Meta lays off 11,000 people

https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/

by technics256 • 4 years ago

2048 1956 4 years ago

about.fb.com

Honest question - what does 'take accountability' and 'take responsibility' actually look like for Zuckerberg here?

theCrowing2• 4 years ago

It means nothing especially with 50% voting shares. The funny thing about these layoffs is how they just go by the C-Suites without even denting their value.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?

lljk_kennedy6• 4 years ago

I guess in an ideal world, the board removes him as CEO?

greenthrow3• 4 years ago

When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.

lordnacho2• 4 years ago

He goes and asks an executive recruitment firm to find a successor and spends more time on the board.

Yeah it sounds tough but if he'd hired a guy who oversaw what's just happened, he would have fired him.

severino• 4 years ago

I would expect that he doesn't say he would take responsibility if that doesn't mean anything at all.

FartyMcFarter5• 4 years ago

Only he can punish himself, effectively. He has control of the company.

jstx12• 4 years ago

This question comes up in every layoff thread.

It doesn't mean "this will have negative consequences on me personally".

It means "I don't blame anyone else for this".

fsloth3• 4 years ago

My english is non-native but I would expect when someone says "I take accountability and responsibility" to means exactly that and I have a hard time figuring out what else it could mean.

The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

mattbrewsbytes2• 4 years ago

If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot. I know its a "cry me a river", "worlds smallest violin" type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people's livelihoods. I'm not implying Zuck has or doesn't have empathy, I don't know him. I'm just saying this likely has an impact. It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well. Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some? We'll know in a couple quarters.

tyingq3• 4 years ago

He's not my favorite person, but he did use language that said he, personally, predicted the business conditions wrong, overhired, etc. You don't have to look far to find layoff messages that blame covid or other outside forces and don't take any blame.

bawolff3• 4 years ago

Its just business speak for "I'm sorry, its my fault".

I don't think that's a bad thing. Its always worthwhile to apologize even if there is nothing else to be done.

namdnay8• 4 years ago

Losing three quarters of his net worth?

lljk_kennedy6• 4 years ago

Meh, it's inconsequential given he's never going to want for money.

selfmodruntime4• 4 years ago

Guy has lost dozens of billions of dollars. As far as accountability goes he's pretty up there.

nabaraz• 4 years ago

Severance: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.

̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶.̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶5̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶2̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶a̶y̶.̶

I was wrong here. I read it as 16 weeks per each year of service.

refrigerator• 4 years ago

5 years => 26 weeks = 0.5 years of pay, right?

FartyMcFarter5• 4 years ago

Possibly dumb question, but how did you get to two years?

Brigand• 4 years ago

Why is 26 weeks two years of pay?

steve_gh• 4 years ago

16 + (2 * 5) = 26

In my book that is 6 month's pay

KvanteKat• 4 years ago

I suspect OP may have been going for a variation on the old "Programmer returns with zero eggs and 12 gallons of milk after having been asked to get one gallon of milk and if they have eggs to buy a dozen"-joke, but it falls flat in this instance since it relies on an interpretation bordering on deliberate misconstrual (i.e. applying the modifier "for each year of service" to the whole phrase "16 weeks plus two additional weeks" rather than just to the latter fragment "two additional weeks").

Macha• 4 years ago

You're getting 16 + (5x2) = 26 weeks of pay, not (16+2) x 5 = 90 weeks.

gmac• 4 years ago

16 + 2 * 5 = 26, implying six months’ pay, not two years?

t0tal• 4 years ago

isn't it just 26 weeks extra? 16 weeks + (2 weeks * 5 years)

rfoo• 4 years ago

Wait, how is 26 weeks 2 years?

iamben• 4 years ago

5 years service would be 26 weeks / half a year, no? Am I reading this differently to you?

bujak300• 4 years ago

I think it would be 5 years times 2 extra weeks - 10 extra weeks on top of the 16 weeks severance

maest• 4 years ago

You may have misread "weeks" as "months".

tjbiddle• 4 years ago

16 + (5*2) = 26 / 4.33 = 6 months? Unsure where you're getting 2 years.

Edit: Lol - OP posted less than 3 minutes ago & there were no replies. Before I finished my comment there are now a dozen others with the same.

jleyank• 4 years ago

? No coffee yet this morning, but isn’t 5 years 26 weeks of pay for severance? And depending on how the severance contract is written, you might not be able to work elsewhere during part or all of this. Perhaps just 60 days due to WARN (in the us) where you are “working” for meta before the money is unencumbered. Read closely. If you have a lawyer friend, ask their opinion.

mattbrewsbytes2• 4 years ago

If you want a math problem corrected, or have math homework kids, post it as a comment here on HN.

technics256• 4 years ago

Severance summary:

  Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two 
  additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.

  PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.

  RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 
  15, 2022 vesting.

  Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for 
  people and their families for six months.

  Career services. We’ll provide three months of career 
  support with an external vendor, including early access to 
  unpublished job leads.

  Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult 
  if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before 
  termination and some visa grace periods, which means 
  everyone will have time to make plans and work through 
  their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration 
  specialists to help guide you based on what you and your 
  family need.

whoooooo123• 4 years ago

4 month's paid holiday? This is the kind of severance that would make me wish I'd been laid off.

nvarsj• 4 years ago

No RSUs though, which make up 30-50% of compensation depending on level.

agilob3• 4 years ago

Or have something similar guaranteed by EU Worker Protection. I was made redundant a few years ago and was paid 4.5 month salary on my last day.

10241024• 4 years ago

4 months of severance + 2 extra weeks for every year of service i.e. 20 weeks (~5 months) if you've been there for the last 10 years. So ~9 months paid holiday in total. Not bad at all.

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

That sounds pretty good. Even better than good.

mrtksn2• 4 years ago

Is it if you are not a home owner still? The problem with not being a home owner is that you have very high burn rate because the market was able to optimize for housing profit extraction - that is, significant portion of the compensation of high earners ended up in the pocket of property owners.

Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).

I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.

Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.

WastingMyTime89• 4 years ago

That seems pretty standard to me.

Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.

But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.

Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.

tudorizer• 4 years ago

I doubt that's the most important part. Maybe for yourself.

The overall tone and high-level business decisions are much more interesting.

Tepix• 4 years ago

Quite a difference between this message and the one Twitter (i.e. Elon Musk) sent to its employees.

kensai2• 4 years ago

As much as people hate Mark Zuckerberg and accuse him of being a robot, he showed much more humanity in his message in respect to Ironman Elon.

andrewinardeer• 4 years ago

You really think he penned this? This is a PR release made by a team of people that he put his name to.

uxcolumbo3• 4 years ago

Totally agree, Phony Stark behaves abysmally towards his staff - not just at Twitter, but also at Tesla.

When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower

https://archive.ph/G3HpY

This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn't think Elon's mini submarine idea wouldn't work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.

Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.

Bilal_io2• 4 years ago

I agree. He doesn't win me over because of this, but he deserves credit. I think many executives need to learn this from him.

Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don't think he's less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.

I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he's nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he's not superior in anyway... Etc.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

You treat recently conquered people differently from the people you have governed for many years.

fleddr5• 4 years ago

What exactly is the added humanity that you see?

"I take responsibility"?

Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you're no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.

usrusr2• 4 years ago

It would be truly horrible if someone in the "life's achievement" position of Zuckerberg would layoff with communication similar to what as a hostile takeover daredevil would do, and it would be truly pretentious if a hostile takeover daredevil like Musk would layoff with communication mimicking that of a "life's achievement" builder. Both are avoiding the worst options.

bigbacaloa2• 4 years ago

There's nothing impressive or inspiring about this message. You have twelve hours to send emails ...

4gotunameagain2• 4 years ago

Considering the greatly inflated tech wages in top companies, aren't those layoffs alone likely to impact the US economy?

maccard3• 4 years ago

FTA:

While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.

It's not all engineers let go.

dopamean• 4 years ago

Are engineers the only people in tech with high salaries?

curiousllama3• 4 years ago

Volume scale is too different. US workers might churn at .5%/month - that’s maybe 500k job losses. Even if Facebook pays 10x average, that’d be equivalent $ to ~3 days of normal churn.

habinero6• 4 years ago

No. The US GDP is 23 trillion USD.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

Yes. Hopefully starting with housing prices & rents in certain areas.

Though the US is ~3.3e8 people. Don't expect layoffs of ~1.1e4 to have a substantial national effect.

[Edit - 's/1e3/1e4/' correction.]

aetherson• 4 years ago

11,000 people is around 0.003% of the US population. These layoffs alone will not meaningfully impact the US economy. Of course, these layoffs are not in isolation, and the economy is obviously cooling. But, alone, no, it is not a mechanically meaningful factor.

em500• 4 years ago

FB alone certainly not. Even if these 11k people would be earning on average 300k/year, their combined income would be only around 3B/year. The US national income is around 25.000B/year.

usrusr2• 4 years ago

The good news is that there will be so much bigger profits to trickle down. (sorry for posting sarcasm on hn)

mupuff1234• 4 years ago

Might affect the housing prices in CA, which in turn might affect housing prices in other states as there will probably be a domino affect.

(Assuming there's a few thousand laid off in CA)

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

Corporations are like schools of fishes. They all swim in one direction until suddenly they swim in a different direction.

So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.

Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.

I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.

pm908• 4 years ago

My opinion here is that tech companies are generally a lot more data driven and quicker to move. So I see these layoffs as them taking the possibility of a recession seriously and being well prepared for it when it does happen.

This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).

maccard3• 4 years ago

I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go

_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

vegai_• 4 years ago

Yeah, I was just thinking few days ago how absurdly large Twitter's workforce seemed to be.

habinero6• 4 years ago

People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don't see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.

FartyMcFarter5• 4 years ago

Obligatory link: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

occamrazor• 4 years ago

Ad sales and content moderation don’t scale as well as engineering, I suppose.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Pretty sure content moderation is excluded due to outsourcing

atemerev2• 4 years ago

The moderators and reviewers alone probably make the bulk of it.

tiagod5• 4 years ago

A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.

disgruntledphd28• 4 years ago

Hilariously enough, most of the front-line moderators are outsourced, so it's even worse than you think.

tyingq3• 4 years ago

I suspect those are not employees and not counted in this at all.

pavlov3• 4 years ago

When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive.

Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.

blagie10• 4 years ago

My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too.

Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.

Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.

Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.

They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).

Dave3of53• 4 years ago

Yeah this tracks with what I've seen too.

As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.

In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.

maccard3• 4 years ago

Yeah this is what I would expect is the correct answer - it looks good to have a big reporting structure under you.

riku_iki3• 4 years ago

is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount

should/do they consider other metrics: revenue, active users, etc under management?

curiousllama3• 4 years ago

They do a lot!

Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.

Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.

Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.

Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.

That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.

fumblebee3• 4 years ago

If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m.

In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...

scarface747• 4 years ago

Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.

steve19772• 4 years ago

Amazon handles physical products, that’s a completely different game

whitepaint• 4 years ago

They literally serve billions of people.

bombcar22• 4 years ago

So does McDonalds and they only have 200k.

steve19772• 4 years ago

And what are they doing all day long?

poulpy123• 4 years ago

It's huge but meta is one of the 50 biggest companies in the world so having so many people isn't very surprising.

sytelus7• 4 years ago

Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.

synicalx• 4 years ago

That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.

nokeya• 4 years ago

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO. Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

robertlagrant• 4 years ago

Depends on the balance of what sort of roles are laid off.

whatwherewhy9• 4 years ago

In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.

If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.

dagw• 4 years ago

While it might not saturate the US job market as a whole, it will saturate the parts of the local programmer market that can come even close to matching the sorts of salaries these people where probably paid.

If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.

KingOfCoders4• 4 years ago

Did I misread or you live in a small central EU country with 200.000 open tech positions?

tifadg12• 4 years ago

I'm quite interested in learning which small central EU country has 150k outstanding programming jobs.

weatherlite4• 4 years ago

You're right but its not as if only Meta are firing or we're anywhere close to this recession ending. There's gonna be a bunch of pain to come still unfortunately.

throwaway0x7E6• 4 years ago

most of the people being laid off are not programmers

xbmcuser• 4 years ago

I think the pay will go down its the meta and google etc that have been pushing up the salaries without the demand from them the pressure on salaries will bring them down.

mythhouse• 4 years ago

I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.

Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.

tobase• 4 years ago

Isn't that forecasted by the same people who now says that they didn't see this coming? :)

vaxman3• 4 years ago

Yeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :D

Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.

smcl5• 4 years ago

I reckon 11k would pretty well fill all the available tech roles in Czech Republic (which fits the "small Central European" description). God knows where they'd live though, rents + prices would explode

swalsh6• 4 years ago

I don't see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day. The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it's been literally weeks since I had one. Lots of companies froze their hiring. The music is stopping, and there's a lot less chairs. Not everyone is going to find a new seat.

spaceman_20204• 4 years ago

True, but these aren't ordinary engineers who'll settle for ordinary salaries. These are the top paid engineers in the industry - there are practically no places that can hire all 20,000 of them at their current salaries.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

It does mean that a lot of folks will be looking for work, expecting really big salaries. Because they have become used to a very high standard of living, these salaries will actually be required.

MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.

I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.

zero_• 4 years ago

Does the small EU country you are living in pay FAANG level salaries (200k and more) for their developers? Because in the small central EU country where I live, they always say skilled workers are in demand until you tell them your desired salary ;-)

fy20• 4 years ago

Similar here. Over the summer my country of 3m people, reached its yearly immigration quota in tech jobs of 16,000. And that doesn't include people moving inside the EU or refugees from Ukraine.

TheOsiris• 4 years ago

the effect this kind of thing has on the broader market is that it makes everyone else reconsider their hiring plans. I doubt there will be as many open positions after this announcement and it won't all be from hiring

samstave4• 4 years ago

The real problem to worry about is hiring practices, shitty HR people, algo-based auto rejecting and shitty fucking interviewers... THIS will have impact on these people suffering to find a new position....

So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.

There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.

KptMarchewa• 4 years ago

Very different roles. Also, corporate America employs millions of people, so this is not a significant percent.

mrits2• 4 years ago

Also a lot of those people are going to take time off. A large number of high earners that have worked at a place for a decade and now have ~9 months paid vacation.

oblio8• 4 years ago

Obviously, if this continues at this rate. We'll be able to judge in 3-6 months the full impact.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in Lalaland.

The main thing is figuring out what's the full impact. If it's 10%+ of tech workers, the golden days are over for the vast majority of tech workers.

mathverse2• 4 years ago

I wonder if comments like yours are said in good faith or in fear or out of pure ignorance. Or all of the above combined.

Proportionally these numbers would not make a difference in a small European country.

habinero6• 4 years ago

Y'all. It's not eng being laid off. Or, at least, only marginally.

This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.

SideQuark4• 4 years ago

The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.

spaceman_20204• 4 years ago

Honestly, tech companies that were formed in the last decade have very little to show in terms of value creation. Majority are unprofitable. Most will never make profits in a recession AND tighter monetary environments.

At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.

relativ5752• 4 years ago

Were you around the dot com crash? It was much worse than what is going on, layoffs happened left and right. But the future would have never been better for tech jobs. So no, incorrect to say anything for sure.

maltelandwehr• 4 years ago

If you include Stripe, Klarna, Netflix, Uber, Robinhood, Snap, Lyft, etc. tech layoffs in recent months have topped 100,000 now.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

Which is about how many people Google itself hired over the course of the Pandemic, for context.

So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.

flakeoil• 4 years ago

Add to that thousands of smaller companies laying of 10 people here, 100 people there. We will not hear about it, but it quickly adds up.

In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.

jollyllama4• 4 years ago

Try ~50,000. https://layoffs.fyi/

gonzo412• 4 years ago

It will have a big effect on salaries, however, it'd be a momentous opportunity for upcoming startups to pick up some bargain basement talent.

oblio8• 4 years ago

"Can someone think of the shareholder value?"

Keep in mind it's always about people, not about soulless entities.

hardtke• 4 years ago

Even if not true (and it very well could be be true), most hiring managers will assume that the people let go were the low performers in their roles.

scarface747• 4 years ago

The US has 2.7 million developers. Who knows? They may have to sully themselves and become “enterprise developers” like most of the other 2.7 million developers…

alexfoo• 4 years ago

https://layoffs.fyi/

Bluecobra4• 4 years ago

Ha, this is brilliant!

AHOHA• 4 years ago

It tracks the layoff, any tracker on who got hired after?

jannes• 4 years ago

Shouldn't salaries just go down to pre-pandemic levels like the headcounts? (not even sure if they increased during the pandemic)

According to the companies that's all that's happening here.

pimbrah• 4 years ago

salaries rarely and hardly ever go down. however inflation does exactly that in real terms. This is an interesting article about it: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

They are actually going down because of inflation and the lack of a full compensation for that. You get the same money but it's worth less.

As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.

kasey_junk2• 4 years ago

Lots of these peoples compensation package is largely equity based. Their pay has already taken a major hit.

marcus_holmes2• 4 years ago

I remember the dot-com (and Y2K) bust, when all the people who got into tech for the money (and not the love of it) suddenly decided to switch career. I hope the same happens now.

