, following months many who want
| will leave. Pretty much every layoff is followed by
| people leaving voluntary. Some over bad feelings of what
| happened, some because their friends are away so why not
| and some dont like new position. But they will be
| leaving.
|
| > it's always the less competent employees that hold on
| for dear life and stay.
|
| Meh. People stay for many reasons. It is not always "not
| having options". It is fairly often "I actually want to
| stay despite layoff". And again, there is no way to force
| people to stay. Confident people will be leaving either
| way.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The worry is less confident people proactively seek more
| certain employment choices when faced with uncertainty
| geodel wrote:
| As they should! Why would a company like Meta base their
| policy on what some hypothetically unconfident employees
| might be thinking.
| [deleted]
| zerkten wrote:
| Does the management, or the quantitative performance of
| the company, agree with you here? I'm somewhat dubious
| given how frequently this occurs, but ideally I think
| you'd want some really long-term study that looks at both
| the layoff(s), attrition, and later progress (or growth
| if it occurs).
| CountSessine wrote:
| I'd bet that this is the difference between having good
| middle managers and not. If you have confidence in your
| directors and middle managers, you can target the C
| players. If not, then you can't and you'll wind up
| shedding B players anyways.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You want to know if companies stop growing for a decade
| or so after a mass-layoff?
|
| If so, yes, they do. But it's incredibly hard to decide
| on causality there, because companies are only expected
| to do mass-layoffs when the management believes it can't
| grow anymore.
| anxrn wrote:
| > I could see a scenario where voluntary attrition helps
| them get reduce size more organically and with lower cost
| than a layoff
|
| This is exceptionally hard on immigrants on a visa, who
| have limited options to leave voluntarily.
| devjab wrote:
| > I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge
| gamble on Meta's part.
|
| I'm Danish, but we have laws and regulations about mass-
| layoffs which means companies have to give employees an
| advance notice of 30-60-90 days, depending on company and
| layoff size.
|
| I imagine California might have something similar.
| ardit33 wrote:
| CA is 60 days, NYC is 90, federal is 60 by default (WARN
| act).
|
| Most companies choose to lay you off, then give you
| 'severance' package/pay that is equal or more to those
| days.
| Balgair wrote:
| >... I wonder if sending this message out like this is a huge
| gamble on Meta's part.
|
| I don't know how to break this to HN, but the Zuck isn't the
| sharpest tool in the shed. He may be gambling, but Hanlon's
| Razor says otherwise.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The guy lucked into a money making machine that was nigh
| impossible to screw up. Hasn't done much since except do
| the obvious when you have a mountain of cash -- buy
| competitors.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How did that work out for MySpace, Google+, Friendster,
| etc?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Lol.. such a foolish comment. He didn't luck into
| anything. He stole it and made it into what it is today.
| Remember the login to your email and we'll send invites
| to everyone? Facebook invented that. Keep it restricted
| to .edu and rolling out school by school was a strategy.
| Identify companies who are a threat and buy them..
| facebook was very successful at that.
|
| Luck had very little to do with facebook's success.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Luck had everything to do with it. FB was no different
| than Six Degrees, or Friendster, or Orkut, let alone
| MySpace.
|
| Identifying threats? Please. EVERYONE knows who the
| threats to FB were and are. It's just that not all of us
| has the money to buy them.
|
| Mark Zuckerberg is average.
|
| His one big "innovation" is taking legs out of Second
| Life.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| Why did none of those succeed then? You are basically
| defeating your own argument.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| It's odd when people think that Zuckerberg is some sort
| of genius for creating a cleaner looking clone of
| MySpace.
| fwungy wrote:
| There has to be plenty of demand at the lower tiers. There is
| a ton of work to do everywhere. It's just that they don't pay
| the same as top tier. FANGs are holding a lot of talent to
| keep them from competitors, as has been pointed out.
