Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/meta-tells-staff-it-will-cut-10-of-jobs-in-push-for-efficiency

by Vaslo • 3 months ago

800 851 3 months ago

bloomberg.com

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/meta-job-cuts-10-percent-8...

booleandilemma2• 3 months ago

Programmers only or across the company?

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

Never at the head... Although the fish begins to smell at the head, as we say here...

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

They don't have 80k programmers. That's total staff

reconnecting• 3 months ago

Given the same trend at Oracle and Amazon (1), it seems large corporations are cutting costs ahead of bad news... and that news isn't about AI.

PunchyHamster2• 3 months ago

It is about AI. The news is "the AI is far less monetarily lucrative endeavour than we thought but don't worry, we already fired enough people to compensate for the loss"

kakacik2• 3 months ago

... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month.

Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).

mirrorlogic2• 3 months ago

Punchy FTW

torginus4• 3 months ago

From what I can tell, its more about cashflow - basically companies need to spend most of their revenue or be taxed on it - and you can buy only so many servers.

Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.

Ancalagon• 3 months ago

Re:

If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...

lpcvoid• 3 months ago

Yeah, also first thing I thought about. What a shit time altogether right now.

BurningFrog• 3 months ago

It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.

voxl• 3 months ago

And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."

peacebeard• 3 months ago

Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.

sdevonoes3• 3 months ago

And little money buys even less. What’s your point?

gedy• 3 months ago

Maybe but this happiness chart seems to reflect economic recessions (including some unofficial ones)

ambicapter• 3 months ago

Not if you pop in to the HN thread for that article, funnily enough.

vonneumannstan• 3 months ago

Not really the standard line anymore. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

darth_avocado• 3 months ago

That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.

lamasery2• 3 months ago

It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.

It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).

testing223213• 3 months ago

The thing is that Americans don’t have much money. A few billion and millionaires skew the numbers horribly.

The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.

snovymgodym• 3 months ago

Maybe not, but poverty definitely causes unhappiness

adammarples2• 3 months ago

Huh, did anything happen in 2020? I'm wracking my brains trying to think of anything.

kartoffelsaft• 3 months ago

As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.

oatmeal1• 3 months ago

America is rich, but that money is spent on new problems we invented for ourselves. We subsidize farmers growing unhealthy foods, then subsidize buying those unhealthy foods through food stamps. Then we subsidize healthcare to address the consequences of extra obesity.

Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.

expedition322• 3 months ago

The richer a country becomes the more expensive everything gets.

The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.

rvz4• 3 months ago

Is this what they mean to "Feel the AGI?"

AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

Asocial Grumpy Interests?

advisedwang• 3 months ago

AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta

Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?

rvz4• 3 months ago

Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:

It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

It's like the economy is struggling or something.

prism56• 3 months ago

Wonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.

dwa3592• 3 months ago

Would it be Mark's cloned AI who will call everyone 'personally' to share this news?

I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.

shmatt2• 3 months ago

if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success

6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"

Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip

* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end

nobleach• 3 months ago

That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)

My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?

shmatt2• 3 months ago

You had interviews scheduled longer than 45 minutes?

stuxnet79• 3 months ago

2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.

aprilthird20215• 3 months ago

If it was the exuberant period of overhiring from around that time, then you're talking about a different company who interviewed you back then

yodsanklai4• 3 months ago

My experience as well, both at Google and Meta. Very positive and well-organized. I also got feedback from the recruiter on each interviews.

vigilantpuma• 3 months ago

I had an interview in 2024 and my interviewer was CLEARLY doing other stuff during the interview. So a very different experience.

torton• 3 months ago

Things have changed. I worked with a very senior and professional recruiter at FB during that time. While things didn't work out then, someone else reached maybe a year and a half ago for a fairly similar role -- massive difference, strictly a disposable drone style process and barely a conversation. I chose to not even start the process.

A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.

canes1234564• 3 months ago

It was my experience as well in Dec 2025

chis3• 3 months ago

What is your point exactly lol. You'd prefer longer interviews? More, less?

-warren2• 3 months ago

So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?

If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.

If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).

As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.

As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.

The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?

Gigachad2• 3 months ago

I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.

dnnddidiej4• 3 months ago

What does a pilot or doctor or cop do in terms of interviews, take homes etc.?

_heimdall4• 3 months ago

At my last job we generally had 3 interviews beyond the initial screening. One was a coding challenge (1 hour with 45 really working on the challenge), one was an architecture discussion, and one was more of a culture fit and similar with the hiring manager.