Ocerge• 4 years ago

So you're implying only people who are passionate about tech should be allowed to work in tech? This does not hold water for almost any profession. Tech pays extremely well, and if you can do the work, who cares how you feel about it?

maerF0x05• 4 years ago

I dont really care why you got into it so long as you remain excellent while you're here. the Problem is the (seeming) correlation between money driven motivation and apathetic (sub)mediocrity.

passion__desire• 4 years ago

A link if you need to keep track of. https://layoffs.fyi/

three_seagrass4• 4 years ago

This is a pretty slick use of AirTable, ngl.

_alex_• 4 years ago

more than that. Here's a tracker: https://layoffs.fyi

googlryas• 4 years ago

It's not a given that everyone will be looking for a job immediately. They're getting a multi-month severance package. Some will look immediately - some will take a breather and start looking in a few months - some will take the time to switch careers or go back to school. Also, it is 15,000 people presumably located around the globe - not just 15,000 people in Menlo Park.

tootie2• 4 years ago

Comps will come down from the stratosphere but good devs will not be unemployed long. They may fall to less exciting roles at banks or other traditional tech, but there's still tons of demand.

automatic61312• 4 years ago

Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

Well I predict two things:

One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.

Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.

ripper1138• 4 years ago

It was obvious that those days were going to end eventually, it was never going to be sustainable. A few people I knew were deciding between job offers at beginning of this year and I straight up said take the most comp, this shit isn’t gonna last forever…

spacemadness3• 4 years ago

Non-developers in the Bay Area dream of this happening.

Vibgyor54• 4 years ago

I think the folks who rode the ride a couple years back got it good: somewhere around 2012-2019 was great time for someone who had worked at marquee tech companies, had massive stock options, and commanded premium on the job market when they moved on from their orgs.

ar_lan2• 4 years ago

I just can't really believe this at all, unless these companies entirely crumble. It's just not feasible for the majority of folks to live comfortably in the Bay Area with a family at less than $200k TC.

I make ~$300k/yr and could probably swing $200k/yr if I didn't save anything (I save ~$100k/yr currently). I just can't imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.

1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world. 2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100/wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family. 3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.

As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000/mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I'd need $100k/yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.

We could downsize and save $10k/yr, but that's not really making a substantial dent long-term.

$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.

Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren't going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.

alfalfasprout• 4 years ago

Not really. If anything junior engineers are not going to see comp like this going forward. But it's still incredibly hard to hire more senior folks even with big comp packages and they do command a premium.

Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.

romanovcode2• 4 years ago

I doubt that even 5% are software developers.

jressey• 4 years ago

My 2 cents is that it's going to be mostly recruiters, sales, customer success, and other misc operations folks. That's the pattern I've been observing since the post-covid layoffs have begun.

Vibgyor54• 4 years ago

plenty of PMs and PMMs being let go fwiw as per my feed

blsapologist425• 4 years ago

The Meta layoff has many engineers affected. Probably at least ~2000

Bluecobra4• 4 years ago

Makes me wonder if there’s enough layoffs coupled with a recession, corps would use this to get people back in the office and eliminate WFH.

acjohnson55• 4 years ago

They can try. But it would be a better time to build a team without the overhead of renting office space. I guess it depends on whether companies see an opportunity to wind back leverage from employees or to embrace new possibilities.

grumple• 4 years ago

There are hundreds of thousands of new software jobs in the US every year. Way more globally. This is a drop in the bucket.

Shit, I get messaged about a thousand software jobs per year and I'm just one guy.

ActionHank• 4 years ago

The difference here is that it is all at once, and those same companies are slowing hiring. Net effect is that there are loads more people with prominent names on their resumes competing for those jobs that the recruiters are canvasing en masse with. Right now if you replied to one of those positions they'd likely turn you down after a screening call because the calibre of candidates on the market is really high.

patothon• 4 years ago

Not all these people have the same jobs though so I’m not sure what you are getting at.

maerF0x05• 4 years ago

August US added 315K jobs including 68K professional services and 7K information (idk what those categories actually mean).

There's jobs for everyone who was laid off, but unclear if they're as good/lucrative.

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/02/heres-where-the-jobs-are-for...

mymyairduster• 4 years ago

Yeah, it's a great time for these people to finally learn to code

rajman1873• 4 years ago

if reports are to be believed, large swaths of these layoffs were in business and recruiting units, much less so engineering, so not exactly 15k+ new applications coming in

sytelus7• 4 years ago

Per last job report in US, there were two positions for every person finding normal jobs. For IT, I would think that ratio is twice. However, the biggest issue that people have to deal with: (1) Meta paid 2X to 4X higher than regular employers so that’s massive pay cuts for the folks, (2) they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked for.

So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.

matt-attack2• 4 years ago

I googled but I see zero references to "hold out" compensation. Is that actually a term?

pmmertens• 4 years ago

Outside of the 2:1 job postings to job seekers ratio, none of what you're saying here is correct.

barbazoo• 4 years ago

they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked for

Are you assuming a 4 year cliff or why would one lose 4 years worth of stock?

Interesting point you're bringing up. Personally I wouldn't count unvested stock as part of my wealth.

dcchambers2• 4 years ago

Will this saturate the market for all open programming/software engineering positions? No.

Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k/yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.

I think there's going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets/from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.

Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.

kilolima• 4 years ago

Yes, because they will be replaced with offshore labor or visa workers.

andreysolsty• 4 years ago

Im really curious how severance in non-US jurisdictions works in these cases. Both stripe and Facebook are offering WAY more than required by UK law for example. Do they offer similar packages to any UK staff laid off? Or do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?

Eisenstein3• 4 years ago

do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?

If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to 'get away' with anything like that? They could 'get away' with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn't. Maybe they don't want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn't also apply in other national jurisdictions.

pmontra2• 4 years ago

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.

This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...

The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?

thomasmarcelis• 4 years ago

Probably same PR company or law firm

vanilla-almond• 4 years ago

Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:

"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."

"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."

https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team

mabbo• 4 years ago

Yeah seriously, I read the meta announcement and thought "Did you just steal Tobi's letter and do some find/replace on it?"

lafreb• 4 years ago

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical:

"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."

"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."

"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."

"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."

"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."

etc.

KingOfCoders4• 4 years ago

Corporate robots are the same everywhere.

chank• 4 years ago

Layoffs have become so normalized these days, I'm sure they have templates.

hiyer• 4 years ago

Startup idea - layoff mail generator using GPT-3.

alvis3• 4 years ago

Corporate robots are the same, that's why corporate mistakes are also the same :/

ChrisRR• 4 years ago

Probably from a "How to make people redundant" template

bhouston• 4 years ago

Someone did crib the Stripe layoff notice at Meta. Strange, but yeah, obviously someone at Meta did base it on this Stripe one.

dontwatchthis2• 4 years ago

well they saw the postive feedback that the Stripe comments got and plagiarised it

paulcole2• 4 years ago

The wording is quite similar but I don’t think identical is the word you’re looking for.

papito2• 4 years ago

Seriously. The sweetest words to me would be: "Here is your six months severance and full medical, now get your shit and get out!"

treffer• 4 years ago

At least the last sentence reminds me of "The hard thing about hard things".

bjourne• 4 years ago

That just can't be a coincidence. American tech giants are again colluding to control the job market for software developers.

stulentsev• 4 years ago

- hey, can I copy your homework? - sure, but change it so it doesn't look like a copy

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

Don't companies usually use consultants to plan layoffs?

system28• 4 years ago

This is scary.

loeg5• 4 years ago

Same layoff consultants?

mysterydip• 4 years ago

When has there ever been a "permanent acceleration" in revenue growth for any company? Or do I misunderstand what they're saying?

Retric2• 4 years ago

It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.

0xmohit2• 4 years ago

Everybody used the same AI to write the memo.

nemo44x3• 4 years ago

It’s just corporate speak.

Abecid• 4 years ago

Holy shit you're right

meijer• 4 years ago

Is this even true? I thought the monetary policy of the Fed (as a reaction to Covid) simply made investments cheaper.

octodog• 4 years ago

Both can be true. But maybe one sounds more sincere than the other.

gbil• 4 years ago

a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term

I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material

nibbleshifter2• 4 years ago

Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended

Who predicted this?

The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.

dan-robertson• 4 years ago

That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.

But my memory may be playing tricks on me.

sbarre2• 4 years ago

I think the whole "many predicted" statement that several large tech companies have used to thin out all the pandemic hires is cover for the fact that they boom-hired during the pandemic knowing full well they would very likely have to shed those hires when things went back to pre-pandemic levels and the opportunity for short-term profit was over.

Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.

Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"

itsoktocry2• 4 years ago

Who predicted this?

Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.

The laptop class genuinely believed we'd never do anything in-person again.

philod• 4 years ago

Most large fast going tech companies "predicited" this but that doesn't mean they really believed it. The alternative at the time was to say..."we grew 100% in the last two years but with covid restrictions limiting etc wr think that growth will be more like 80% and revenue down x%" that would have sent massive shocks to investors and stocks would have dropped overnight as companies like Meta had been setting a long precedent of "beat and raise" with their earnings calls. Essentially everyone was hoping it would continue as they didn't want to see equity and comp and valuations down. What's funny is that it all happened anyway over the course of the year. Believe me from first hand experience there were many people in these companies raising flags late last year that it can't continue but were essentially ignored. Hope is not a strategy!

Aeolun5• 4 years ago

All the big tech companies that are now laying people off?

I mean, they probably believed what they wanted to believe, but that’s a very human failing.

twawaaay2• 4 years ago

I do not believe the statement.

Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.

My take would be:

* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.

* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.

* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.

* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.

chrisseaton2• 4 years ago

Share value is down everywhere. Where would people move to for better compensation?

itsoktocry2• 4 years ago

expect to start loosing ad revenue

They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.

But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.

We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.

dontwatchthis2• 4 years ago

well it could be all of the above....what i find odd is that the Facebook CEO already knew that demand for ad revenue would already drop in 2023 and they were still hiring up untill now....they should have started cutting costs earlier

colinmhayes8• 4 years ago

They claimed their monthly, daily, and total engagement are all up in this quarters earnings. Ads shown up 17% price per ad down 18%. Doesn’t seem like losing users.

pyb• 4 years ago

This layoff almost sounds like an opportunistic decision, rather than something that was planned long in advance.

refurb3• 4 years ago

Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos.

When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.

shafyy2• 4 years ago

I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.

bombcar22• 4 years ago

They thought it would be a paradigm shift and didn’t want to be caught out and dinosaured.

For them that risk was much greater.

grey-area• 4 years ago

They were willing for their new employees to take that risk.

pachico• 4 years ago

Someone used https://quillbot.com/ with that memo and replaced the company name. Job done!

0xmohit2• 4 years ago

It seems to do an awful job.

Input:

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."

Results in:

"When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."

seydor4• 4 years ago

the % of workers fired is also the same everywhere. As if a single nefarious overlord is running the Valley

rtanks• 4 years ago

Agree

geniium• 4 years ago

OpenAI rephrase

gz5• 4 years ago

Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different:

+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.

+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.

+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.

arbitrary_name• 4 years ago

The same HR/layoff consultants were used by both leadership teams, i believe.

nixcraft• 4 years ago

All social media companies hire too many folks and now cutting expenses to meet their target for shareholders. Yet, only Twitter seems to get lots of backslashes compared to other FANGS. Why? I wonder if this relates to Elon Musks' ongoing outbursts on Twitter regarding his political and other conservative views. I believe I answered my own questions. Ha!

habinero6• 4 years ago

I don't think you understand how many people it takes to run a large company.

Turns out Elon doesn't either lol. Also, he's not a conservative.

nikau2• 4 years ago

Also, he's not a conservative

Yeah he's a regular old leftie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_and_unions

Bilal_io2• 4 years ago

I don't think you're looking at this objectively. The way Musk handled the layoffs was reckless and without much thought other than "reduce cost immediately", the proof is they backtracked and tried to hire people back after realizing what a poopy mess they've created. That alone is ridiculous and warrants the backlash Musk/Twitter received.

From the looks of it, Zuckerberg handled this better than what anyone was expecting. Talk about under promising and over delivering

nikau2• 4 years ago

Musks was the "press conference outside 4 seasons landscaping" equivalent

wooger• 4 years ago

You think twitter is in FAANG?

rvz• 4 years ago

Good. About time. $180K per employee for years is not sustainable.

This is the general 'Tech Crash' I was talking about before all of this happened in advance. [0] [1]

We'll see what happens after the news. No company is safe. Not even FAAMNG companies that HN has been screaming about for years was ever untouchable.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663119

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238

habinero6• 4 years ago

Okay, but it's not eng being hit, it looks like. He mentions recruiting and biz depts.

hsbauauvhabzb• 4 years ago

Congratulations on your prediction?

tiagod5• 4 years ago

Where's your source for $180K/year average for these 11k employees?

FartyMcFarter5• 4 years ago

Since you insist on tooting your own horn, I think you should put a timeline on your predictions, as well as specifics on how this "crash" differs from periodic layoffs that happen every decade or even more often than that.

Anyone can predict that things will be bad at some point in the future.

ddorian432• 4 years ago

$180K per employee for years is not sustainable. - House prices will skyrocket

Who will pay these house prices?

iamstupidsimple• 4 years ago

Crab bucket mentality. Those salaries are fine, what went wrong is Meta overhired. FAANG companies don't have enough work to go around as it is.

matwood8• 4 years ago

$180K per employee for years is not sustainable.

By what metric? Metas profits the first 3Qs of the year totaled ~$17B. They would have been higher if not for Zuck's insane spending on the metaverse.

As the letter says, Meta clearly over hired around covid to the tune of 30k+ people. It's normal to pull back some.

Engineers at these companies generate so much economic value, I would argue they are still underpaid at 180k.

muro• 4 years ago

Wrong CEO :)

CarbonCycles• 4 years ago

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave…

I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

lvl1023• 4 years ago

Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR.

Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

pavlov3• 4 years ago

FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse.

The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.

whatyesaid• 4 years ago

How would Meta win in the cloud business though?

danpalmer3• 4 years ago

Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be.

Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.

personjerry• 4 years ago

You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.

Moldoteck• 4 years ago

I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model

cdiddy2• 4 years ago

Their payment attempt was stifled by regulators though. I wonder where they would be at if they had launched Diem instead of shutting that down

tech_tuna2• 4 years ago

I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company.

I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.

Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.

That's an interesting idea.

zulban• 4 years ago

No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one.

You can't possibly know that. Try not to get caught up in your own speculation and speculation from pundits.

rippercushions2• 4 years ago

AWS has the first mover advantage, Microsoft knows enterprise, Google has some awesome tech. I'm not sure what Meta could bring to the table?

erikpukinskis3• 4 years ago

If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity.

They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.

They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.

Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Screw that, I think the meta verse will pan out. Zucc will rise from the ashes.

andromeduck4• 4 years ago

They should have never given up on mobile. Burning a few billion a year on an android fork would have had much better returns than trying to go warp speed on VR.

matwood8• 4 years ago

meltdowns

Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse.

Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.

p0pcult2• 4 years ago

No, earnings have been going down because Apple fucked Meta with Apple's policy change on asking for consent to be tracked. Meta has even stated as much in various earnings calls since this happened.

This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.

The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.

jryhjythtr11• 4 years ago

Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.

FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.

loeg5• 4 years ago

High revenue but the stock is down 74% this year for a reason.

PM_me_your_math• 4 years ago

Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.

fleddr5• 4 years ago

You being downvoted just shows even this community prefers emotional projections over simple facts.

There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere.

Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe).

There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.

NaturalPhallacy2• 4 years ago

"Twitter usage is at an all-time high lol"

November 7th: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589784134691741696

The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.

roflyear10• 4 years ago

FB is making like $30bn year in profit. I am not sure if they are melting down?

paxys3• 4 years ago

Zuck is doing first ever mass layoffs for a company he started from his dorm room 18 years ago and grew to a ~trillion dollar valuation.

Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.

sidcool2• 4 years ago

As much as I dislike Meta's practices, this was well handled. Decent severance and support.

tumetab1• 4 years ago

Allowing access to email until the end of day also seems an improvement over other US companies practices

We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.

brailsafe2• 4 years ago

This is why you need real friends outside your workplace. When you get shoved out the door, at most your get the afternoon to be like "lets keep in touch!"

fleddr5• 4 years ago

It's honestly pretty risky. I imagine quite a lot of confidential information is in email.

cmsonger• 4 years ago

I thought so too. They did not have to be so generous.

housingisaright• 4 years ago

Depends how you look at it. I think they are well aware of their reputation and probably does not want to make it any worse.

andreiursan• 4 years ago

IMO the Zuck just gave Elon a lesson on how to be a grownup CEO.

amelius2• 4 years ago

Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.

serf• 4 years ago

and Zuckerberg is somehow real and authentic? First time i've ever heard that one.

Realistically this cut was probably done in time to offer a decent severance without hurting things on the corporate side -- to compare this to Twitter's post-Elon crash-plan is disingenuous, and i'm not even a Musk fan.

oxplot3• 4 years ago

Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.

I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).

It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)

strikelaserclaw3• 4 years ago

i would never trust Elon's word and he has some big flaws as a person but his goals are so ambitious and risky, small thinking VC's would never invest in those , all VC's want are relatively safe software (SAAS) companies.

jdthedisciple• 4 years ago

Mind elaborating on the "fake person" part?

pm908• 4 years ago

I laughed so hard at this comment, thank you for a little bit of humor in these ominous times.

Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.

aliswe• 4 years ago

Troll post of the year!

daniaal• 4 years ago

Google did the same sort of crazy hiring and i wonder if they will be next to layoff thousands

ptman• 4 years ago

I read (an estimate?) somewhere that google has been doing this by not renewing contractors and cutting hiring

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

That's a version of this which doesn't stress out employees so the best ones don't jump the ship at first occasion.

Our org went through something similar some 6 year ago, and it was a stark contrast with previous frequent firing rounds when nobody would be secure, sometimes even best within given team were let go (ie due to current allocation issues).

But this can replace small firing ie up to 10%, not when you are doing stuff musk-style.

bart_spoon2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure that's what Meta was doing 3-6 months ago, so it may still be coming.

pm908• 4 years ago

Google's ad network is pretty ubiquitous since it spans almost all the known web. Facebook is pretty big too but relies mostly on its own platform (FB, Inst etc.). For sure Google is affected, but I imagine the impact is less.

Also one thing that shouldn't be missed: Google controls Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world (except US maybe) so it wasn't affected as strongly by Apple's clampdown.

The lesson to Zuck is clear: he absolutely needs to own the next digital platform, and in his mind its the metaverse so he's going all in. I question the decisions he makes but the reasoning seems pretty solid at least (unlike a certain Electric Car maker)

meta_gone2• 4 years ago

Got cannned today. At least the severance is good

lambda_dn2• 4 years ago

Is it immediate or you still working notice?

fumblebee3• 4 years ago

What did the process look like? Did you find out first from HR, from Zuck's memo, your manager, or was your laptop just remotely KO'd?

meta_gone2• 4 years ago

Email, then checked to see if I still had access. Still have workplace access weirdly.

polio2• 4 years ago

What org were you part of?

lambda_dn2• 4 years ago

This is the slow demise of Facebook, if their pivot to AR/VR/Metaverse fails to catch on things will go sideways fast.

kodisha• 4 years ago

Will the remaining staff use "Mark as safe" feature? /s

derwiki2• 4 years ago

I’ve been joking that LinkedIn should build this.

firstSpeaker• 4 years ago

I am wondering when will Amazon start the layoff process or that their practices are more economical and that they wont go this direction.

lrvick2• 4 years ago

While I am no fan of Amazon, they at least produce useful services and users pay money for them.

I would be surprised to see layoffs there.

derwiki2• 4 years ago

Don’t they have high natural attrition?

nfRfqX5n3• 4 years ago

With the holidays and re:invent coming, it would be pretty insane for them to cut jobs right now

saos• 4 years ago

Ohh that’s a lot.

How can I view timeline of my companies headcount growth? Does LinkedIn have this info?

Edit: LinkedIn premium is required for this info

lrvick2• 4 years ago

While I truly feel the best outcome for humanity is Facebook/Meta shutting down, I will give due credit to the PR and HR teams for managing to make Zuck look human in this moment.

pera• 4 years ago

I wonder why the two biggest recent layoffs were by the two largest (US-based) social networks, is this the end of an era? And where is all that advertisement money going now?

As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.

nemo44x3• 4 years ago

Probably not. Some companies grew too fast and are now correcting. Nothing goes straight up or down. It will be tight for awhile though.

Ragnarokk• 4 years ago

I think it was mostly a bubble and it finally has popped. The big social networks were funded blindly because they were growing on the market. But of course it wouldn't be eternal

weatherlite4• 4 years ago

The ios privacy change hurt Meta but honestly most financial reports I've seen from tech (Alphabet, Amazon etc) don't look great. It has to do with the macro environment we're in. Which tech stocks had a stellar year? Not that many.

eschneider7• 4 years ago

I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.

curiousllama3• 4 years ago

Are you referring to rounds at the same company, or rounds across the economy?

eschneider7• 4 years ago

Rounds at the same company.

marcus0x627• 4 years ago

Not the OP, but what I’ve experienced is severance packages get worse across rounds at a single company. A previous employer started at 1 year pay / benefits, then six months, then six weeks + two weeks per year of service.

throwaway20375• 4 years ago

I read it as same company.

refurb3• 4 years ago

I've been through 3 lays offs years ago and after the 2nd one I got pretty good at predicting the 3rd. It's basically a cookie cutter approach.

Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.

agotterer• 4 years ago

Maybe less relevant now that a lot of companies are still remote. In the past when a company cuts back on office perks, such as snacks, it’s often a leading indicator of financial issues and possible looming cuts.

IronWolve• 4 years ago

Correct, Take the first round of payouts, always.

Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.

Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.

washywashy3• 4 years ago

Are employees able to “take” a layoff even if they don’t receive an email telling them they are among the affected group?

vegetablepotpie• 4 years ago

Let’s say you are an employee at a company that does mass layoffs. They do not lay you off like everyone else and keep you on. What is the best course of action to take at that point?

chipgap98• 4 years ago

I'm not saying there won't be more layoffs, but I don't think this advice makes sense for people at places like Meta. They are generating a ton of revenue and profit even with the current economic conditions.

pjmlp3• 4 years ago

I have been through a couple of merges and layoffs, it taught me that what matters is loyaty to the team, employer not so much.

yarky2• 4 years ago

Do you mind to elaborate a bit?

paxys3• 4 years ago

It depends. In a lot of layoffs your manager themselves will find out the same morning and will have no say in the decision.

H8crilA2• 4 years ago

I'm close to deciding to go back to University to get some additional education that's likely to improve my work in the future. I can afford it without any salary. Based on your experience, do you think this is the right moment to do so? I'm employed at the moment.

typeofhuman• 4 years ago

What are you going to pursue?

If you're looking for income growth and are already in professional position making decent money it's almost never worth it to go back to school.

sillysaurusx2• 4 years ago

If you’re going in order to get education that you personally want, now seems like the best time. The economy will recover and you’ll be able to get back in later.

If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career.

Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.

taude• 4 years ago

This was common on what a lot of people did when the dot-com era crashed to an end. Almost all my software engineering friends went to grad school, most for their MBAs and law degrees, a few stayed their course in software engineering and bit-twiddling.

cableshaft5• 4 years ago

I did that after I got laid off early 2009, although for me it was going back to finish my bachelors.

Spent two years in school and got to sit out the worst of the recession. However, (in the US) tuition increased a ton from when I first went to school and has only gotten more ridiculous since I graduated.

Personally I'm glad I did it, it just took a while to pay it all off.

greenhearth• 4 years ago

From personal experience school is much better (and more fun) later in life, especially if you're genuinely interested in what it is you are studying. If you can afford it, or even better - get your company to pay, it's definitely worthwhile. You may have to pace yourself, as taking on a lot of credits and full-time work at the same time is not easy.

mrits2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure comparing a company with $28 billion Q3 revenue to .com bubble makes much sense.

marcus0x627• 4 years ago

During the dot com bubble even companies with massive (for the time) revenue did huge layoffs. Cisco was probably the poster child for that.

tootie2• 4 years ago

This is going to be a repeat of 2000, not 2008. There's seemingly no contagion and no secular stagnation. This is just unwinding of the cheap money era that flowed overwhelmingly into SV. You'll see a cooling off of red hot compensation, a lot of failed startups that no one ever understood and the ongoing crypto crash. This may end up being enough to trigger a mild recession.

swalsh6• 4 years ago

" mild recession"

If we're lucky

fortran77• 4 years ago

We didn't have inflation like this in 2000. I'm old enough to remember the 70s

boringg3• 4 years ago

Global macro is very different. This is going to be different from both.

solumunus• 4 years ago

Mild recession? How are you not understanding the global macro set up right now? Europe will see a ~10 year recession, possibly the worst ever. America may fare better but there's no way you're getting away with a "mild" recession.

Aunche• 4 years ago

Software engineering is far more saturated than it was in 2000 and 2008. In 2008, Amazon, Apple, and Google all had a seemingly endless room to grow. The iPhone, Android, AWS, and video steaming were still in their infancy. There's nothing like that right now. There are definitely a lot of exciting innovations in ML and VR, but I think it will be a while before these technologies find a mainstream consumer use case.

renaudg• 4 years ago

I was around in 2000. It had the failed startups but it didn't have inflation, war, and a pandemic.

Long Covid alone is going to hamper any economic recovery. It's a mass disabling event. The sooner we recognize this and start tackling it, the better : https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-workforce-absenteeism-pro...

tsunamifury• 4 years ago

CMBSs held by shadow banks with quarterly markdown accounting — with valuations linked to commercial leases.

hindsightbias2• 4 years ago

You'd almost think cities and metropolitan areas are being thoughtful when avoiding the demands from those following the latest gold rush. But surely, that would be an unpopular opinion around here.

trashtester• 4 years ago

It really depends on the Fed and the overall market. I would say the economy is at a much greater risk now than in 2000, for these reasons:

We have several fundamental inflation factors - The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year. - Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare. - This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception. - The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs. - Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up. - During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe. - Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.

On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors: - Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything. - Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well. - Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.

All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.

As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems. - Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation. - Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more. - In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy. - People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US. - Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs. - Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts) - These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.

In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).

jollyllama4• 4 years ago

People act like there were no layoffs between 2010 and 2000 but there were plenty, if you were in the wrong company and/or the wrong sector. IBM comes to mind. There were still CEOs out there trimming the fat while everyone else was getting high on the hype. If you had exposure to this, you're ready, at least emotionally, for what's going on now. If you didn't, you're probably shellshocked right now. Don't worry, you'll get used to it.

registeredcorn2• 4 years ago

I'm interested to hear your opinion: Do you have any thoughts on the current way companies are valued/how they operate vs how they were leading up to the 2000 crash?

Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.

matwood8• 4 years ago

This is literally nothing like 2000 unless in you're in something like crypto. Meta hired 30k+ people during covid and they are correcting that over hire mistake. They are fine financially.

In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.

Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.

eyear• 4 years ago

Not necessarily: I know companies paid 2 weeks/year in the first round and 3 weeks/year in the second round a year later.

bagels• 4 years ago

Sounds like everyone got a weak deal.

anthomtb• 4 years ago

I survived two rounds of layoffs in 2008/2009 and they went as you describe. The first round had significantly better benefits. Which, ironically, ended up going to the worst performers.

That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).

dboreham• 4 years ago

Except the very last round, where you're the person left to handle sale of IP and so forth. Then they'll pay you well to stick around for a few months doing nothing.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse

Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.

nomilk• 4 years ago

the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected

What's "ads signal loss"? Is that iPhone asking for permission to track activity across apps, causing less accurate ad placement?

danpalmer3• 4 years ago

Yes. That and other similar efforts such as phasing out third party cookies.

akmarinov• 4 years ago

They've been milking that for almost 3 years now...

Barrin92• 4 years ago

yes. it's the changes Apple made to app tracking. IIRC Facebook earlier this year itself stated that it would cost them up to ten billion in sales.

willis936• 4 years ago

It could mean people left after the re-brand.

lovecg2• 4 years ago

Attribution, not placement

thatoneguytoo• 4 years ago

It felt as if I was reading the Stripe memo.

dustedcodes2• 4 years ago

Did they hire 11k people during the pandemic? If not then the given reason for the layoffs are clearly not the full story.

justapassenger• 4 years ago

They hired way more than that.

somedude895• 4 years ago

They give two reasons:

- Hiring spree during Covid

- Economic slowdown, eg lower ad spends

habibur• 4 years ago

Head count had been around 40k in 2019.

dustedcodes2• 4 years ago

Wow so they increased their head count by more than double? How do you even onboard 44.6k people in 3 years? No wonder that they weren't very productive.

krembanan• 4 years ago

Does anyone know how many of these are in engineering?

glintik• 4 years ago

That’s ok, they hired too much people too fast. Ad revenues go down, they need to save money.

pelasaco3• 4 years ago

Bad Musk /s

xvector• 4 years ago

Looks like the terms of the layoff are very generous. 4 months of pay, accelerated vesting, etc.

oars• 4 years ago

Is it better for Google and Amazon to try recruiting this available talent straightaway or keep waiting?

strikelaserclaw3• 4 years ago

what makes you think those orgs aren't bloated as well ?

Hackbraten• 4 years ago

I’m feeling sorry for everyone affected.

Let’s hope that this isn’t going to impact Buck [0] too much. It’s one of the best things Facebook has ever made.

[0] https://github.com/facebook/buck/tree/dev

alberth2• 4 years ago

I'm surprised they announced this on a prime news day, as oppose to Friday afternoon where less attention might have been given to it.

(My heart goes out to all who lost their job. I'm wishing everyone well during these tough times.)

tech_tuna2• 4 years ago

The news is consumed with the US midterms, it's actually a great time to make this announcement.

bombcar22• 4 years ago

And it’s perfectly timed because now no ex employees can change their vote “out of anger”.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

They should join fresh ex-twitter employees and incorporate.

revskill• 4 years ago

HR is annoying in most of cases. Their job should be (and could be) automated via bots.

My thought is, the reason is most of them lack of logical thinking skills, that's why they're HR in first place ?

esalman• 4 years ago

Do bots have better thinking skills than humans?

patkai• 4 years ago

Where would you advertise for ex-Meta or ex-Twitter developers?

postexitus• 4 years ago

teamblind.com

optymizer6• 4 years ago

lots of us read HN, so maybe in one of the usual hiring threads here

andyjohnson03• 4 years ago

I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.

Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?

throwawaysleep• 4 years ago

It means as much as was said. Nothing at all.

texasbigdata3• 4 years ago

That’s super pessimistic. What do you want him to say: “sucks all y’all lost your jobs but wasn’t my fault. Haha you’re unemployed now”. Like sure it’s not much, but without owning your mistakes how do you get better and improve to prevent them from repeating?

fullshark5• 4 years ago

I'd like him to say words that have actual meaning, and not words that resemble meaning after being filtered by a PR consultant.

andyjohnson03• 4 years ago

I think your confusng pessimism with scepticism.

Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why?

For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment?

I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?

triceratops4• 4 years ago

He can resign. As CEO he's ultimately responsible for the share price. By that measure, he just might be the worst-performing employee at the company.

discordance• 4 years ago

"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."

cdolan• 4 years ago

SV from HBO I’d really something else

cableshaft5• 4 years ago

For someone who barely ever worked an office job, Mike Judge is an expert at portraying office space.

tifadg12• 4 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeYaQGbD6Xc

Hilarious, yet the way corporate PR is heading it could be real and none would be the wiser.

sytelus7• 4 years ago

SV should start new season. Writers will have no shortage of material.

cloutchaser2• 4 years ago

I wonder how many of the people who say “musk is just an investor and Tesla and spacex exist because of the engineers” now say

Zuckerberg is clearly the responsible for the failures of Facebook.

You can’t have both.

jghn3• 4 years ago

At sone point “I take responsibility” came to mean nothing more than “My bad”. It’s as if the act of saying it was your fault is all that’s necessary.

Ive noticed it used this way more and more, presumably as people realize it’s utility as a get of jail free card

StevePerkins• 4 years ago

Just months ago, "The Crying CEO" guy became a viral meme for expressing too much empathy in a layoff.

It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".

twblalock• 4 years ago

When did it mean anything other than "my bad"? It never did.

gustavorg• 4 years ago

I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.

"Some of you May Die, But it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" - Lord Farquaad

dolmen3• 4 years ago

Best quote.

Aeolun5• 4 years ago

Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making.

Which eventually leads to complete stagnation and nobody being willing and/or able to make a decision.

paulcole2• 4 years ago

What would him taking responsibility in practice look like to you?

micromacrofoot3• 4 years ago

sacrificing some personal wealth for the good of the people that were affected

davidcbc2• 4 years ago

Facing repercussions on the level of those he's laying off. If he's responsible he should be the first one out the door.

falcolas5• 4 years ago

Taking a salary cut. Loosing unvested options. Fewer grants going forward.

Financial penalties that incentivize him to not fuck up again.

triceratops4• 4 years ago

Resigning.

0x4454423• 4 years ago

Has he actually admitted how he failed in his responsibilities? I have not followed the FB fall closely but from the outside there appears to be some dubious strategic decisions at work. It would be interesting to hear him elaborate on the situation with something like “I failed to see how precarious it was to be at the mercy of Google and Apple for our core ad business”. Or, “looking back, it was a mistake to not get into cloud computing for a more diversified revenue stream”.

andyjohnson03• 4 years ago

Good question. I don't know the answer. And that points to the problem, really. In rhe world as ut is, there isnt really a way to realistically imagine a CEO doing anything meaningful to take responsibility for a self-admitted error lile this.

If, just for the sake of argument, I said he should resign or compensate the affected people out of his own pocket, I'm fairly sure that people here would think I was being naive. People here are already saying that corporate leaders wouldnt take decisions if they had to be held responsible for the outcomes.

So we end-up with a bunch of people who everyone knows (a) are not responsible for mistakes, and (b) are tacitly understood to be able to make statements that habe no meaning. In other words, lies.

And thus the domain of trust becomes smaller and more fractured.

nonameiguess2• 4 years ago

If the issue is his moonshot bets on AI research and metaverse that are not expected to immediately payout hurt the company by having too much headcount not contributing to short-term revenue, and core products can't support that, then he made a bad strategic decision, and the appropriate way to take responsibility for that is to remove the unique voting structure so that Mark is no longer the sole person capable of deciding the company's future strategy.