| codemac wrote:
| This was posted the week after all management should have
| communicated AE to A players. I know for senior directors
| last day of performance review comms was Friday.
|
| What is AE? Meta has a program for their top ~1% or so (who
| knows really) where they dump a pile of RSUs on your head,
| "additional equity", to retain you and bet on your future at
| the company. For most it's 2-4x your annual stock refresher,
| though I don't know exactly how it varies.
|
| If you're E7+, this is another 1M+ stock grant on a 4 year
| vest on top of your 600k+ refresher grant. Stock is up from
| their internal refresher pricing. Their "A players" all just
| got ~5% bump on their 1.5M+ RSU grant.
|
| G and other FAANG struggle to compete with Meta on comp for
| the actual A players. We'll see if they budgeted enough for
| AE to keep the people that matter.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| While some people do get 1M/yr, it's hardly every E7+. I
| don't know the exact % obviously, but anecdotally it's <30%
| (though more get the smaller grants--around 250k or 500k).
| fnbr wrote:
| Yes, 1000%. Especially when it comes to AI. Meta has an
| excellent team of ML engineers, many of whom are in
| exceptionally high demand right now. If I were a ML engineer
| at Facebook, _especially_ if I was working remotely, I'd be
| sending out a ton of applications right now. I bet they end
| up getting an easier, more meaningful, higher paying job.
|
| I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and
| this was my experience.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > I bet they end up getting an easier, more meaningful,
| higher paying job.
|
| They won't.
|
| > I'm an AI research engineer who was recently laid off and
| this was my experience.
|
| But not from Facebook? They are very well compensated right
| now; they aren't just going to drop into a better paying
| role.
| fnbr wrote:
| FAANGs aren't anywhere near the high end of the ML job
| market currently.
| gat1 wrote:
| What's the difference between an ML engineer and an AI
| research engineer ?
| fnbr wrote:
| ML engineers work on products, AI research engineers work
| for AI research labs.
|
| Skillset is almost identical, biggest difference is
| having research experience.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The first ships products. The second is the code monkey
| to the statistician.
| ben7799 wrote:
| It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be a
| great place to work for a long time.
|
| They have been involved in so many shady things and have had
| such a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks"
| approach it sounds maddening.
|
| I think a lot of people working there just made the
| calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end of
| the compensation scale made it worth it.
|
| Even if you are in the ML/AI stuff. You have to balance out
| that they were funding at a very high rate versus that they
| were funding the work for less than stellar reasons.
| xrikcus wrote:
| > It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be
| a great place to work for a long time.
|
| Largely because much of the company is a great place to
| work. Actually working there, I don't find this hard to see
| at all.
| foobiekr wrote:
| It's been the money.
| distcs wrote:
| Literally said in the comment you are replying to if you
| bother to read until the 3rd para!
| foobiekr wrote:
| I think you're missing the point of my deliberately terse
| reply.
|
| All of the replies you are getting are trying to tell you
| that there's no deep thinking involved. There's no "hey I
| considered it and the comp overcame my concerns" etc.
| Most of the leetcode-into-fang people are not doing a
| moral calculus or even spending thirty seconds thinking
| about the ethical aspects.
|
| There are no concerns. There are no ethics for most of
| the people in our industry. It is an employer who pays
| well so they work there.
|
| Your comment implies that, yes, it came down to comp, but
| also implies that for Facebook employees, on average,
| there is any thought process beyond economic
| maximization. There isn't.
|
| I know a ton of facebook and ex-facebook engineers. They
| also worked for famously ethical companies like Zynga and
| Uber. Now and then they'll do the pretend performative
| handwringing or whatever but their decisions are
| consistent.
|
| There is just money.
| influx wrote:
| I worked there, the compensation was best in the industry,
| I worked on infrastructure that billions of people depended
| on, and in a very small way increased security and privacy.
| I'm proud of that work, and the people I worked with were
| awesome.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Let's call it what is, any adTech company is
| diametrically opposed to increasing user privacy.