It worked very well for us, I was a bit surprised with some of the red flags that showed up that I wouldn't have expected to be caught in the hiring rounds done at previous jobs.

gcampos• 3 months ago

The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.

What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels

singpolyma39• 3 months ago

Last time I talked them they also wanted an NDA just to interview, which was just insulting and dumb so I kept my existing big tech job instead

yodsanklai4• 3 months ago

I believe they optimize for fairness and consistency. They interview a huge number of people from very different backgrounds so they need a standardized process. It's not perfect but I can understand the logic. And there's team matching phase if the candidate pass the interview, it's not a random allocation.

abkolan• 3 months ago

This was exactly my experience too. The interviewer seemed more focused on checking boxes on the grading rubric than actually understanding the design discussion. They barely engaged with alternative approaches.

The interviewer was also very hard for me to understand, which made the interview harder than it should have been.

I am ESL too, so this is not about someone’s background. The problem is communication in an interview where both sides need to understand each other clearly.

From what I have seen on Blind, others have had similar experiences.

geremiiah• 3 months ago

The only part of Meta I care about is the PyTorch team. Are those people also being affected by this?

htrp• 3 months ago

a bunch of them already left....

trjordan• 3 months ago

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.

It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.

But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.

They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.

Cowards.

swader9992• 3 months ago

I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.

thewebguyd• 3 months ago

Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months.

The domestic jobs aren't coming back.

JeremyNT2• 3 months ago

Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.

AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.

Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.

heathrow838293• 3 months ago

but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?

I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.

expedition322• 3 months ago

Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.

1217893• 3 months ago

this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all

lanthissa• 3 months ago

meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.

they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.

There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.

Forgeties793• 3 months ago

Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.

They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)

nh23423fefe2• 3 months ago

When is it ok to lay people off?

gtowey2• 3 months ago

Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.

So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.

dist-epoch• 3 months ago

It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains."

Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.

matchbok315• 3 months ago

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.

There is nothing "cowardly" about it.

Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

sdevonoes3• 3 months ago

With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you

bellowsgulch• 3 months ago

That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.

paganel• 3 months ago

I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".

I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.

BoredPositron2• 3 months ago

Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.

operatingthetan3• 3 months ago

Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.

33MHz-i486• 3 months ago

its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter

Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers

I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.

lamasery2• 3 months ago

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.

Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.

To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.

abosley• 3 months ago

Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.

jmull• 3 months ago

I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.

I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.

To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.

dackdel• 3 months ago

found the ceo

BobbyJo• 3 months ago

Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?

If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.

singpolyma39• 3 months ago

Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.

wolvoleo5• 3 months ago

Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.

I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.

Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.

I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.

HoldOnAMinute4• 3 months ago

Imagine a world where people could just be happy with returns on investments. Even treasury bills.

Can't we all just be happy?

spicymaki• 3 months ago

If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.

ineedasername• 3 months ago

It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".

That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.

bsimpson2• 3 months ago

Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?

asdfman1232• 3 months ago

It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.

heathrow838293• 3 months ago

Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.

asdfman1232• 3 months ago

Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.

missedthecue• 3 months ago

I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.

testing223213• 3 months ago

They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards.

To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence

They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.

marcosdumay3• 3 months ago

They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.

That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.

That said, IMO they are right...

jongjong• 3 months ago

This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people.

They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.

I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.

The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...

ModernMech• 3 months ago

Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.

chis3• 3 months ago

I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.

I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.

linkjuice4all• 3 months ago

I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.

It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.

chis3• 3 months ago

I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).

To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.

rvz4• 3 months ago

I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time.

After the AI race and the large IPOs of 2026, this will be the case. The hiring pipeline will be a lot slower than 2021 and will be more controlled.

rishabhaiover• 3 months ago

I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.

fidotron• 3 months ago

Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).

Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.

Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.

da02• 3 months ago

What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?

kakacik2• 3 months ago

Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.

sevenzero• 3 months ago

This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.

mr_toad3• 3 months ago

With time, their intentions have become much more clear

Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

trelane• 3 months ago

Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?

Sort of.

Wikipedia @ 2:

Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

Britannica:

Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

Wikipedia @ 3:

A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.

Wikipedia @ 2:

Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."