But either way, it's still inevitable that a change in strategy would entail elimination of some of that headcount.

adamzerner3• 4 years ago

I think a Bayesian perspective is helpful here. 1) How likely is it that Zuck makes that statement if he feels like he is responsible? 2) How likely is it if he doesn't feel responsible? I think the answers to those questions are quite similar, in which case hearing the statement doesn't actually tell us much.

Enginerrrd2• 4 years ago

Just to elaborate on this since I had to think about it and I might save someone else the effort:

Let M = Makes the statement Let R = Feels Responsible Notation: ~R = Not R

Answering OP's questions 1 & 2: I think it's safe to assume P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1 So P(M) = 1

So Bayes' theorem simplifies as follows: P(R|M) = P(M|R)P(R)/PM) = P(R)

Thus, OP's point is that the statement tells us essentially nothing about the probability he actually feels responsible or empathetic, and I agree.

mattmaroon• 4 years ago

Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.

But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.

I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.

recuter• 4 years ago

I can't imagine these sort of layoffs, which are baked into the lifecycle and business plans of the company, were not something he wasn't anticipating years and years ago when hiring was being ramped up. In fact some notable fraction of these 11,000 were hired in the first place only to be fired, by design.

Sweet dreams.

BarryMilo• 4 years ago

And unlike any of his employees, he is a billionaire. I'm sure he'll find a way to sleep.

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

This isn't hard for Zuck - he just directs his subordinates to layoff a bunch of people, and then goes back to swimming in his vault of cash. Losing x billion of essentially infinity money is the same as losing no money. Once you reach Zuck's level of wealth you can't really even conceive of non-billionairs as the being same species as you, much less empathize with them.

bmm6o• 4 years ago

Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough

He didn't pay a fine, it isn't any sort of punishment. He tanked the value of the asset that is the primary component of his wealth. That money is gone whether he "takes responsibility" or not.

chasd003• 4 years ago

He's lost a lot but it's not like he's having to ask his wife to stop going out to lunch with her friends. There's a level of wealth where the numbers just stop having any real meaning. $1B is still multiple lifetimes of the most decadent luxury currently possible.

jjav2• 4 years ago

I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.

But that's not taking responsibility.

As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.

avgcorrection2• 4 years ago

Everyone: The hero of their own story.

reaperducer2• 4 years ago

I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.

Perhaps he will give up his sixth boat, or his fourth house, or his 13th car? Maybe he's going to wait on buying that private island until next quarter.

Everyone has to make sacrifices.

robbintt• 4 years ago

It might slow the pace at which he tries to take over the private resources of the island of Kauai, Hawaii from the billionaires before him but I doubt it.

I think it's interesting how pedestrian Oprah, Zuck, and Larry Ellison are, obsessing over a place Elvis visited for pork barbecue parties while demonstrating 0 understanding of local people and their needs.

It's incredibly embarrassing for humanity.

crazygringo3• 4 years ago

It means he's not trying to scapegoat a VP or the board or say "It's not my fault nobody foresaw this economy."

It doesn't mean anything in terms of action or "self-punishment" but nor should it. The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see.

I'm no fan of the guy, but some people won't even take responsibility verbally. So at least he's not descending that low.

And the severance seems decent so it all seems to be handled fine. Not sure what more you're looking for.

2rsf2• 4 years ago

The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see

Those are mostly virtual dollars and he has a lot more real ones in his account, while I agree that whatever he does to "punish himself" will be practically meaningless it might have some symbolic meaning. Lowering his and senior management salaries and incentives won't save jobs but will give a better image of the crisis

tiagod5• 4 years ago

The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see.

Is it worse to lose a billion dollars when you have two b, or a thousand dollars when all you have is 2k?

lapcat5• 4 years ago

Taking responsibility would mean resigning as CEO, for example. Or altering the voting situation where he has absolute power, can't be voted out by the board of directors, and thus has no accountability for his actions and mistakes.

But just saying that you're taking responsibility is not actually taking responsibility. It's empty words.

Enginerrrd2• 4 years ago

I don't agree with that take at all. No leader would be able to learn from mistakes or grow if they had to metaphorically commit Seppuku every time they made a mistake by resigning or abdicating their authority.

Taking responsibility would mean owning the situation as being caused by you, and critically evaluating your actions to see if there were different paths you could have taken given the same information, or if there was other information that you should have added to your decision-making.

There are some mistakes so grave and unjustifiable that resignation would be the appropriate way to take responsibility for them, but I don't think a round of layoffs pending an expected economic downturn after excessive growth qualifies.

lob_it• 4 years ago

"Where's the vaporware? Under the pickle...." is best portrayed by the younger types.

https://youtu.be/Ug75diEyiA0

You know why the food sucks so bad when you know who they are catering to :p

abeppu• 4 years ago

Or altering the voting situation where he has absolute power

Absolutely this. Others in this thread are saying that the fact of having lost a lot of money is enough for him to be "accountable". But IMU the specific arrangement with Meta class B vs class A shares is that the group of other institutional investors lost _more_ but didn't have any ability to influence decisions, replace the CEO, etc. Zuckerberg's large on-paper loss isn't accountability for decisions he made, but is just the risk of being a wealthy person with a lopsided portfolio.

Both because of his role in deciding to hire so much, and because he's dead set on pursuing a metaverse vision which is controversial, I think "accountability" would require him to at least make it possible for other shareholders to vote on proposals on an equal footing.

ilaksh• 4 years ago

All of them bloated up. It's just like, polite to take the blame.

adrianmsmith• 4 years ago

I thought this https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1590304422735015936 was a good explanation:

What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.

sausagefeet6• 4 years ago

This is a pretty poor take, IMO. I have not seen any difference in results of a CEO who "takes responsibility" vs "blames outside factors". Taking responsibility seems to be a cheap way to come off as a better person without actually doing anything differently.

kraf2• 4 years ago

Actually to me his explanation kind of sounds like he's blaming the economy

alecbz7• 4 years ago

I think just leaving it at "I got this wrong" would land way better.

Adding "and I take responsibility" without actually substantiating that makes it sound way more hollow.

BurningFrog2• 4 years ago

It just means he accepts the blame, and holds no one else responsible.

Do people want him to fire himself to show he means it, or what?

khyryk• 4 years ago

People have a problem with it because it's a string of words without meaning. Better to leave it out than to sully modern language further with meaningless gibberish that looks like language.

jimbokun• 4 years ago

Is there a better way to say this?

I think the meaning is pretty clearly "Many of you are being let go not because of poor performance on your part, but bad decisions on my part."

It's acknowledging fault.

orangepurple• 4 years ago

I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice

Increasing value of company stock

lazide3• 4 years ago

He lost untold billions of dollars (admittedly off his giant pile of even more untold billions of dollars).

He’s the primary controlling shareholder and defacto owner. What other kind of accountability would make any sense at all? Even if he fired himself, he’d either have to shut the company down, or find someone to replace him and manage them, which makes him their boss.

Edit: to correct dumb statement around share ownership. But you know what I meant.

spacemadness3• 4 years ago

Apparently taking responsibility means lessening the impact by releasing this news alongside election results so it is somewhat buried.

jbaczuk2• 4 years ago

Wow, people can find a way to complain about anything. The severance benefits are insanely generous. Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now? Would it have been better if he blamed the layoffs on the market? Maybe it's just a glass half empty kind of thing.

arbitrage2• 4 years ago

Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now?

Does everybody take a job expecting to leave it? I don't think that is the case.

miiiiiike4• 4 years ago

As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.

Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?"

Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and not blaming others for your failures. It doesn't mean that self immolation follows soon after.

I move on from bad breaks pretty quickly but there are few things that I've held on to. Things that still burn years later and all of them involve refusals to accept responsibility. Hearing someone say: "Yep, it was me. I fucked you and I'm sorry. Here's what I can offer." isn't nothing.

Layoffs suck but the rate of hiring in big companies wasn't sustainable. A correction is here. It's temporary, but, it's real.

If you've tried to hire outside of FAANG over the past decade you'd know one thing: FAANG is hoarding talent. Every developer I've really wanted to hold on to has gone to a big tech company.. I can't blame them. But, here's the thing, so have many of the contractors that I didn't end up hiring for very good reasons.

These layoff messages, down to the structure and content, all sound the same because PR people follow best practices just like everyone else. You wouldn't ask why all Redux or Angular apps use similar patterns.. They're using patterns, that's what patterns are for.

hardolaf• 4 years ago

It sounds like you should pay more for developers because we don't have an issue retaining top talent over in the financial space.

mongol2• 4 years ago

Taking responsibility is more than just admitting reponsibility. It is also about bearing the consequences. Such as, if you broke something, you fix it. If you lost something, you pay up to replace it. Or similar. A manager usually can't fix a problem themselves though. But unless they pay a cost for their mistakes, they are not really taking responsibility. Then they just pay lip service to the word.

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

Apologizing means you won't do it again. What steps are being taken so that the situation being apologized for doesn't happen again?

warcher• 4 years ago

Nothing short of seppuku streamed live via Oculus will redeem the honor of a business guy putting his honest level best effort behind some business things that didn't make as much money as he hoped.

P_I_Staker• 4 years ago

I've called this the public apology ritual. In the minds of the angry mob, the person is irredeemable and should suffer the worst fate (in our society that might entail being "canceled"... shunned).

They don't WANT to forgive them, or provide them with any redemption. Regardless of the apology, you will use it to push back further. Look for any hole in the apology to point to. If that fails, criticize the apology for being too late, or only to save face... in any case, make sure to proclaim that you're even more angry after the apology.

I'm not saying people should never apologize, but I get sick of this whole routine and all the acting. People will always just do what they want and it will just be based on a knee jerk sense of how much they like you.

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly

But they aren't, this isn't “taking responsibility”, this is just following the latest spin doctor trend in public communication.

Taking responsibility for a failure means stepping down.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

I think people are forgetting that a severance package is not a legal requirement, and that this one is actually pretty generous. "I fucked up, here's what I can offer" is more or less what this letter is saying, but it's just not drawing the connection between the two parts in a way that makes sense to people.

People can disagree about whether the package is satisfactory, but that's completely beside the point. The severance package is the make good Zuckerberg is offering: it is an expense his company is paying when they do not have to.

It is the implied answer to the question "Oh yeah? How is he taking responsibility?" Argue about whether it's good enough, but it is an answer.

rendaw• 4 years ago

Admitting mistakes and taking responsibility are two different things. People were calling for the first, not the second.

What they're complaining about is that Zuckerberg can't take responsibility here, it's too late (being responsible would have been gambling less), but he is claiming he will which is more obvious marketing speak (sounds good, doesn't make any sense).

baxtr• 4 years ago

Taking responsibility means first of all admitting that you were wrong. Most people never even get to this first step.

Yhippa6• 4 years ago

Think about it this way. If I, for example, did a series of activities that led to 13% of my division's business being impacted adversely, I'm almost assuredly getting fired.

When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.

smsm426• 4 years ago

I'd say yeah, that's pretty much it. In any case, what'd you expect? He's not giving up the control of the company. He made a mistake, yes - but there's no obligation for anybody who makes a mistake to give up everything and never have any responsibility again. So what else is there?

conductr• 4 years ago

I live in a oil rich area and there's a large economy of well paid folks attached to it. They all understand it's boom and bust. They get paid really well when it's booming. Then they take the L when it's busting. All to say, I think people need to come to terms with the fact they weren't being paid well due to their sheer brilliance but due to the risk they assumed by joining a boom and bust industry. Nobody was lured into a job at FB under unfair circumstances and I'm sure they're not exiting on unfair circumstances. Does it suck to be in a cyclical bust period, does it hurt worse that it's in large part self inflicted by Zuck. Of course, of course.

pishpash2• 4 years ago

On some level it's not even Zuck's fault. It's Jerome Powell's. It's however up to each individual to plan for what comes after knowing 2020-2021 was an epic bubble.

varsketiz• 4 years ago

He is paying a pretty decent severance package for the US as far as I understand.

noname2021• 4 years ago

Taking responsibility might mean ponying up to give all the affected people additional months of pay / benefits etc. After all he is responsible for a big time disruption to their families

That would be a meaningful way of saying he is sorry as well as setting a precedent for all other billionaires who just "take responsibility" and continue on

iepathos4• 4 years ago

In practice, the change is they're laying people off and paying them generous severance packages and some other support options to help them transition as well as looking to cut infrastructure expenses. I'm not sure what other change you would be expecting. As a major share holder he is significantly impacted, losing over $100 billion since 2021. He's far from the only tech CEO to invest in fast expansion during the initial covid boom. It can very much be argued he made general good decisions to fast expand then and retract now given the information they had at the time, though I think his investments specifically in VR have been terrible for the company as a whole. Only time will tell if that will ever pay off for them or continue to be a money sink hole.

faangiq• 4 years ago

Like the soul of America, it’s nothing but empty corporate speak.

Eumenes• 4 years ago

Meta/FB is an immoral company, so I have almost zero sympathy if you agreed to work there in the first place.

nickdothutton• 4 years ago

“I want to take responsibility” vs “I take responsibility”.

darkwater2• 4 years ago

I'd like to highlight this quote from the statement:

and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected

Apple decisions + EU regulations?

yreg4• 4 years ago

I have a stupid question. Perhaps someone can explain.

What is the link between Apple introducing new rules to nerf tracking and Meta making less money?

I guess less tracking means less relevant ads. Are Meta's customers able to somehow evaluate this and are they now unwilling to spend as much money on advertising with them? Or is it that Meta now has lower click-through rates on iOS? Is there something else?

KaiserPro2• 4 years ago

it means its harder to say that this advert lead to this click on the page.

This means the quality of the analytics coming back are much poorer. so its harder to optimise for a market segment.

fingerlocks2• 4 years ago

Less attribution. Attribution is more valuable than targeted ads.

srcreigh• 4 years ago

Imagine FB can report that its ads are driving 60% of sales at a lower ROI than other channels. That’s a great incentive for companies to spend more on FB.

Due to the iOS privacy consent form, FB can’t provide these kinds of reports anymore. There hasn’t been a decent replacement which drives companies to spend money with Facebook. That’s why revenues are down.

This is also why VR is such an important investment. If Meta will own the VR platform, other companies such as Google and Apple wont be able to block Meta’s attribution.

Qub3d• 4 years ago

The link is that Ad Tracking Transparency (ATT) happened relatively close to FB's numbers going south, and its a great scapegoat.

https://daringfireball.net/2022/08/ft_effects_of_app_trackin...

What I think makes ATT a tempting scapegoat is that it creates a great story. Apple enacted a change in the name of privacy and that change has adversely affected both Facebook and small businesses that relied on Facebook. That’s a dramatic, captivating storyline, with two rivals, both corporate behemoths, on opposing sides.

(The footnote on this blog is a great explanation as to why FB's adTech was considered so bananas and why its no longer as much.)

randomsearch8• 4 years ago

Scapegoating. Replace "signal loss" with "TikTok" and "Most of our products suck" and you're a lot closer to the truth.

temende• 4 years ago

Well, it's all of the above. Lots of factors working against Meta/FB these days.

jacooper2• 4 years ago

I'm still surprised they are using the fb.com domain. Why haven't they move to meta.com?

jacooper2• 4 years ago

Moved*

yashg2• 4 years ago

16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance and everything else, looks like a decent severance package at least. This seems better handled than Twitter's layoffs.

kadomony4• 4 years ago

Musk only authorized 3 months' severance to substantiate the 90 days needed to prevent being sued into oblivion. The man is going to do the bare minimum for his employees to recoup his loss in making the acquisition.

FraaJad• 4 years ago

The bare minimum would be 60 days severance to stave off California's WARN act, isn't it?

nsenifty• 4 years ago

+2 weeks base pay for every year of service with no cap.

blsapologist425• 4 years ago

Yup. One person I know is getting around 10 months of severance(!). Actually seems like a sweet deal.

consumer4512• 4 years ago

That is really generous. But man, I'm sitting here really hoping my sibling who works at Meta is not getting axed.

He took the job because of the money, after our parents had to declare a medical bankruptcy. The increase in salary allowed him to pay for their housing which they cannot afford on SS benefits.

Even under those circumstances he still would not take the job until he got my super-anti-Zuck butt on-board with the idea.

I hope people realize that reasons for working at Meta may be more complicated than it might seem on the surface.

</rant>

UPDATE: he still has a job, whew

yashg2• 4 years ago

Of course layoffs are never pleasant and I hope and wish no one ever has to face them. But in the capitalist world we live in, they are inevitable. I am glad your brother has his job. Another sad thing about the uber capitalist society that US is, are the medical bankruptcies. In a developed country like the US, people shouldn't go bankrupt trying to avail healthcare. But that's a completely different discussion and let's not go there.

ggregoire2• 4 years ago

I've read several times in those comments that this is a "decent" severance package.