| influx wrote:
| You have no idea what I worked on, yet you're quite
| confident that it didn't increase security or privacy.
|
| Ok.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Your ultimate goal was to help an adTech company.
| Everything anyone does is ultimately in service of that.
| amrocha wrote:
| Once I had a manager justify his employment at Palantir
| by saying he helped troops detect and avoid landmines.
| Well cool, they still murdered people after getting past
| the minefield though.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > It's hard to see how anyone has thought FB/Meta would be
| a great place to work for a long time.
|
| Maybe because, I don't know, Meta pays well? I don't go to
| work for self fulfillment. I work to exchange labor for
| money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
|
| No I don't work for Meta nor have I ever.
| [deleted]
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| It's almost as if that was already said if you had kept
| reading past the first sentence.
|
| > I think a lot of people working there just made the
| calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end
| of the compensation scale made it worth it.
|
| Is this our level of laziness now? To read the first
| sentence and base our snarky replies entirely off it,
| ignoring the fact that it's a rhetorical question that
| was answered immediately after?
| scarface74 wrote:
| > I think a lot of people working there just made the
| calculated decision that Meta being at the very high end
| of the compensation scale made it worth it.
|
| That didn't help. It's like saying "I don't know why the
| guy died. Maybe it's because he got shot in the head at
| point blank range"?
|
| Of course people work at Meta because of the money. No
| one works for Meta to make the world a better place
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Do you understand the concept of rhetorical questions?
|
| Because your comment indicates that you clearly don't
| understand that people sometimes ask questions not
| because they want an answer but for emphasis or dramatic
| effect.
|
| This was, clearly, such a case.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
|
| Digging down on your snark when you're called out is a
| bold play that doesn't generally work. Most people have
| this thing called humbleness but I guess you left it with
| the rhetorical questions.
| scarface74 wrote:
| In other words, there is nothing insightful about
| wondering why people work for the best paying company in
| tech is because they like making money.
|
| The original post was no more insightful than "I wonder
| why he got wet when he jumped into the wster"
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| In that vein, replying the exact same thing with
| different words and added snark is even less insightful.
| And repetitive to boot.
|
| Hence, you know, me calling you out on it.
|
| Get off your high horse.
| orangepanda wrote:
| Its a post-communication world. While before only a title
| was read and comments made based on assuming what the
| content is, now we assume what the comment is and reply
| based on that.
| SubuSS wrote:
| It is a very tricky philosophical question you're asking:
| should you consider the broadest impact of what you're
| doing OR should you ensure you're doing good work and leave
| the ramifications to higher up decision makers?
|
| The former approach means you can't do anything with clear
| conscience: do you take that vacation or donate the money?
| Do you punish yourself if your work on databases eventually
| was used for a scam?
|
| I find it paralyzing to operate in the former way: so I
| take the traditional stem person approach. I just ensure
| what I do is good (obviously for the highest bidder). I
| won't work for an explicitly criminal organization - but as
| long as the government approves, am in. I am going to let
| them do the policy making and governing because frankly I
| am tired and probably incompetent at that since I don't
| sink much time thinking about it.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > It is a very tricky philosophical question you're
| asking:
|
| There is nothing tricky about it. No one works at Meta
| thinking they are feeding starving children.
|
| It's also "difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it"
|
| I'm not making any moral stand either way.