[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

swingboy• 3 months ago

I think the “face book” was used prior to the name of the company for what you would call a college student directory. Like a yearbook.

kokanee• 3 months ago

My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.

tasuki• 3 months ago

Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties

Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!

vovavili• 3 months ago

Meta products are pretty good specifically if you're a business owner who wants to advertise his product.

hn_acc13• 3 months ago

Now? NOW? Not 15 years ago?

kryogen1c• 3 months ago

their intentions have become much more clear

The hunter Biden laptop story was censored - including in private messages - and Charlie Kirk was shown being shot in the neck to death to children.

There's nothing else to say.

jonnonz• 3 months ago

What happened to the metaverse ?I suspect maybe wasting all the resource wasn’t a good idea

autophagian• 3 months ago

The whole concept just didn't have any legs.

jonatron• 3 months ago

I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.

teaearlgraycold2• 3 months ago

Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.

booleandilemma2• 3 months ago

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

marcosdumay3• 3 months ago

There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.

mlsu• 3 months ago

They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:

HoldOnAMinute4• 3 months ago

Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.

The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.

killingtime74• 3 months ago

It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.

Waterluvian2• 3 months ago

“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”

laserlight• 3 months ago

A certain large company

Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

userbinator2• 3 months ago

Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.

...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.

dlev_pika3• 3 months ago

Moreover, he has no idea what those laid off people actually did or who they are

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

I worked at S&P Global for 2 years via an acquisition. The scale is insane. It is completely unmanageable. It's impossible to get anything done. Yet, it shits money. It was a miserable place to work.

janalsncm2• 3 months ago

I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.

eleventen• 3 months ago

If you sort https://layoffs.fyi/ by date, the machine started turning in 2020. But it did indeed kick into high gear in 2022.

This was the big one I remember:

https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-emplo...

gip• 3 months ago

I have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI!

That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.

whatever1• 3 months ago

Let me guess. Year of efficiency?

bradlys• 3 months ago

It’s being coined the decade of efficiency now.

alex11386• 3 months ago

The little red book says so

HardCodedBias• 3 months ago

Everyone at Meta should know the score.

Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance.

Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.

This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.

Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.

(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)

aprilthird20215• 3 months ago

This is in addition to performance cutting just fyi. I get what you're saying but this isn't that

mr_toad3• 3 months ago

When Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix

zeroonetwothree4• 3 months ago

Layoffs are not the same as performance terminations

cchrist• 3 months ago

This isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.

mr_toad3• 3 months ago

So is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?

arnitdo• 3 months ago

Ah yes so 8 billion (at least) companies are supposed to pull financing out of their rear-ends? You've re-discovered freelancing!

dsign• 3 months ago

I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.

pipes3• 3 months ago

The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.

mswphd2• 3 months ago

inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.

Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.

altmanaltman2• 3 months ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "central banks got inflation so wrong the last time"? You mean Covid or 2008?

rickcarlino• 3 months ago

Layoffs.fyi is not looking good right now.

heathrow838293• 3 months ago

but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.

ProllyInfamous3• 3 months ago

I'm really surprised that they:

1) still have a submission form that doesn't require email

2) that they post my email-less submissions from my smaller USA city, too [farily quickly, as well!]

LogicFailsMe3• 3 months ago

"letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here..." is a sacrifice Mark Zuckerberg is willing to make.

dnsb• 3 months ago

I came across this article recently and watching it play it out is wild: https://readuncut.com/the-survivors-paradox-how-layoffs-turn...

whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.

oxag3n• 3 months ago

Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live.

It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.

doublerabbit3• 3 months ago

just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.

I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in? erlang, tcl and perl?

rdevilla2• 3 months ago

Just use lisp.

kibwen• 3 months ago

You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.

hn_acc13• 3 months ago

I'm still partial to Tcl from years in EDA - sign me up..

guzfip• 3 months ago

Hey, erlang is brilliant

lbrito• 3 months ago

Haskell!

phyrex• 3 months ago

You could work in Erlang, PHP, and C++ at Meta ;)

rbanffy2• 3 months ago

Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves.

Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.

marcosdumay3• 3 months ago

They are probably reacting to the general economy.

rbanffy2• 3 months ago

The scariest thing is that people with this amount of responsibility was caught by surprise.

ardit33• 3 months ago

I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.

I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).

I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.

I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.

the_biot• 3 months ago

Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.

I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.

dlev_pika3• 3 months ago

It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.

yalogin• 3 months ago

I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor

giobox• 3 months ago

I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.

Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.

yodsanklai4• 3 months ago

I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though.

That would be sad. I've never owned a Quest, but the technology is starting to be very impressive. I would consider buying a new generation one.

ryukoposting• 3 months ago

It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.

Ifkaluva4• 3 months ago

I think the Reuters article that preceded this said it would be 10% on 5/20, with more to come throughout 2026

zeroonetwothree4• 3 months ago

10% May 10% November

dbgrman5• 3 months ago

20% is the outlook for the whole year. Wait and see :)

keithnz• 3 months ago

one thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.

atl_tom• 3 months ago

I bet they are worried about the class actions that the SC lawsuit opened up.

hintymad3• 3 months ago

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.

pipes3• 3 months ago

Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?

pembrook6• 3 months ago

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.

People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.

Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.

The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.

For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.

ironman1478• 3 months ago

I worked at Meta and they're spot on.

ironSkillet• 3 months ago

I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.

renewiltord2• 3 months ago

I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.

jeffbee2• 3 months ago

Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.

dnnddidiej4• 3 months ago

Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?

hintymad3• 3 months ago

There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.

slashdave2• 3 months ago

Not popular? Who asks someone to break their confidential agreements in front of them, and why would you hire someone who would do that so easily?

AlexeyBelov3• 3 months ago

What is confidential, exactly? I once had a contract that said that I cannot discuss any technology I used for two years after the contract ends. _Any technology_. So, git. And Postgres and so on.

It's completely normal in tech circles to talk about technology.

rsanek• 3 months ago

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

jiggawatts• 3 months ago

Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.

Macha• 3 months ago

Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.

pembrook6• 3 months ago

Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).

Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.

Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.

Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.

hintymad3• 3 months ago

Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.

screye2• 3 months ago

Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

oytis5• 3 months ago

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

disillusioned• 3 months ago

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.

Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).

Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.

Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.

If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...

Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...

pbreit• 3 months ago

"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"

That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.

coldtea• 3 months ago

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.

So? They likely already had too many in 2021.

They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.

compiler-guy3• 3 months ago

Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.

But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.

Aurornis• 3 months ago

They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.

Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.

Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.

Lammy• 3 months ago

If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.

PaulHoule2• 3 months ago

The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.

philjohn• 3 months ago

You're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple).

about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.

And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.

tootie• 3 months ago

Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.

pclmulqdq• 3 months ago

Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.

__turbobrew__• 3 months ago

Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.

wrigby2• 3 months ago

I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.

pizlonator• 3 months ago

I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:

- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race

- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store

Barrin92• 3 months ago

choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png

They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.

Danox3• 3 months ago

Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.

postexitus9• 3 months ago

Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.

laweijfmvo• 3 months ago

it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.

some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.

lenerdenator2• 3 months ago

Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.

Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.

Mark needs to be shown the door.

Oh wait.

Mark's on the board.

And he has majority voting power.

... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.

NotMichaelBay• 3 months ago

Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?

zmjone2992• 3 months ago

many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!

superfrank• 3 months ago

I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.

Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.

I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.

casualscience• 3 months ago

Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is

kjkjadksj2• 3 months ago

Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.

culi• 3 months ago

People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need?

I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign

wakawaka287• 3 months ago

It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.

I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...

ryandrake• 3 months ago

In the year 2040, they’ll still be using the same excuse. “BigTech lays off another 10,000 from all the overhiring done 20 years ago during COVID!”

hn_throwaway_998• 3 months ago

I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:

1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.

2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.

Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.

dbgrman5• 3 months ago

its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.

There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

tshaddox2• 3 months ago

Well, one could start by looking at how their total employee counts have changed between now and the beginning of the pandemic.

I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.

thrawa8387336• 3 months ago

They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that

CamouflagedKiwi• 3 months ago

It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.

postexitus9• 3 months ago

Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.

bux93• 3 months ago

Firing 10% every year is just good old Jack Welsh-style workforce intimidation.

bobmcnamara• 3 months ago

Unemployment is an economic feature for wage modulation, not a bug.

burnte• 3 months ago

I can understand that, but when you have a dozen friends in these companies talking about how overstaffed they are and the whole "FAANG companies keep devs on payroll just so they can file 5k people to make investors happy" thing makes sense. None of these companies actually pause hiring when these layoffs happen, which is a major indicator of what's driving the layoffs. It's all artificial.

bandrami11• 3 months ago

This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.

DanielHB• 3 months ago

I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.