I'm not that familiar with the US legalities and practices, what's considered a "good" and "very good" severance package over there, if 16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance (for the employees and their families btw) is only "decent"? Is it common to get way better? From abroad we think that the severance packages in the US are at the will of the employers and so are usually very bad.

patagonia5• 4 years ago

Getting tired of “I take responsibility” without taking responsibility.

zmxz7• 4 years ago

Could you highlight in detail how responsibility wasn't taken in your opinion and which parts of the text we've all read highlights that?

patagonia5• 4 years ago

Nope.

ericd2• 4 years ago

Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.

optymizer6• 4 years ago

The one thing I want is the ability to work on my own startup in my spare time, without fearing legal repercussions. It wouldn't require me to risk my house on an idea.

randomsearch8• 4 years ago

Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary? if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.

now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different

swalsh6• 4 years ago

Getting laid off during a tech crash often leads to smart people deciding to finally follow the dreams they couldn't justify during the tech bull market. There's probably no shortage of people working at Facebook who have dreams of quitting to build some idea they have. But quitting a job paying 350k or whatever is just not in the cards.

seydor4• 4 years ago

facebook making a lot of money doesnt imply that they are making something great

if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.

For the past 10+ years, in this forum, the advice is to stop trying to build something, go work at Faang

kilovoltaire• 4 years ago

Google and Facebook are both advertising companies, doesn't seem that different to me.

micromacrofoot3• 4 years ago

Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary?

Yes, have you seen the salaries recently? an E6 can make nearly half a million a year in total compensation.

erikpukinskis3• 4 years ago

FWIW I’m currently working on a startup side project with someone at Meta. I don’t know that we’re going to “change the world” but I think we’re both awesome and I can see us building something awesome.

We both have jobs because we need to pay our bills.

stewx• 4 years ago

What is Google doing to change the world right now?

snapcaster2• 4 years ago

I don't work at either, but aren't they both advertising companies with roughly same kinds of people working at them? Why do you think it would be different?

monktastic1• 4 years ago

You may be thinking of the Google from 10+ years ago. I left all the way back in 2016 and the Alphabet transition had already turned it soulless. I've heard it certainly hasn't gotten better since.

twelve40• 4 years ago

I think that many great, world-changing, folks have a non-linear life path and may end up doing all kinds of things including working for evil corporations for money, or bussing tables at Denny's before they get to the actual great, world-changing stuff.

adamsb65• 4 years ago

If you want to work on interesting massive-scale infra problems there are few better places than Meta.

thrown_22• 4 years ago

From what I hear on the grapevine the people getting laid off today are the people who would have gone on wall street 20 years ago.

now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different

The culture in google isn't any better. Smart people who want to do things haven't gone there since 2012.

kadomony4• 4 years ago

I mean, the "world-changing" stuff they're investing in is what directly led to this layoff. The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.

amusedcyclist4• 4 years ago

There were some contradictory signals about this in the article. In one bit Mark says they are continuing to focus on the metaverse but he also says some people at Reality labs will be affected. But it sounds like the apps teams are going to be affected too

ct03• 4 years ago

Meta didnt just lay off metaverse related employees according to my source.

nottorp4• 4 years ago

What's that metaverse? Never been able to figure it out.

loeg5• 4 years ago

The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.

Where are you hearing that?

swalsh6• 4 years ago

Smart people can also change the world by working on climate change, improving healthcare costs, addressing the energy crisis, coming up with new ways to mass manufacturer consumer goods at reasonable prices without shipping things halfway around the world and back, help an increasingly aging population do basic stuff.... the metaverse (maybe crypto?) were just natural evolutions of existing business models, but these weren't the world changing things people need, so capitalism (the brutal nature is why it works) didn't reward it.

If these smart people spend their brain energy to address these needs, which the world actually needs, they'll find success again, and the world will be changed in the way it needs to be... and frankly that's the way capitalism is supposed to work. Changing the world is only rewarded when people want it.

bergenty2• 4 years ago

Not true. The AR/VR group is mostly unaffected.

DarkGroku2• 4 years ago

FB still making 4Billion in profit, all the comments here dont seem to talk about that Twitter wasnt profitable, FB is and laid off 4x the amount of employees, Zuck just saw Musk do it and thought itd be a perfect time while the attention is on Musk and Twitter, that letter Zuck wrote is sick and sounds like its written by a sad emotionless robot he brags about how profitable Meta is in that letter its pathetic, reminds me of the 70s and Reagan and neoliberalism making changes to laws to allow capital flight from New York to the south and firing all the well paid factory workers in the Bronx 10,000 families now without a breadwinner over night Zuck blew through billions on his VR research that no ones buying and just saw the perfect opening to sharpen his technocrat knives and surgically remove 11,000 employees even though they all contributed to making Meta be 4B in profit and it was Zuck who blew billions he needs his stock to bounce back so he can continue buying the rest of Hawaii

colinmhayes8• 4 years ago

I mean meta is a business, not a charity. They’re not going to employee people who aren’t furthering the mission.

keewee7• 4 years ago

Facebook has become the local town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere.

Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?

optymizer6• 4 years ago

They filled the town square, and growth is the primary metric, so they decided to announce a new and exciting area to grow in.

polio2• 4 years ago

They are indeed investing into groups, but ultimately the marginal gain there is marginal. The metaverse stuff also complements (i.e. it isn't a complete pivoting away from traditional social networking) all of the other connectivity (e.g. imagine a unique and persistent VRChat instance per group; you can have a meta-localverse) but also gives Meta its own platform. Mark is obviously incredibly pissed at the amount of leverage Apple has over him.

fullshark5• 4 years ago

Because FB missed owning the smartphone platform with their FB phone (apple + google), and so they want to own the next one in their opinion (VR-Oculus).

system28• 4 years ago

They do own WhatsApp though.

erikpukinskis3• 4 years ago

So was Yahoo Groups at one time.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

No they aren't. Because of [censored] algorithmic timeline you only see posts Facebook decided are relevant for you, and usually they aren't the ones you are most interested to see.

SkyPuncher• 4 years ago

The Localverse isn't defendable in anyway. People don't use Facebook pages/groups because it's "Facebook". They use it because it's adjacent to something else they do.

brailsafe2• 4 years ago

I think Reddit is probably the local town square, but it depends on your bubble.

Marketplace is there, Messenger, but I haven't used FB for anything else in years.

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail.

Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope that things will be fine for those laid off.

bioemerl5• 4 years ago

No way.

Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear.

They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan.

There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.

I think these layoffs are more an example of just how crazy short-term we are thinking in the world. Everyone thought coal was going to go away, remote work was the future, tech jobs were the future!

In reality we need more productivity, less labor demand, and for our smartest people to be out working on those problems, not on delivering people advertisements.

All of these lay off people may end up out more distributed in the country working no boring jobs that ultimately free up butts and seats so that those butts can go take other seats for they are more necessary and important and productive.

niij2• 4 years ago

There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.

TikTok is a Chinese company and is major competition for Facebook

grp2• 4 years ago

those (chinese) companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside
(...)the United States government will clamp down on them hard.

In the same sentence, nice one. :)

swalsh6• 4 years ago

" no one really _needs_ them"

Facebook? Sure, people can live without that. But Microsoft, Google, i'd argue even Amazon are integral parts of the economy. Trying building a modern business without the business software Microsoft maintains. Try doing work without Google. Amazon is a part of our modern shopping habits.

Do they need to be as big as they were? Probably some room to go down, but they're an essential part of the economy now.

yrgulation6• 4 years ago

Microsoft is not FAANG, at least not part of the acronym i was strictly referring to.

The world needs a search engine, but the moment a new, competent, one pops up all you need to do is switch a URL and you are done with google. All other services google provides are replaceable.

Amazon is a cool marketplace, infested by scams and low quality products, an alibaba of the west. It is an integral part of the economy by I manage to do just fine without it. AWS is a wake up call away from trending out of fashion.

nfRfqX5n3• 4 years ago

Very hn take. Nobody really needs Gmail or AWS? just look at what happens when AWS has an partial outage in a single region

mensetmanusman5• 4 years ago

Amazing what an iOS update did.

AnonHP• 4 years ago

Apart from that, I think the bigger ongoing folly here is this whole Metaverse thing.

mensetmanusman5• 4 years ago

I used to think that, but recently tried some AR glasses that filled my whole usable field of view with an editable PowerPoint slide with clear text… yeah, the tech seems like a big deal for this new digital world

lovecg2• 4 years ago

And yet Apple is not the one getting anti-trust scrutiny… funny how that works.

amelius2• 4 years ago

How many of them are severely disgruntled? Is my data safe?

buggythebug• 4 years ago

As a non-tech guy who follows the tech scene:

87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous.

These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same.

Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to "do good" after.

vxNsr• 4 years ago

it's not just facebook... they have oculus, insta, whatsapp, they were exploring mapping, and self driving cars at one point...

krn• 4 years ago

When you realize that WhatsApp had 450 million monthly active users and only 55 employees at the time of its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, you start to think that those tens of thousands of employees might be more needed for Meta's ad business.

sidcool2• 4 years ago

Facebook I believe does a lot of things, including their own infrastructure.

rjh292• 4 years ago

They managed with 7,000 in 2013. But a lot of things changed.

To continue to grow they needed to buy Facebook and Instagram. They scaled up their infrastructure - lots of system administrators. They needed more sales people and corporate campaign managers to get advertising in. More moderation, because governments started passing internet content laws. Spam detection. Customer support. Automated content blocking. More legal teams, because they are constantly under legal attack. Don't forget all these laws and what is acceptable or not changes by country - so they need a team in every country to handle that. Then there's VR, Meta AI, the 'Metaverse', and their whole R&D division.

danielunited• 4 years ago

As far as I’m aware most of the people who’ve lost their jobs were headhunters. Makes sense to let them go now that FB stopped hiring.

adamsb65• 4 years ago

I left Facebook in March after having worked there for seven years.

It was always a struggle to hire enough engineers to accomplish my team's goals, and it only got worse as time went on. We didn't have a terrible on-call or terrible team morale, we just tended to lose out to teams working on more visible projects. We could have doubled our headcount and still had a backlog of impactful work we couldn't get to.

dbrgn2• 4 years ago

If 11k employees are 13% of the workforce, then Meta employed roughly 85k people.

Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long?

Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That's quite something.

propogandist• 4 years ago

Facebook folks usually make 6 figures, and most have a large portion of comp in stock based comp. The number is much larger.

dbrgn2• 4 years ago

I assumed that not every Facebook employee is a senior software engineer in California, but that they must have a lot of lower wage employees in non-tech jobs on other continents as well (e.g. for content moderation).

washywashy3• 4 years ago

Genuinely curious why Meta (other big companies) hired so much during the pandemic? Did one companies make a strategic business decision to hire more based on project needs, and other companies followed on in a copy cat way? I guess maybe meta was thinking “VR will take off during pandemic and folks won’t be able to put the goggles back down ever”. I could see some companies copying it just to hedge against other companies over-recruiting and snatching some of their employees. Seems almost like a similar copy cat effort is happening now, unless they are all just admitting they over-hired.

intrasight• 4 years ago

Lots of over-hiring. It was a competition for scarce talent with a thinking that talented head count is a prime metric. I think it is, but it only works if that talent is contributing to the bottom line.

Poor HR management plays a big role too. I believe that capitalism requires ongoing "culling of the herd" - like 5% every year. This happens in many other businesses. Perhaps tech will now follow suit.

clolege• 4 years ago

Google's grown its workforce by about 15% every year. Which adds up to a lot of people nowadays.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...

yalogin3• 4 years ago

All these companies and guys just began feeling very rich and wanted to corner the market by hiring more. This is the reason every company hired more and more people. Mark was probably very bullish on VR given covid and remote work taking off. Musk felt similarly rich and bought Twitter.

game_the0ry• 4 years ago

When these big tech layoffs happen, I always wonder what proportion of those laid off are software engineers. I would not be surprised if that figure is small.

jcpst• 4 years ago

“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.”

It’s not over yet.

taylorius• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if 11,000 employees is 13% of Meta's workforce, that implies they employ close to 100,000 people? Excuse me while I involuntarily spit my coffee over my keyboard.

sagebird6• 4 years ago

Even though laid-off employees will lose access to Meta internal systems today, they are welcome to utilize Facebook services to stay connected to former colleagues, friends, and family members around the world. After all, it is Facebook’s mission to create a more connected world - and that will never change.

sagebird6• 4 years ago

I just want to reassure everyone that while some things are changing, Facebook’s commitment to creating a more connected world is not going away. If anything, these changes will help Facebook reach that goal more effectively- and that’s something we can all be proud of. After all, as we continue to develop new features and products to better connect people from around the world, there are always going to be challenges but if we can stay more connected we will be able to handle them in a very connected way, I believe.

thrillgore• 4 years ago

"I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here."

...but I'm going to stay and keep all the cards on the Metaverse as my personal fortune sinks with it. For 11% of you, good luck.

jerpint• 4 years ago

Have all departments been equally impacted? I am curious if machine learning engineers have also been laid off

whatever12• 4 years ago

TikTok is on a hiring spree in the US. They will get a ton of talent in great discount

sagebird6• 4 years ago

While many are commenting that these layoffs are sensible given the situation, I am fearful that laying off approximately 13% of Meta employees will lead to a less connected world. I don’t think people fully understand the magnitude of step-backwards it will be in terms of people connecting in this world. Does Zuckerberg take responsibility for what this will mean to people who simply need to connect more through great products developed by Facebook and future technologies being developed by Meta?

sagebird6• 4 years ago

To the people downvoting my post- would you care to explain what possible alternatives could exist that would fulfill Facebook’s mission - “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”?

I sense a deeply cynical and dismissive tone from many commenters and I sincerely wonder how many of you have given any honest thought to Facebook’s mission- or the many great products and features that support that mission. Given the importance of the mission, I find it hard to believe that cutting the workforce by 13% will have anything but dire consequences . Akin to the Middle Ages, or AI winter, humans will almost certainly suffer from being less connected. But what I haven’t heard is calls governments or ngos stepping in to provide funding to lighten the shockwaves of this disruption to connectivity. Surely, this must be considered. When comparing Meta’s mission to that of- say- automakers, or financial lending institutions- isn’t it clear that creating a more connected world should take priority?

britch2• 4 years ago

What is your concern here? What does "a more connected world" actually mean?

sagebird6• 4 years ago

Do you think that Meta could be worth 273 billion, and yet promulgate a false, inaccurate or misleading mission statement? Perhaps, but it would not seem like it would instill much confidence in the company leadership.

FartyMcFarter5• 4 years ago

If this was sarcasm, well done :)

sagebird6• 4 years ago

I wouldn’t dare ;)

osuairt• 4 years ago

Facebook is cancer.

synergy20• 4 years ago

In 2000, some Hi Tech companies laid off 50%, e.g. Motorola, Meta now has 1 out of 8 laid off, seems a lot, might not be enough in the end though.

CamelRocketFish2• 4 years ago

Could the title match the post tile to follow the hackernews guidelines?

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

The world runs on certain types of software. I doesn't run on social media, or video streaming, or "AI/ML", or search. So it doesn't actually run on FAANG companies. It is no surprise they are shedding workers when the free money runs out. But if you are willing to work on "boring software" that provides actual economic value - logistics, HR/Payroll, or really anything people actually pay to use because it boosts their productivity - I wouldn't worry too much.

This was true during the .com bust, 2008 dip, and it will be true now.

Reason0772• 4 years ago

Sure, FAANG may make a lot of frivolous stuff (Metaverse, anyone?) but also a lot of boring software that the world really does run on now days. Google especially.

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

Sure - as does amazon and apple - I doubt you'll see layoffs in those specific departments at those companies. I suppose I shouldn't have said FAANG as most of them have some core business that makes sense, Meta being the exception.

TremendousJudge• 4 years ago

Maybe not in the US, but WhatsApp is pretty important messaging infrastructure in big chunks of the world

idk1• 4 years ago

I would certainly make a case the the world runs on the two As and the G of FAANG. The world runs a fair amount on Amazon deliveries and aws. The world runs a fair amount on gmail and google searches. And the world runs on a fair amount of Apple products.

yalogin3• 4 years ago

I don’t agree at all. These companies are all super important and provide valuable services. If they vanish suddenly tomorrow that hole will be felt by every single human one way or the other. You are going back to 1970s for your comparison but that is not where we are

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

I'll grant you that for the AAG part of FAANG, but I can't think of a single useful product from FB. If FB itself vanished overnight people would just go back to sharing their cat pictures with family over sms (as they are doing anyway), and all the dusty unused Occulus headsets in drawers would stop receiving updates. Otherwise....

parthdesai• 4 years ago

So it doesn't actually run on FAANG companies

Disagree, a lot of businesses do use GSuite and also a lot of people in the world do definitely use youtube/gmail/gmaps. Samething with apple, people will still use iPhones and a lot of people in the first world at least will still use macs. Only companies your comments apply to are Facebook and Netflix, and even then Whatsapp is basically an essential app to have if you're not form North America

Maro• 4 years ago

Facebook (and Google Search) are the most widely used software on Earth, ~3-4B MAUs each. I don't know what else something needs to do to qualify for "world runs on [it]".

newsclues2• 4 years ago

There is a big difference between something that is highly used, and something that is highly valuable.

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

There's way, way more software that exists. All that boring enterprise Java and Spring stuff HN loves to ridicule represents the dark matter of the software engineering universe. There's tons of money in it and armies of developers working away without the praise or adulation of their Bay Area betters, but they're making good money and putting food on the table.