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly right. I mean unless long term means 6 months or
| such, no one looking for job would really care in an year
| that Meta had layoffs in 2023.
| SubuSS wrote:
| It's a very narrow viewpoint to take.
|
| Engineers in Meta have advanced technology in so many
| ways (buck / react / so many contributions to distributed
| software / leveldb ...). I think it is very reductionist
| to discount all that work.
|
| There's nothing about salary depending on it here:
| there's a ton about your work contributing to the global
| good irrespective of who's funding it (and whatever ways
| they end up utilizing it).
| scarface74 wrote:
| And that software was also written to further the
| concerns and profits of an adTech company. Facebook may
| have allowed open sourcing non critical parts of its
| software - every major tech company does.
| LegNeato wrote:
| You work at Amazon where advertising brings in more
| profit than AWS... https://www.ben-
| evans.com/benedictevans/2023/3/6/ways-to-thi...
| [deleted]
| alvis wrote:
| A players always in demand, no matter whatever the economic
| situation. They have the freedom to choose wherever they want
| to work.
|
| I'm not sure how many A players have left meta, but I'm sure
| A players never want to work in a low morale company. The
| damage is much higher than layoff number.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Is "a player" an internal rank?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| For once, as someone with 0 stake in this whole affair, I quite
| like he's explicitly spelt out the details he has.
|
| Specifically the sections "Leaner is better", and "Flatter is
| faster". Other sections are quite relevant and well written
| IMO.
|
| Also, reading between the lines, Metaverse gets mentioned just
| twice. I guess they are going to go slow on that? And Oh, "In-
| person time helps build relationships and get more done" tells
| me WFH at Meta will be a thing of the past.
|
| Edit: More content.
| s1k3 wrote:
| Managers write novels because employees complain about lack of
| transparency and communication. I promise you no manager wants
| to write some novel about how layoffs are good for company, but
| they just or they get skewered for not communicating.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Saying more words isn't communicating. In this situation,
| employees would like to be able to prepare for the layoffs
| ahead of time, know their jobs are safe (or not), and see
| what they can change. Saying a bunch of stuff about the
| future outlook of the company being bright feels like a lie
| when that's the same email that got sent after the last
| round, three months ago
| foobiekr wrote:
| Every time a layoff is discussed, people talk about how the A
| players are going to leave. Seemingly, people do not understand
| that the A players could have easily left the whole time but
| are taken care of - already - so they haven't.
|
| It is not that rare for critical employees to get grants as
| part of the layoff execution in a pre-emotive action, and now
| that I'm older I will note that I've been on the planning side
| of layoffs and this is fairly commonplace.
| badpun wrote:
| Plenty of A players might be assigned to pointless projects
| which could be axed wholesale.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| So "A Player" is on a pointless project not providing value
| to the company gets axed. The value to the company is
| losing with that "A Player" is nothing because the project
| they're working on is pointless.
|
| These companies could take a more twitter like "print out
| your code" or global stack ranking to lay people off but i
| don't think it dodge the problem people describe. The "A
| Player" could still be mad that all their coworkers got
| fired and/or the "pointless project" they enjoyed working
| on got axed and still leave. You just get the add cost,
| drama, and blow-back (see twitter) that a performance based
| firing would entail and probably open yourself up to
| lawsuits (IANAL) if you don't have an adequate paper trail
| for those performance based filings.
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| But it might be better to move those "A Players" to a
| critical project (ads? lol)
| thaanpaa wrote:
| Not sure if it's true in Meta's case (and almost certainly
| not Twitter's), but from what I've heard, they usually tell
| the key people that they are safe a day before.
| secondcoming wrote:
| +1, there are some quite juvenile sentiments about employment
| evident in this thread. If a company wants someone to stay
| they'll try very hard to make that happen. Not every employee
| is treated equally.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| When I was younger I was shocked to learn that during an LR
| companies would "over" cut in order to fund retention for
| critical people. You're laying off 7%? This is a good time
| to free up some additional opex, so just add a few heads
| above target in order to free opex to comp important
| people. You won't get that 7% back but overage you do,
| usually.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| Rafuino wrote:
| Good luck getting anyone to do any work while they wait for the
| news on whether they're axed over the next 1-2 months (or up to
| the end of the year!). These trickling layoffs absolutely kill
| morale. Do it all at once, seriously.
| swlkr wrote:
| This feels like they spent a lot of money on the metaverse, it
| didn't work out, so now they're raising money by doing layoffs
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