Brystephor• 3 months ago

Meta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range.

Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either

wazzup013• 3 months ago

You no who I am ( meta )it me .0. I'm coming to see u meta u killed and hurt to many people. Wear are the children. Kids..... You know who I'm talking about this is holly war people humans you know as well. This is not your world 2010 to 2025 it's human world

wazzup013• 3 months ago

Your computer is the problem meta to many dead people that why computers are fucking up..your programs are tanted and bad programing formula bads. Your killing people

wazzup013• 3 months ago

This is the truth god's word

ptdorf2• 3 months ago

The firings will continue until morale improves.

4fterd4rk• 3 months ago

The real question for me is how the hell did this company reach $200 billion in annual revenue? Nothing about our economy makes any sense to me.

zeroonetwothree4• 3 months ago

Something something ads

maxrev17• 3 months ago

Neckbeards’rein is over!

midtake• 3 months ago

Don't worry, these CRUD app software artisans will land on their feet somewhere.

upupupandaway5• 3 months ago

I don't understand this comment at all. Are you being sarcastic? Digging at the developers? At Meta?

dlev_pika3• 3 months ago

Is this what Zuck meant when he said he “takes full responsibility” for spending 80 billion in the wrong direction?

wmf• 3 months ago

Taking responsibility doesn't mean paying people to do nothing.

autaut15• 3 months ago

Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down?

What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?

The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.

LambdaComplex• 3 months ago

So what does it mean, concretely? What repercussions will he personally suffer?

alexjplant2• 3 months ago

I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it.

Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.
But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.

Mike Judge is a masterful satirist.

nervousvarun• 3 months ago

All true...been a huge fan since it originally aired. I was about the same age as the characters and doing the same work and got all the references and loved every minute of that show but looking back now overall I only feel regret for not buying BC when I saw this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU

givemeethekeys2• 3 months ago

With the way people get added and removed from big tech, why is having worked at these companies still considered a badge of honor?

Ifkaluva4• 3 months ago

I don’t know if it’s a badge of honor, but it’s definitely highly desirable because they pay a lot. The term FAANG was originally coined to group together extremely high paying companies.

Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.

derwiki3• 3 months ago

Mathing that backwards, you’re saying L5 makes 250k/year? That seems very low for Senior.

wolvoleo5• 3 months ago

Again??? Phew glad I don't work there. I hate that constant worry.

nemo44x• 3 months ago

For years the advantage big tech had was that capital expenditure was minimal and now with every big tech company trying to become an AI company they’re blowing gobs of money on data centers and everything that goes inside of them.

AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.

sys_64738• 3 months ago

Does the Facebook corporate campus still have the Sun Microsystems logo on the reverse side? I hope these 10% see that and welcome its significance.

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

The clockwise swastika? Yeah

https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/sun-microsystems-sign-at-...

dehrmann• 3 months ago

As of a few years ago, some of the restrooms in Classic still had purple and yellow tiles.

blinded• 3 months ago

Systems are great, but the product has been very poor.

janalsncm2• 3 months ago

I wonder if the quality of YC applications will go up as more engineers find themselves in need of a job.

It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.

xtracto2• 3 months ago

This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before.

I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.

I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.

byzantinegene2• 3 months ago

in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.

rambojohnson• 3 months ago

and they're going to start monitoring employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI. good luck guys. save up aggressively now.

tech234a• 3 months ago

During mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.

kjkjadksj2• 3 months ago

Because it isn’t scientific. It is about appeasing irrational investors who demand a blood sacrifice. This is why it is always a big even number, and not some carefully established number based on analysis of operational shortcomings.

jen729w• 3 months ago

Because the stock market won't care about that.

plemer• 3 months ago

You’d have to go company-wide to sync schedules and norms. Not just opt in. Many would not like a 20% pay cut. The best talent would disproportionately leave.

Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.

Ifkaluva4• 3 months ago

Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?

Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!

dbish3• 3 months ago

A couple reasons I would guess:

1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.

2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.

4. Layoffs let you cut by performance.

NegativeK3• 3 months ago

Your points seem focused on the bottom line and short term extraction of labor from employees, versus actually building a long-term community of healthy, productive people.

Like this:

will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

Maybe that's a good thing? [1]

I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.

[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.

alexjplant2• 3 months ago

the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.

If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.

gensym• 3 months ago

There's a fixed cost to every employee. Health care being the biggest, so you don't save 20% by dropping an employee to 4 days / week, even with a proportionate pay cut.

Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.

gslin• 3 months ago

https://archive.is/3ZeOv

Chinjut• 3 months ago

Again? Haven't there been waves of mass Meta layoffs already?

sidcool• 3 months ago

Why would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.

loeg9• 3 months ago

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

nazcan• 3 months ago

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

Ekaros• 3 months ago

Making it 2-5 years there sounds like reasonable pile of money. And I don't think getting fired in one of these big layoff rounds is too big black mark.

phantom784• 3 months ago

I've not worked at Meta, but I was at a similar scale of company for 2 years before being let go. Once you factor in RSUs, they essentially paid double what I've ever made anywhere else. Knowing how volatile those sorts of positions can be, I just saved & invested all the extra, which worked out quite well.

netcan3• 3 months ago

Because they offer an attractive job/package relative to other opportunities... same as any other job people take.

citrin_ru• 3 months ago

Because in the current job market many job seekers will accept 1st offer after spending months looking for a job without any offers.

igleria2• 3 months ago

Facilitates legal immigration. At least that was my case (not at Meta thankfully).

derwiki3• 3 months ago

The comp is really good.

upupupandaway5• 3 months ago

I was offered $1.15m a year to work there back in 2022. That's why.

mancerayder2• 3 months ago

and you said no?

bandrami11• 3 months ago

This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.

riteshnoronha16• 3 months ago

Yup feels like it.

wisty• 3 months ago

3 and a half ways AI takes jobs:

1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)

2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else.

3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway.

Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...

Wololooo• 3 months ago

4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.

hn_throwaway_998• 3 months ago

It's #3 - it's always #3.

All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:

1. Correcting pandemic overhiring

2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.

So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.

netcan3• 3 months ago

Meta basically "pivoted."

The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.

That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.

aurareturn• 3 months ago

Why is #1 hypothetical?

If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.

In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.

Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

DonsDiscountGas2• 3 months ago

They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.

pjmlp• 3 months ago

1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work.

Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.

In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.

pelasaco• 3 months ago

1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)

At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.

lumost2• 3 months ago

Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept".

The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.

maerF0x0• 3 months ago

Also investors are currently more interested in hearing "Business is booming and we handled it all with AI+Robotics+Automations" than "We hired people".

The sentiment is that the latter is more expensive and less flexible than the former... which seems backwards to me. (AI is expensive, robots are mostly not that adaptable to new tasks, automations only really help the most repetitive tasks and they must be rewritten/updated when the task changes)

throwaway894345• 3 months ago

At my company, the executives have been saying things like "AI will let us do more with less", so they preemptively encourage attrition. Now the people with the skills to potentially automate away work (including via AI) can't get to it because they are now backlogged by doing the manual work themselves that they might otherwise be automating away. What's more: the way they "force attrition" aren't directly via layoffs which might let them target the lowest performers, but rather they give shitty pay raises across the board, which means the top performers leave as they have the most incentive to leave (they're the most able to get higher paying jobs elsewhere).

I'm not one to invoke "incompetence" willy-nilly, but I'm having a hard time explaining these policies apart from it.

Anyway, I bring this up because it didn't quite fit into your 3.5 rubric.

silveira• 3 months ago

And sometimes 3 can be "every other CEO is doing it, let's do it too. At least we already have the narrative.".

loeg9• 3 months ago

Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.

NewJazz• 3 months ago

Doing slightly less than 150b looks bad to investors. Or at least it looks small.

fmbb• 3 months ago

Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!

decimalenough• 3 months ago

My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.

Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.

bandrami11• 3 months ago

I think any company that is seen to reduce capex right now is going to be the Bear Sterns of this cycle

sulam2• 3 months ago

It’s slightly more nuanced than layoffs = capex. You’re right, they don’t. That said, they do create free cash flow, which the market uses as one important input into the value of a given stock. Moving FCF positively when capex spending is moving it the other way is the real financial accounting move that is happening here.

zurfer• 3 months ago

salaries are opex, data centers are capex, you can't compare them in the same timeframe.

4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.

glouwbug• 3 months ago

Funny how AI took all the jobs, but not from automation

xg15• 3 months ago

I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.

HarHarVeryFunny• 3 months ago

Absolutely.

Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.

DarkNova6• 3 months ago

In other words: Nothing has changed.

Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.

NickC252• 3 months ago

The desire for financial hyper-optimization has been killing the economy for a very long time, not just recently due to AI.