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

What are those 3B people doing? Spreading conspiracy theories, looking at cat pics, and searching for porn. Whenever someone is on FB or google they are less productive, not more. Sure, a small fraction of those people are using FB or google for "work", but their work is usually just finding ways to get more people to waste more time on google or FB, or some other nonproductive activity people get paid for.

marcinzm• 4 years ago

It is no surprise they are shedding workers when the free money runs out.

Free money hasn't run out, it's simply stopped growing as quickly. Then again it grew massively during COVID so FAANG is still ahead of where they'd have been if not for COVID. Meta revenue is DOUBLE what it was 3 years ago.

DebtDeflation• 4 years ago

It absolutely has. 8 months ago the Fed Funds rate was effectively 0% and now it's 4% and headed higher. That may not mean anything to you, but it means everything to VCs, banks, investors, and the market overall.

triceratops4• 4 years ago

The world doesn't run on "AI/ML" or search? You must inhabit a different world than me. Do you run to the library every time you can't find some information?

datalopers• 4 years ago

An inverted index is not AI/ML.

jacobsenscott6• 4 years ago

Of course not, but 99.999% of all searches are frivolous.

pavlov3• 4 years ago

Nobody watches digital video or searches for stuff online, so you should focus on payroll software? Is this career advice from a 1992 time warp?

yeahwhatever10• 4 years ago

OP is sour-grapes, saying the world doesn't run on search is an unbelievable statement in 2022.

echelon• 4 years ago

The world runs on certain types of software. I doesn't run on social media, or video streaming, or "AI/ML", or search. So it doesn't actually run on FAANG companies.

To the extent that the world runs on energy and industrials, you're right.

To the extent that tech soaks up human attention, directs spending and emotions, and now serves as the basis for communication and once manual mental tasks, I think you're wrong.

We're seeing that this is cyclical and that access to cheap debt has perturbed the sentiment.

efficax• 4 years ago

tens of thousands if not millions of small, single proprietor or only slightly larger businesses are run entirely through facebook. it's the only way to learn about them, their hours, or contact them, and often the only way to buy things from them online.

dcchambers2• 4 years ago

I would argue search is highly valuable.

Also I expect video streaming (of some format, whether it's "traditional living room content" like Netflix/Disney or mobile-first like Youtube or TikTok) to maintain its entertainment dominance during a recession. People like their cheap escapes from the real world. It's been shown time and again that during recessions cheap entertainment like cinema (or these days, video streaming) doesn't die off.

badpun• 4 years ago

provides actual economic value
HR

ryanbrunner3• 4 years ago

Plenty of businesses have Facebook or another Facebook property (i.e. IG) as one of or the only way to get in touch with them. Plenty of individuals use Whatsapp or Facebook as their primary contact database and messaging platform.

The "post news articles on a feed" is probably not essential to too many people, but the messaging and communication features are in a lot of cases.

samhuk• 4 years ago

I would say that any software that has 4 billion MAU quite reasonably can be classified as "the world runs on it"-tier software.

If I had to guess, what I think you're doing is you're letting your opinion about the morality of FAANG-like software (ads, tracking, mal-influencing, etc.) be a judge on it's utility.

FAANG-like software is like fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, like much of FAANG-software, have many immoral aspects, yet they have utility to the point of "the world runs on it".

Google, DDG etc. connected the internet. Facebook, twitter etc. connected people on the internet. I'de say that's something of a big deal.

type-r3• 4 years ago

I mean, almost all of software does run on AWS / Google Cloud.

hbn3• 4 years ago

Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.

I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.

Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.

roflyear10• 4 years ago

FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people.

Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.

Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!

Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.

8b16380d• 4 years ago

Completely agree.

abstractmath6• 4 years ago

Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point

This is super idealized. How many layoffs have been going on in startup land recently?

martindbp2• 4 years ago

They are laying off people because the value of the company just tanked 70% in a few months. The value of a company contains all the future estimated discounted earnings, the trend of earnings matters more than current earnings. The actions of a company is determined by what its shareholders want, which is to maximize stock price, not be satisfied with X billions in profits when the stock is down 70%. The actions of companies will remain a mystery to people who do not understand this.

jbverschoor• 4 years ago

Small companies don't pay over 200k + perks for someone who just graduated

xyzzyz• 4 years ago

They lay people off, because companies always want to lay some people off, and doing so in normal times is even less palatable. Employees are not fungible, and some employees are worth to companies less than the company wants.

This is not to say that every single person being laid off is of low value, that’s not true. It’s just it is hard to lay off only low performers, some average or even good performer will always be collateral damage. But, overall, if you want well-performing companies to not do mass layoffs on recession, the only way is to make it more palatable to people to see mass firings in good times.

rajman1873• 4 years ago

FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people.

The quarterly revenue was about $27bn but net profit $4bn, so you're off by a factor of 7 or more on the estimate. R&D expenses alone are $9bn, and the largest operational expense is employee comp, by a LOT, distant second being data centers. For added measure, they also reduced real estate footprint along with the 11k employees.

The company has also essentially doubled in size every year since ~2013, and that was certainly encouraged by false positives in terms of future projections when the pandemic hit. So this is really not surprising, and a major cost-saving function for them.

gregshap• 4 years ago

In the last four quarters FB's reported profit went from $10B to $7.5B to $6B to $4B. The business is threatened.

martius• 4 years ago

I read this as "we expected to stay at the levels we were at at the beginning of 2022, but instead things went back (down) to the levels of 2019".

hbn3• 4 years ago

They specifically said "acceleration" though, not velocity

Meaning they expected to continue picking up speed, not maintain their speed

sabellito• 4 years ago

but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.

Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.

enumjorge• 4 years ago

Isn’t part of shorting also predicting when the drop will happen?

mattnewton3• 4 years ago

He's also probably not an accredited investor, selling a stock short in any significant volume is not like making a retail purchase. It can be quite hard to make money off knowing a stock will crash, and that's not even accounting for needing to know _when_ precisely since most of the ways involve short dated options. I gave up after investigating ways to bet on interest rate hikes and market corrections, and just went cash heavy at the end of 2021. That doesn't make you a billionaire it makes you just not lose principle.

twoWhlsGud• 4 years ago

the economist John Maynard Keynes notably said, “the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

A good thing to remember when you're tempted to sell short.

MagicMoonlight• 4 years ago

I don't know how you think investing works, but you can't become a billionaire unless you are already a 900 millionaire

dolmen3• 4 years ago

Many thought that commerce was switching to online.

But in fact stores reopened and people went back to massively buy at stores instead of offline. Parenthesis is closed.

fullshark5• 4 years ago

That is the premise behind the metaverse, more and more activity going online.

glassjawjon• 4 years ago

Is anyone else thinking this is very similar to Stripe CEO layoff letter(1)? Sure all lay-off letters have some similarity but I’m pretty sure any automated plagiarism detection system would flag this.

1: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...

Reason0772• 4 years ago

Z̶u̶c̶k̶ Zorg fires 1 million: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg

DarkGroku2• 4 years ago

hbn3• 4 years ago

All these layoffs seem to follow the same format of "we're sad to have to let you all go even though business is booming and we're pulling in more money than ever!"

I assume it's for the shareholders. A plain "we're laying people off" letter without the asterisk of how good they're doing is just asking for people to cash out.

cnees• 4 years ago

"We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas [like] our long-term vision for the metaverse"

Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.

romanovcode2• 4 years ago

I wonder if no-one from higher-ups in Meta tell Zuckerberg that it is not going to happen and explain to him what sunk cost fallacy is.

warinukraine• 4 years ago

Anyone who says that to him will get fired, and that makes sense: In his mind, if you don't believe the vision that he's going all in in, then you're just detracting.

fullshark5• 4 years ago

Maybe Sandberg did, and he disagreed and now she's gone with a bunch of stuff leaked to try and embarrass her.

jakeinspace3• 4 years ago

I’d feel pretty embarrassed right now to be working in VR at meta while seeing coworkers getting laid off.

_boffin_2• 4 years ago

Why? If I were working there and on that tech, I’d stay. It’s a cool project and I like working on cool projects while being able to live a comfortable life.

What are you working on that’s more fascinating than VR?

Loughla• 4 years ago

Honestly, it is amusing to see him put so much effort into 2nd life II , but:

How can you call it a disintegrating corpse when it's been in the public eye for what, a few months? I don't get it.

_dan• 4 years ago

It is in fact the opposite of disintegrating - they only just got legs!

marktangotango2• 4 years ago

Watch the Joe Rogan interview with Zuckerburg. There's a moment in there where Rogan gives Zuckerberg a reality check on it, it's hilarious.

contravariant• 4 years ago

Why does it matter how long the casket's been open? If it's dead it's dead.

vorpalhex• 4 years ago

Their MAUs have been declining consistently.

ouid4• 4 years ago

third life

belval2• 4 years ago

I have this (maybe wrong) opinion that Meta can't be the one to bring an actual VR/Metaverse project because they are too "on the radar" of medias. Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass. You can't successfully build a metaverse without accepting the kind of weird deviant stuff that goes on in VRChat and Meta can't accept the weird deviant stuff because they will immediately get called out for it.

So you get "Horizon" and its assortment of low-quality games that feel more like a tech demo than an actual world that you could lose yourself in.

Kye3• 4 years ago

I guarantee it's going to be some furry working on VRChat stuff who finds its policies or technology too limiting and sets off to do something better. It's already sort of happened. I don't know that Frooxius started NeosVR for that reason, but it came after VRChat and is one of the major competitors.

shuckles• 4 years ago

iPhone was speculated about as an Apple product for years by the media before it came out. Newsweek even did a cover story about it.

Also, the initial launch of iPhone didn’t support apps or Flash (i.e. no porno videos on the web!), and the App Store has never supported deviant communities. Apple’s policies probably precipitated Tumblr’s no nudity moderation.

jfdbcv4• 4 years ago

Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass.

What examples are you thinking of? Did this happen with the PC or smartphone?

Eupraxias• 4 years ago

Agreed - kind of like how Friendster and MySpace paved the path for the little startup called Facebook?

i_have_an_idea• 4 years ago

Well, they missed the boat being a platform on mobile or desktop. So, now they have Apple/Google dictating terms to them.

They are really desperate to own the next big thing. Whether that'll be VR, who knows.

bombcar22• 4 years ago

They've lost $10b on the metaverse so far; you'd think you could design a phone at least SOMEWHAT decent for that price, and at least get a TINY foothold back into the market.

jesuscript• 4 years ago

This was Zuck’s biggest mistake. The money spent on Metaverse would have been better spent just making a Facebook phone.

stiltzkin• 4 years ago

HN and Reddit always get it wrong about the future, the Metaverse is still an on-going under development ecosystem and Facebook bad image gives it a negative perspective.

klenwell• 4 years ago

I detest the Meta metaverse as much as the next Hacker News user. But there is one use case where I could see it luring me in. Virtual meetings. Really virtual social events or happy hours. Professional ones mainly with my remote distributed team. This would be the killer app in my view.

The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!

Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?

sergiotapia• 4 years ago

It takes balls to do what The Zuck is doing. Facebook is stagnant and dying. It's being chipped away by Tiktok and neutered by Apple's monopoly.

He could ride the facebook ship into the sunset and have it die 20 years from now.

But no, he's betting big and going for broke. I hope he succeeds just for the sheer stones he's displaying. Really inspiring to see a man aim so high.

hashtag-til2• 4 years ago

I'm sure there are lots of competent people putting a lot of effort in "Metaverse", but to me it looks really just yet another VR world. Does anyone know what is the concrete new thing it would make successful?

LongShip87• 4 years ago

I recently left my well paying job in a startup to pursue my hobbies for a few months. Now I am looking for a job again. I wonder how will I find a job with so many Meta and Twitter engineers flooding the market :/

PS: I have only worked with startups including a YC startup.

om42• 4 years ago

We're hiring! Reach out to me via email, it's in my profile.

SeriousM• 4 years ago

Mark's statement has a fineprint at the end about future uncertainty and "forward-looking" statements. I guess that's the new way to state your point and at the same time change the meaning of it in the fineprint.

ericpauley• 4 years ago

This is very standard (and legally necessary) boilerplate in any public statement.

Exuma• 4 years ago

Sweet baby rays

redleggedfrog• 4 years ago

Alright people the talent pool just got more fish. Go get 'em!

rejor121• 4 years ago

A lot of people are spouting doom and gloom for the entire industry, but I feel like Facebook had this coming. Especially since they lost billions in Meta.

It seems to me that there are a lot of software jobs out there, and companies can’t seem to find enough people. But that said, I’m sure the story is probably different in Silicon Valley

temp0826• 4 years ago

Yeesh. Was planning on returning to tech work after a couple year hiatus in a couple months. Between this and twitter there may be some competition (:

clavalle2• 4 years ago

Perhaps. And perhaps some will go and create their own companies and create more demand.

MasterYoda• 4 years ago

87000 people is working at meta just now. What are all those people doing? Why is so many needed? How many are developer, manager, marketers, seller, anti spam/desinformation stuff etc etc?

sh4rks• 4 years ago

87,000 people and they still can't fix the bugs in the Instagram android app

clavalle2• 4 years ago

Considering the severance, Meta might have just realeased the biggest pre-seed funded class ever.

vthallam• 4 years ago

I work here and wasn't affected. But that's how I saw the severance. Anyone who doesn't have visa issues could literally pursue their ideas for the next 6 months.

throwaw202211074• 4 years ago

6 months

more like 6 years, unless you're a new grad with no savings, or unless you somehow managed to burn through your 200K/yr salary every year. Probably decades if you migrate to an LCOL.

Edit: oh, you meant 6 months on the severance alone. Yep

achow• 4 years ago

We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.

Conviction for Metaverse is unwavering. Hope some good comes out of it in future.

beej71• 4 years ago

"Desk sharing"... I wonder with the cost-cutting appeal of smaller real estate footprints and remote work if the huge campus era is actually drawing to a close.

debug-desperado• 4 years ago

Maybe it is. They're definitely reducing footprint for satellite offices: https://www.statesman.com/story/business/real-estate/2022/11...

Ozzie_osman• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, the stock is up 8% today. Because maybe this shows Mark isn't as crazy as investors thought.

wollsmoth3• 4 years ago

Well he apparently kept all the ones working on second life VR. It's a gamble.

dolmen3• 4 years ago

We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.

E-mail address still working for the day? Is this the standard way to layoff employees in the US?

dpkirchner• 4 years ago

I wonder if they've limited outgoing emails so they may only be sent to internal users.

nelsonic• 4 years ago

Facebook ("Meta") made $46.7 Billion in Profit in 2021. They have $42 Billion in cash. If the average engineer is paid $150k then these 11k people would cost the company 150,000 x 11,000 = 1,650,000,000 ($1.6 Billion/year) Mark Zuckerberg could _easily_ afford to keep these people employed and focus their efforts towards improving the safety of the platform e.g: stopping Human Trafficking, Drug Dealing and Child Abuse all documented extensively in the Facebook Papers. They are failing to protect the most vulnerable people in society while sitting on a _mountain_ of cash. Shame on you Mark.

AnonC2• 4 years ago

If Mark Zuckerberg had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be around with Meta and all the companies it owns/runs. But he has good company among many other CEOs who’d rather cut the workforce and earn more bonuses for themselves.

jrochkind1• 4 years ago

When doing "how much staff costs" calculations, you typically have to add on ~30-50% on top of salary for employer's share of taxes, and benefits (health insurance in USA is very non-trivial), and other assorted overhead.

But your point stands.

pb73• 4 years ago

If the average engineer is paid $150k

Haha.

It’s more like twice this, with another ~50% in overhead costs like healthcare, payroll taxes, real estate, etc.

rbanffy5• 4 years ago

They have employees outside Silicon Valley

Sakos3• 4 years ago

I'm not really sure what the point of the layoffs here are. Are they realizing that they had no idea how to effectively put 11.000 people to work? What are they trying to achieve?

pm908• 4 years ago

Its been mentioned in other places but to summarize:

* this is a cost cutting measure and not primarily driven by the need to cull "low performing" employees.

* point of the company is not to guarantee employment or even keep the lights on; its to maximize the stock price (at least according to the prevailing worldview, which I disagree with). Investors use the stock price as a proxy for their belief in a company's future. If the stock price is high, company invests and expands, if its low, it contracts until the investors/markets believe it can generate value.

* layoffs scare the employees that remain into working harder. The sad truth is that unless you're really exceptional, this doesn't really matter. But they will likely see a productivity boost for a little while. Again, this is pretty short term.

nathan_gold• 4 years ago

Why is this identical to Stripe’s layoff letter https://stripe.com/en-ca/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...?

bizzodes• 4 years ago

Imagine complying with the covid vaccine mandates against what you otherwise would have done, and then you get laid off anyway. What a gut punch.

raxits• 4 years ago

Best is to know finance/unit economy/burn etc of your employer in good as well as bad times!

AnonC2• 4 years ago

Seriously, what exactly does “I take responsibility for this” mean? Is Mark Zuckerberg going to resign as CEO or step down from the board or go with no pay for a year or two (including bonuses)? He says he’s accountable, but how exactly does this move hit him hard (except for a punch to his ego)?

If there are no consequences of significance for him, what’s the meaning of those words? What do the people who aren’t laid off to trust anymore?

rybosworld• 4 years ago

It's wild to me that a CEO can simultaneously take responsibility for the decision to over hire, and also suffer none of the financial consequences. In fact, META stock is up 7% on this news, so Zuck has made money on this decision.

I think that's a major inefficiency in modern corporations. Executives are the last to face consequences when they make a bad decision.

bsaul• 4 years ago

if you think stock up means zuck made money for this (good) decision, then you've got to admit stock being down 50% during the last year was zuck loosing money based on his previous (bad) decisions..

Invictus0• 4 years ago

Zucc's net worth is down more than $100B? Should he lose an arm too?

djkivi• 4 years ago

Over 1000 points and 900 comments in 4 hours and not #1 on the front page?

hinkley• 4 years ago

I totally would have been part of this layoff if I’d responded to any of the many, many FB recruiters who have contacted me in the last 18 months.

Why didn’t I reply? Several reasons, but importantly because if you can’t say anything nice sometimes it’s best not to say anything at all.

pm908• 4 years ago

I explicitly asked them to put me on a blacklist because there's no way in hell I'm working for Facebook. They may not be directly culpable, but they allowed their platform to be used in ways to subvert democratic norms and institutions (West), promote and coordinate Genocide (Muslims in India and Myanmar) etc.

I honestly consider it better to work for Raytheon; at least the weapons they make are regulated and subject to stronger scrutiny.

simsla• 4 years ago

Same feeling.

I initially passed on the offer because I couldn't work remotely from my country of choice. They later contacted me when that'd changed, but I'd found another job by then that I was happy with. (Plus, the whole "do I want to work for them?" thing.)

Probably would've been let go, because less tenure + nonstandard working arrangement + mass firings is not a good combo.

fredgrott• 4 years ago

I have a question...

If we assume that during the last 20 to 30 years that there has been no gain in actual real production efficiency increases(real reason for inequality is non-investments in actual production efficiencies by VCs and hedge funds); where is the call to re-align in VCs and hedge funds to investing in production efficiencies directly (I say directly as investing in climate green energy is an indirect production efficiency play)?

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

What is the composition of roles that are getting fired? I naturally tend to think about programmers but Meta (and the other big tech companies that have had big firings) have roles all over the place

Are they mostly getting rid of programmers?

pm908• 4 years ago

Anecdotally from Blind its mostly recruiters and business ops, but engineers as well (but not exclusively). Distribution is not yet known.

Joel_Mckay• 4 years ago

I think 11000 people are going to find a brighter future at a nicer company.

Does anyone under 40 still use Facebook/Meta anymore?

jfdbcv4• 4 years ago

Ya, Instagram is quite popular among the younger generation, actually!

zffr• 4 years ago

I view layoffs as a last resort, so we decided to rein in other sources of cost before letting teammates go.

So spending a few billion less on the metaverse was not an option?

system28• 4 years ago

Not a fan of Zucc but he is trying something. What else would you do to Facebook to save it from TikTok's takeover?

system28• 4 years ago

So from the looks of it, the investors see this as a good move. In 5 days Meta stock went up nearly 20% from $82 to $105.

Dramatic news but company holds stronger than last week.

wickedsickeune2• 4 years ago

For those wondering what "accountability" and "responsibility" should look like:

They do not need to mean punishment, they can just mean "clear, concrete intent for remediation and improvement".

The remediation part is implemented by the severance package. The intent for improvement, is nowhere to be seen.

When somebody makes a mistake, punishing on its own is meaningless. The point is to remedy the mistake (eg pay money if the mistake incurred a financial loss) and prevent further future mistakes. No, the CEO should not resign, they should just identify why things went SO wrong and show a clear plan on how to prevent such mistakes from the future.

If someone deletes a database, I don't expect them to resign, I expect them to restore it from a backup, and find a way to prevent such mistakes from the future (eg run migrations in a reversible transaction)

ergocoder2• 4 years ago

They did. It is the over hiring, and they rectify it by laying off people and going into hiring freeze.

obert4• 4 years ago

The timing of the layoff, right before the holiday season, is especially harsh...

sumitgt• 4 years ago

On the day after the US election as well. Great way to avoid making the headlines.

obert4• 4 years ago

The fact that the company is still investing in the development of the metaverse, while letting go of thousands of employees, may not sit well with some... this could be just "I was wrong, part 1"

stillametamate3• 4 years ago

Zuck made it very clear in the last earnings call that he's committed to the metaverse. The stock price is up a lot of the layoffs, but I don't think it's sunk in that that they cut elsewhere.

maerF0x05• 4 years ago

> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

He's not taking responsibility.

Taking responsibility would look like him saying "And I'm going to personally give 1% of my shares to those who are leaving spread equally". Responsibility means being willing to sacrifice something personal to make it right (or less wrong).

Zuck owns 13.6% of 2.687B shares, at a $104 a piece that 1% share would be about $30k per exiting employee. And basically no skin off his back.

That's true responsibility and ownership.

ergocoder2• 4 years ago

Isn't it included in the severance packages?

Just curious. Or you want the severance package to be 30k more?

maerF0x05• 4 years ago

Severance is a distributed load that all shareholders + employees bear. Taking personal responsibility means personal action to resolve. Not making a decision to use the resources of others for one's own guilt. (at least this is my own ethical framework)

nell• 4 years ago

He was worth $130B. Now, $34B. Hasn't sold any significant piece of it while he knew there are risks with changing the direction of the company. That should count for something.

cortesoft• 4 years ago

Isn't the plummeting stock price him taking responsibility and ownership? He has lost way more from that than 1% of his stock ownership.

obert4• 4 years ago

Like with all lay offs, the move to cut discretionary spending and perks may also impact employee morale and motivation, and the decision to extend the hiring freeze may also limit potential growth within the company... it's going to get worse before getting better

stillametamate3• 4 years ago

Absolutely. The Meta campus is sad right now. Philz closed. The woodshop closed. Some of the perks from before the pandemic are gone. People are getting paid a lot less. Unless you actually believe in building the metaverse or can't find something comparable that's not sinking, there just isn't much reason to stay.

obert4• 4 years ago

laying off 11k employees while still claiming to be "historically important" and "profitable"... Poor attempt to stay positive IMO

Simon_O_Rourke• 4 years ago

I know a couple of my European friends were bitterly disappointed to be kept on, over there you get a nice little exit package mandated in law.

sytelus7• 4 years ago

Meta is burning $10B/yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E stack development will cost about half. Developing entire smartphone hardware and OS from scratch would cost about a third of that money. Moon worthy space rocket development will cost a tenth of this budget. One can do so much with $10B that it is absolutely mind blowing.

throwty345df• 4 years ago

I watched a presentation in which it was explained that they got Microsoft to create a version of Office for their metaverse and other companies to do similar things. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is not doing this for free, so generally speaking I think their expenses include all the spending related to this kind of partnerships, which can add up to quite a lot when you have a whole ecosystem to build. This is not just software and hardware engineering. With this in mind, the $10bn figure looks much more reasonable and even disciplined for the goal pursued. Whether or not this goal is the right one is another question. I personally think Meta is misguided here and this aventure will fail miserably.

skizm• 4 years ago

This is completely incorrect. They took on ~$10B in debt recently for stock buybacks when debt was cheap. They make around $28B in profit after metaverse spending and have $40B cash on hand.

sytelus7• 4 years ago

Corrected. It still doesn’t make any sense to take on debt (which no longer is cheap) to do stock buybacks.

mike006322• 4 years ago

I have very similar thoughts, especially when I compare the Metaverse spots to the products that video game companies make for way less money that are comparably much better. I guess video game companies have a reputation for over-working and under-paying their employees though.

jollyllama4• 4 years ago

It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of what % of Meta employees are remote, what % are not, and what % of each are laid off.

alasdair_3• 4 years ago

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.

The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.

If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.

sytelus7• 4 years ago

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.

ASalazarMX• 4 years ago

Maybe it got to his head, like child movie stars that never enjoyed a normal childhood? Being a hacker is no guarantee of being a well adapted adult, specially if your hobby transforms into an international behemoth in just 15 years.

colordrops4• 4 years ago

NSA is also probably a great place for hackers, but their mission is trash. Someone once drew a 2x2 grid for me. One dimension was competence, and the other was right mission. I was then asked what is the most dangerous square on the grid. The answer is competent with the wrong mission.

goodpoint5• 4 years ago

he was unapologetically a hacker

Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.

dantyti• 4 years ago

I get your point, but is that really such a great thing when it comes to business ethics? e.g., spying on people and hacking their private communications just to get ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...

the-anarchist• 4 years ago

That is how cabals work.

kenhwang• 4 years ago

I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies.

Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.

iepathos4• 4 years ago

"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.

guhcampos• 4 years ago

I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are.

From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good.

I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

If it were just about the money

Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.

dunkmaster• 4 years ago

Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is about money in the linked article:

"Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "

artificial4• 4 years ago

They hired 42,000 during COVID. Lots of companies did the same, Twitter added 3500, the largest since they started.

adam_arthur3• 4 years ago

It’s easy to be generous when times are good and your equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals

AbrahamParangi• 4 years ago

And yet, many are still not generous when times are good.

phonebucket2• 4 years ago

equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals

Which fundamentals?

The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]?

The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio

princevegeta89• 4 years ago

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

asdfman1232• 4 years ago

People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it.

He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.

callmeal• 4 years ago

Company over Country right?

ipaddr• 4 years ago

Blame Sheryl Sandberg for many of the unethical decisions

forgotusername6• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Hank Scorpio

kraf2• 4 years ago

You can't be serious. I think it's rare for a company to treat developers poorly but that's beside the point.

Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.

This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.

racl101• 4 years ago

That's good to hear about Mark as opposed to just the bad stuff.

donretag• 4 years ago

I worked at Ticketmaster when covid first hit. Since the beginning, management has always been positive and re-iterating that the cash reserves are substantial and the company can endure the loss of revenue. Then the first layoff hit. Same re-iteration. We are good. Then came the second layoff.

lupire4• 4 years ago

The company is fine. The employees are not.

Anyway, you don't join Ticketmaster for anything approaching morality. Snakes eat snakes.

lazyasciiart3• 4 years ago

Salesforce announced their largest profits ever the same week they announced their first layoffs ever, I believe. The company, as they said, was in great shape.

cachvico• 4 years ago

Curious - what's the vibe like at Ticketmaster when ticket fees comes up?

tomcam2• 4 years ago

Not normally a fan of the man, so this is very nice to hear.

dbg31415• 4 years ago

Hold up. You know they got money from the government not to lay people off, right?

syntaxing• 4 years ago

As in a PPP loan? I haven’t found this in public record, any source I can reference?

j0ba• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure he didn't lose a single one of his billions paying them, but good on him anyways. He definitely didn't have to do it.

paxys3• 4 years ago

I agree with your overall point, that Facebook employees have been very well taken care of, but:

There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.

Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.

CobrastanJorji• 4 years ago

When your CEO's most famous quote is "They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks," you shouldn't be surprised what happens when you trust him.

carstenhag• 4 years ago

The beginning of covid is 2.5 years ago. I don't see how you can today say that he lied.

cletus• 4 years ago

Ex-Facebooker here too, also during that time.

Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.

But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:

1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);

2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.

This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.

But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.

But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).

So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.

ummonk3• 4 years ago

I feel like if we do see VR going mainstream it’ll be something like the background screens used in filming the Mandalorian. Big wall displays / projections that adjust what they’re displaying based on viewer location. All the viewer would need to wear is 3d theater glasses.

nomel6• 4 years ago

If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty)

Could you expand on this? It's seems absolutely certain, with products like nreal Air existing: https://www.nreal.ai/air

What unsolved hurdle do you see? Heck, there were even prototypes of laser retinal projection at CES!

foobazgt• 4 years ago

Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).

I've said this same thing a thousand times. It's not lack of content or use-cases killing AR - the tech just isn't there yet. Form factor is one of the very pressing issues. It seems inevitable that the tech will get solved, but it's not clear whether it's a couple years or a couple decades.

jimmySixDOF• 4 years ago

But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't.

Less true today than yesterday. Less true tomorrow than today. Rinse. Repeat.

appleflaxen• 4 years ago

Zuck has no vision for the company

Exactly this.

musicale• 4 years ago

I may dislike Facebook, but this is great! Kudos to Zuck for doing the right thing for his employees.

fatnoah• 4 years ago

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit

Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.

antipaul2• 4 years ago

My Facebook interview process was not only more professional, objective, and relevant than any other, it was also actually enjoyable, as I said elsewhere.

I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.

tomerbd• 4 years ago

amazing and imagine if this was not just a common cold

posedge• 4 years ago

I'm surprised by this direct and candid tone.

alasdair_3• 4 years ago

It's amazing how similar this whole thing is to Stripe's layoff letter, down to the exact ordering of severance, PTO, RSU, career services, immigration details and the thing about everyone losing access immediately due to sensitive information but also keeping email access for 24 hours and the bit about recruiting being most affected. It's almost a verbatim copy.

jaywalk• 4 years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. It's quite striking.

lbriner• 4 years ago

Sad but completely unsurprising. People should realise by now that when a company starts a massive hiring boom, it will inevitably bust. Why? Because as many have said already, if you have tonnes of cash, it is easier to hire loads of people rather than hire appropriate and effective people.

The fact that we are talking about such an enormous number just shows how many people are part of the hive but probably not really contributing much to the company overall.

The worst part is that some people who are really effective will get caught up in the layoffs paying for the inefficiency of corporate structures.

itissid2• 4 years ago

From the immigration H1b PoV looks of it a few months of severance and then there is 60 days when the clock starts ticking to find a job. Not bad.

From what I understand the people where the WARN act is active they have to give atleast 60 day notice in case of mass layoffs(this is different from the 60 day grace period for H1bs to transfer status).

Leires• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

camdat2• 4 years ago

Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent

Link pls

WoahNoun• 4 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1416405111

gfd• 4 years ago

Not saying it makes it okay, but every company in existence does this to some extent. Everyone does A/B testing with the intent to alter user behavior (aka psychology) to increase their profits.

londons_explore3• 4 years ago

And without A/B testing, every product you use would be worse. Not only would it be less profitable, but it would also be harder to use, less useful, and less productive.

A/B testing isn't a new thing - I'm sure the inventor of the wheel experimented with different shapes, and the buyer of the hexagonal wheel probably didn't have the best user experience.

Multiply that by the number of people in the world and the number of products people use, and A/B testing is really up there as possibly one of the most beneficial ideas ever.

I really don't understand those who claim it should be banned - I see no way that testing two different versions of a website with people who desire to use that website can bring sufficient harm to outweigh those massive benefits.

bigbacaloa2• 4 years ago

Not every company consciously does unethical things, no.

lanstin2• 4 years ago

It isn’t just the one thing, it is a pattern where when given a choice between respected a sense of ethics and decency or taking more money, Facebook as an org has at every instance that is publically known, has taken the money. The high salaries seem to be justified not by their technical skill but their willingness to do what they are told for momey without regard to conscience.

Read the whistle blower report, witness the evolution from seeing content from your friends posted in less addictive chronological feed to addictive content your friends like in the internet sorted by addictive news. Hell, the site started as a PHP hack to creep on pretty women. They sold a bunch of data to foreign adversaries. For years, they let people sell ads to Nazis. They don’t give the people faced with the psychologically brutal jobs of moderation get benefits. They have been a platform for genocide and government surveillance.

I might be missing some examples of them missing some money to do the right thing, but nothing comes to mind.

cj• 4 years ago

A/B testing compared to creating algorithms that prey on human vulnerabilities to drive “engagement” are 2 categorically different things.

Absolutely, go bananas A/B testing different colors for a “Sign Up” button or testing different pricing models.

But let’s not go bananas optimizing algorithms that are damaging to users mental health at a massive scale.

three_seagrass4• 4 years ago

IIRC it wasn't a generic A/B test but an experiment intentionally designed to manipulate the emotion of users and measure their reactions.

In research, these types of experiments typically require consent..

mrinterweb• 4 years ago

Let's not confuse or conflate A/B testing with making ethical decisions.

kat_rebelo• 4 years ago

A/B testing is a completely different thing from hiring Behavioral Psychologists to design your platform to be as addictive as possible

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30962055-irresistible

worik3• 4 years ago

but every company in existence does this to some extent

That is untrue.

A/B testing is not the same thing as seeing how bad your users' mental state becomes if you muck with what they read.

A/B testing is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. That was Facebook's choice how to use it.

throw827474737• 4 years ago

Nope, not every, really such an ignorant statement.

Lutger• 4 years ago

I doubt that the mentioned 'psychological experiments' are just A/B testing. There is a very strong case to be made that Trump and Brexit would not have happened without Facebook, and those are just two examples.

kube-system• 4 years ago

Maybe every company financed by adtech does this. But that's a far cry from "every company in existence".

webmobdev2• 4 years ago

You have a good point. But let's not forget that the Nazi's and the Japanese used to do incredibly invasive medical tests on human beings in the name of "science". (Even the Americans have done political and medical experiments on their citizens, using the CIA, on African Americans and criminals). All these are condemned today by the scientific community because of it caused great harm (or even death) to the subjects who never gave their consent to such experiments. The psychological experiments conducted by FB on its users was equally bad because it looked to trigger emotions in the users (a useful feature for an advertising platform), some of which could cause users to go into depression. I don't know if the FB people conducting those experiments are aware that even mild depression causes great stress on an individual, and serious depression triggers suicidal impulses.

(This is not an attack on you or your otherwise valid point. Just a reminder that people should be mindful of their ethical obligations to get informed consent and not cause harm to others with their experiments).

zeruch• 4 years ago

A/B testing (which is getting users to respond/react to a UX event, and choosing which outcome is more suited to the business) is considerably different from "can we manipulate users up front, to perceive or react to things assertively and programmatically, even if against their interests?"

j0hnyl• 4 years ago

It's naive of you to think that this is a Meta problem. Just by surfing the internet you're subject to all the same psyops by organizations that are arguably even worse than CA.

smodo• 4 years ago

It doesn't say that's what they think. About Meta though, we know. 'Others are worse' is not a convincing argument.

dr_dshiv• 4 years ago

That is such a poor reason to not like Meta, among many, many reasons. All meta did was publish their results. The backlash ensured that no other companies shared results—but AB testing is bigger than ever across the industry.

Now if you had said “fuck meta because my feed is filled with an unintelligible mix of baby photos and political screeds,” I’d totally follow.

ShamelessC• 4 years ago

There's always this, as well -

"On 6 December 2021, approximately a hundred Rohingya refugees launched a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it did not do enough to prevent the proliferation of anti-Rohingya hate speech because it was interested in prioritizing engagement."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

Don't forget that the company profited from being a platform used to organize a genocide[1].

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

PKop• 4 years ago

either they charge for social media or they attempt to grow by ad targeting, or social media is maybe banned through regulation to stop what you describe.

I think maybe your beef is with the nature of technology today and/or our current culture that enables/glorifies it's mass use. What's the solution?

concordDance2• 4 years ago

Do you just fundamentally hate the concept of an A/B test? Or do you just hate the idea of letting people outside the company know the results?

headhasthoughts• 4 years ago

What's wrong about conducting psychological experiments on users? Everyone who signed up for Facebook agreed to the ToS.

carimura• 4 years ago

Billions of people use the service for "free". As long as everyone knows they are what's for sale, the rest makes sense. Any company of this size is going to sway discourse so it's time to accept that. I for one do not and thus deleted our family accounts long ago.

ClumsyPilot3• 4 years ago

I for one do not and thus deleted our family accounts long ago.

I have seen many people brainwashed by highly targeted ads and conspiracies that found them on facebook. Those people vote, break into congress, etc.

deleting your individual account doesn't change that

jrm44• 4 years ago

I'm sorry, but the "A/B" responses to this sentiment are some of the worst euphemistic cope I've ever seen. You all really need to get out of your "tech" shells and take seriously this idea that "running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.

jahsome6• 4 years ago

I am interested in this line of logic, but I'm not sure I would go so far.

I feel engaging in commerce in any way at all is impossible without being "evil" under this definition.

Aren't advertisements at their core unconsented psychological manipulation? What about retail store design? Is providing customer service altogether just manipulation?

I think I take issue with the word "evil." It seems to imply a certain malice or intent to harm, which just isn't logical, given the context.

alasdair_3• 4 years ago

"running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.

If a store owner puts two different candy bars at the register to see which one sells more, is that an evil thing?

concordDance2• 4 years ago

Ignore the phrasal connotations and focus on the actual reality. What traits make nonconsensual experiments evil? Do they apply in this case?

When someone tries out a different way of greeting strangers at a party, are they being evil? What if they write down the results?

leesec• 4 years ago

Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent

This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations

vippy2• 4 years ago

Yeah, because that's definitely what folks are concerned with. A/B testing of button locations, and not feed algorithms designed to manipulate users.

prezjordan• 4 years ago

This is not what happened https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...

metalliqaz• 4 years ago

Oh come on, you know that's not what he is talking about. He is talking about algorithmic engagement-keeping.

smsm426• 4 years ago

So, Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has been used as a source of electioneering data for years before that. See for example Eitan Hersh's testimony. In fact, I've read articles bragging about how inventive the political technology using social networking profiles is, for a couple of electoral cycles before that - they may still be somewhere in HN archives even. And of course, selling the very same data to advertisers, maybe repackaged a bit differently but the same source and same data set, is the whole business model of Facebook. And it somehow never bothered anyone until Cambridge Analytica. Why is that?

treeman79• 4 years ago

Bigger concern is Facebook actively blocking stories the government doesn’t like.

artificial4• 4 years ago

Most don't have a problem uploading address books and contacts into these platforms. I think it depends which team it is. Companies? Cool! Political Party you agree with, sure! They mined the social graph and Zuck reached out to them and said they're on the same team and didn't restrict access while they mined 50 million people. Don't forget Zygna!

adamsb65• 4 years ago

Starting around 2016 the New York Times decided that coverage had to be negative: https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

Consider how this may have helped you to develop your opinion.

richbell2• 4 years ago

They gave specific examples of negative things that Facebook has done. This is a pretty shallow dismissal of their criticism, even if their comment is a bit heavy-handed.

rossjudson2• 4 years ago

You seem very sure of what you know, and very confident about how the people working at Meta think and act. Do you have any direct experience? Or know anyone who works there?

sweezyjeezy• 4 years ago

I think they were making a statement about the company not the staff.

jjav2• 4 years ago

Not OP but the things OP is saying are well covered in the press, no need to know anyone there.

wahnfrieden2• 4 years ago

Those are just facts that have been reported credibly. There’s worse they didn’t mention. Why are you being so reactionary?

jahsome6• 4 years ago

I understand the sentiment. I agree there should be accountability.

With that in mind, I'd like to point out root merely expressed an anecdote about above and beyond humane treatment of employees from the CEO. Parent described the hacker-friendly culture. Those appear to be first hand accounts.

How does your comment relate contribute to that discussion?

Further, how does over the top and genericized outrage and harm wishing on a cohort of innocent people advance society in any meaningful ways?

zaptheimpaler3• 4 years ago

Your argument is essentially that the company treated its employees well, so who cares what it did to users. Who gave you the right to decide the discussion is framed around how Meta treats employees rather than what it does for the entire world?

webmobdev2• 4 years ago

Work culture and values both matter. I found @Leires comment insightful because it jarred me to the reality that while we are appreciating the good in someone, we shouldn't forget their capability to be bad. Can a Gandhian be comfortable working at Hitler's gas chamber? Both had amazing leadership qualities. What attracts us to either of them are the values we think they represent.

Siira2• 4 years ago

Conducting “psychological” experiments without “consent” is the only way to do science. Perhaps in this instance the knowledge gained is used in the ad industry and not benefiting society, but the nature of the research is to be admired and replicated.

andirk• 4 years ago

Remember that Facebook "whistleblower" revealed that Facebook "put profits over people"? That will never not be funny.

aussiesnack4• 4 years ago

I'll cede no ground to anyone on loathing the corporate world, to the extent that I've all but abandoned work and the cash economy (at the cost of considerable personal privation).

But humans are complex beings, and it's just realistic to view us all with some nuance rather than casually tossing everyone into good/evil baskets. The gp outlined an example of decent behaviour, and it remains just that regardless of our attitudes on other grounds towards Zuckersnuffles and/or Meta. Even murderers can be kind and decent people given in some contexts (witnessed at first hand).

godelski3• 4 years ago

We can condone the good behaviors and condemn the bad ones. It is important to do both because if all we do is condemn then there is no pressure to do the right thing. If all you can do is evil then you'll only ever be evil and criticism will fall upon deaf ears.

A lot of people here agree with you about Meta's faults, even me. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the good they've done. Even if it isn't much and even if it is vastly outweighed by the bad. We should still use positive reinforcement to pressure companies to do the right thing.

murat124• 4 years ago

Hear hear.

NoPicklez• 4 years ago

Hear hear.

raleighm• 4 years ago

Well said.

digitaltrees• 4 years ago

I agree. Thanks for bringing that to the discussion. The risk is that it creates a false equilibrium where the perception is the good equals, outweighs or justifies the bad.

But you are totally right. We must celebrate with he good in others and life or our critical observations lose all merit.

dheera• 4 years ago

Well yes, but a good fraction the good they've done would have been done by other companies if they weren't around.

What's frustrating is that they currently have a near-monopoly on friend-to-friend publishing, yet unlike about 5 years ago, they now gatekeep a lot of those communications -- many times I post something on my Facebook or Instagram that I want friends to see, and Meta doesn't show that content to my friends, just because it isn't a "Reel". Friends in my age range (+/-10) who grew up in North America tend to use only Meta's products, so I basically feel like I'm talking to a wall most of the time.

betawolf• 4 years ago

Good thing I read today!

blobbers• 4 years ago

Take my downvote. "Psychological experiments" on users is what every company; user and market research. Enabling "psyops" is simply building a platform; this isn't the first platform that his been misused or scraped for other purposes. You get spam robo dialers? It wasn't from meta... etc. etc. etc.

throwawaymeta4• 4 years ago

Its much much worse than just psychological experiments. Meta currently stands accused as an enabler of a genocide in Myanmar [1], and provides a platform to spread massive hate against Muslims in India and elsewhere [2,3,4,5]. For folks trying to do bothsidesism here and bring out how great they've been, I am sorry but there is no excuse for enablers of Fascism.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... 2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-... 3. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-s... 4. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985143101/stop-lying-muslim-r... 5. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/07/facebook-mark-zuckerberg...

dang• 4 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33534643.

itsjustround• 4 years ago

All the people who failed META's shitty interview's are quietly laughing now. The world is round folks.

Animats• 4 years ago

How much of the "metaverse" group is being laid off? Anyone know?

rubyist5eva• 4 years ago

I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

I wonder what this means in practice? Nothing? Ok, great.

oldstrangers• 4 years ago

Anyone have a quick estimate as to the number of layoffs across the tech sector in the last 3 months? Absolutely wild.

Sirened2• 4 years ago

https://layoffs.fyi puts it at ~40k

nicolashahn4• 4 years ago

Some data from the inside:

Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.

Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well.

Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need.

edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers

blamazon• 4 years ago

(RL == Reinforcement Learning)

Edit: I was wrong but this is why acronyms without explanation are annoying.

rwiggum• 4 years ago

incorrect. RL = reality labs. the VR and metaverse stuff.

magicseth• 4 years ago

Reality Labs?

nicolashahn4• 4 years ago

Nope, other comments are correct, Reality Labs, aka AR/VR and other hardware

rcdexta• 4 years ago

I think he is talking about Reality Labs division

ml_basics• 4 years ago

Most bootcampers are gone, even ones that were performing well.

What are bootcampers, does this just mean recent hires? Or people who came in with no specialist skills who rotate until they find a team?

nicolashahn4• 4 years ago

Recent hires who haven't yet been allocated to a team, though they do work with teams on real tasks and produce code. Usually non-specialists, though some like ML engineers do go through bootcamp.

jonasdegendt• 4 years ago

People without any formal higher education, but only coding bootcamp experience.

azemetre• 4 years ago

Facebook has a program where a majority of new hires go through to learn about their tech stack and contribute to a variety of teams. It's also where you find a team to join.

Basically a high powered onboarding program that is really good.

blsapologist425• 4 years ago

Not true that "most" bootcampers are gone. Please don't spread misinformation.

nicolashahn4• 4 years ago

I don't have hard data (do you?) but all bootcampers we were working with were laid off and threads on Blind seem to indicate bootcamper layoffs were heavy

skee83832• 4 years ago

Meanwhile all you hear on the mainstream news is "Labor shortage" "No one wants to work" "Companies are having trouble finding talent". This smells like 2008 all over again. Housing market is tanking, MSM is lying about employment numbers. Companies are lying about how many people they are actually hiring. I went through all this back in 08. you'd put in applications and never hear anything back, then the next day you'd see the exact position you applied for listed on the job board again.

mertd• 4 years ago

Labor participation is still below pre-pandemic levels.

Most labor numbers are dominated by blue collar or service jobs. They are not fungible with tech labor.

skee83832• 4 years ago

The numbers are made up. They always cite "polls" as a source. Strangely enough i've never been polled...

lovelearning• 4 years ago

I’ve decided to...let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.

It's phrased as if those 11,000 were itching to go away all this time. Then Mark, in his infinite benevolence, "let" them finally "go." He hath freed the birds from their golden cages.

zombiwoof• 4 years ago

meta hiring bar was ridiculous compared to the quality of their code. i passed the bullshit interview, standards was higher than Google, and then joined and saw some of the worst code/designs i've ever seen. at least Google code quality was fantastic.

fuck mark and his 1000 acres he stole on Kauai. karma is a bitch.

ScriptCrash• 4 years ago

Wonder if "day in the life as a 23 year old product manager at Meta" still works there...

troyvit• 4 years ago

When somebody in Zuckerberg's type of role says, "I take responsibility for that," how exactly do they see that responsibility play out?

Unrelated but that's some nice severance.

transfire• 4 years ago

Honestly I don’t have any idea where this metaverse thing is or how to get to it.

m1117• 4 years ago

Facebook employees are so much luckier than the poor twitter employees that no one cared about.

ppjim• 4 years ago

One thing that struck me is the similarity in the wording of the Stripe and Meta layoff memos. They appear to have been written by the same AI.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/stripe-lays...

gtsnexp• 4 years ago

Where are tech jobs heading in the United States and globally? Who (or what industry) is absorbing all these folks? I think the current landscape merits one of these prediction style threads on HN.

Zanneth• 4 years ago

Still mostly staying in Silicon Valley. Plenty of companies are still hiring. Laid off Meta employees with good skills will not have problems finding another job in the same area.

didibus• 4 years ago

But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth

Interesting, so the cust cuttings aren't about being sustainable or avoiding loss, but to meet future growth expectations?

Couldn't they just have like sustained a break even point until economy recovers?

bartread• 4 years ago

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.

There was similar wording to this in the recent Shopify announcement. I must admit, I was frustrated by it then, and I'm frustrated by it now.

"Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration?" Yeah, sure, many people who don't understand the concept of regression to the mean predicted a permanent acceleration. But here's the thing: if you thought that after months of being cooped up most people were just going to carry on sitting round their houses playing Runescape and jacking off, or never visit the shops again, you are an idiot. Now, I will grant you, there were some silver linings to the pandemic, and some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a lot of people crawling the walls who couldn't wait to be let off the leash again. Just look at what's happened with the travel industry and holiday chaos this past summer, at least here in the UK.

I saw Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan recently. I've got quite a lot of hostility for Meta, due to the societal damage, and personal cost to individuals, for which it's responsible, but Mark Zuckerberg is an intelligent and interesting guy. Definitely worth listening to, not least of which because he actually comes across as a human being in this podcast episode rather than some sort of odd robot.

I'm incredibly disappointed that he got taken in by this idea of a permanent off trend shift to online and beyond him - and beyond Shopify - this kind of, "hurr durr, we got it wrong, wut you gunna do <<shrugs>>," justification for layoffs is going to get really old really quickly.

There's something really wrong with corporate governance that can look at an unprecedented situation like COVID and then jump to the conclusion that it's going to permanently change human behaviour in the round, disregarding all previous trends: humans are, after all, still human.

bonney_io• 4 years ago

some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a lot of people crawling the walls who couldn't wait to be let off the leash again

And what did people turn to? Social media.... VR...

Sorry, Zuck, not buying it.

CosmicShadow• 4 years ago

But can they hire at least 1 person who can fix all the glaring user interface bugs on their core web app? The trade would be worth it.

irsagent• 4 years ago

It sad to see the direction of the company go complete VR and AR. If it is the next product it would seem to catch on early with the demo.

tombert• 4 years ago

Fantastic. I just got laid off from my (non-Meta) job, and now I have to compete with thousands of other software engineers.

I suppose I knew that the cushy absurd-salary-days of software engineering had to come to a close at some point, but I guess I was just hoping it would happening after I retired.

tkiolp4• 4 years ago

Just said you worked for Meta in your resume and you just being laid off. Bang! Instant hire.

dm03514• 4 years ago

Can the market absorb all these layoffs? Will it significantly drive salaries down from peak Covid?

SCAQTony• 4 years ago

Perhaps a strong, independent board of directors could have mitigated this fiasco. The meta-verse never looked like a good idea especially after previous failures like "Second Life." YMMV

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/faceb...

daniel_iversen2• 4 years ago

You can't really predict the future like that.. there were lots of mp3 players, tablets, smart phones, smart watches etc. before the ones that "hit it off" and made a lot of money. I'd think the theory is Meta has the money to invest for the long term as the market is building and become a leader.

ummonk3• 4 years ago

Walkmans were big hits 50 years ago. Blackberry phones 20 years ago. I wouldn't exactly say music players and smart phones had a track record of failures.

ummonk3• 4 years ago

We’re probably going to see a decline in market comp / offer competitiveness as the flood of big tech layoffs hits the job market and startups feed on the offerings from big companies.

dcow• 4 years ago

This is the best toned layoff announcement I’ve read.

bionsystem• 4 years ago

Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.

That's... Wrong ? Who predicted that the growth would continue ? To me and from a lot of reading I did, it was obvious by the end of 2020 that a lot of those tech companies took several years of growth in advance, not that it would continue...

Meta lays off 11,000 people

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