That said, AI isn't helping.

giancarlostoro• 3 months ago

I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether.

This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.

ljm• 3 months ago

The WWeWork model of being in real estate and not tech, I guess.

Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.

bandrami11• 3 months ago

It's weird though: everybody wants to be seen to be building data centers but nobody is actually willing to put down the money to do this (except Oracle and I think it's universally agreed they're probably going to be destroyed by this). Half of the deals announced to begin in 2025 still haven't started yet, and that's with a very generous definition of "started" that basically just means "broke ground". Now some of that is an unexpected wave of populist datacenter opposition gumming the works (though I would argue that should have been expected and mitigated), but a lot of it is just a plain old lack of steel, engineers, and power, which are things everybody knew about before these deals got inked.

dheera• 3 months ago

not because AI is doing the work they used to do

No, it's absolutely happening that way.

I work in tech in a senior IC role. I'm now expected to single-handedly do the work that I would previously have led a team of 5-10 people to do. The junior ICs, we aren't really hiring for. This is not specific to my company, it's like this across the board.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 months ago

There is only one reason to terminate large numbers of employees at the same time

1. Cut costs

There are multiple reasons companies may need to cut costs. Generally, historically, they are not positive

One of them is that, internally, the business is not doing well or the company believes there are problems on the horizon

Perhaps a company that is healthy and optimistic about the future could at the same time be conducting successive rounds of layoffs

But are there many examples of healthy, shrinking companies from history

Usually company growth is taken as a sign of prosperity. Multiple rounds of layoffs are not. More like survival mode

But of course this time it will be different and the remaining employees after the layoffs have nothing to worry about

matt3210• 3 months ago

AI winter #3 incoming. Enjoy the cheep ram and gpus

Magi604• 3 months ago

I hope you're right. What my RAM cost me $130 last year is $650 last week. This is ridiculous.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

Will Meta also cut down on their use of lobbyists, trying to mandate more age sniffing?

Something is seriously flawed here.

SpaceNoodled• 3 months ago

Nice to see that decimation is back in style

weezing• 3 months ago

On the other hand 8000 people can potentially do some jobs meaningful to society.

Oras• 3 months ago

The tech job market is in dark state now, really not much options to choose “meaningful”.

I feel for the those who will hear the bad news, whether meta or other companies, and I hope they will cope and get other roles

hackable_sand• 3 months ago

There are plenty of jobs outside of software development.

fevangelou• 3 months ago

Firing 10% of their workforce on the one hand. Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other. Get fired or get tracked. Well, isn't that convenient...

schnitzelstoat• 3 months ago

Introducing the tracking in such a public manner is probably a way to drive voluntary redundancies as it encourages people to leave.

SJMG• 3 months ago

This is my thought as well. Fewer severance packages.

franczesko• 3 months ago

If there's a number given, the reason is secondary.

igleria2• 3 months ago

I wonder if in a parallel universe without the extremely stupid metaverse sidequest this could have been prevented.

danans2• 3 months ago

I doubt it. Expensive and wasteful side quests are a symptom of too much wealth/power concentrated in too few hands.

Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.

androiddrew• 3 months ago

Isn't this the same idea of the old Roman decimation.

gordonhart• 3 months ago

Depends on who's making the call for who gets cut. A key part of decimation was that the doomed soldiers were beaten to death by their comrades to give the remaining 9 a bloody, lasting impression of their dishonor. If Meta makes everybody sit in a group with their ten closest coworkers and debate until they decide who gets cut it's a lot closer to decimation than if management suddenly shuts off 10% of employee computers.

threepts• 3 months ago

I thought they were doing this in order to allocate funds for their multimillion acquisitions on their superintelligence labs?

greg_dc• 3 months ago

Meta will go down in history as the quintessential case study of late stage capitalism. A company that has provided a consistently worse product over time and produced consistently less value over time to the detriment of both their users and employees, yet somehow gets consistently more profitable.

shin_lao• 3 months ago

AI is a scapegoat. These companies are bloated. That's why they are laying off people en masse.

dbgrman5• 3 months ago

Not just bloated, obese. These companies have an eating disorder. They can longer control it. Even after all the layoffs meta gained net weight in 2025.

_heimdall4• 3 months ago

2026, the year of Corporate Ozempic?

frrho• 3 months ago

Meta has been dead for years

neuroelectron• 3 months ago

Can they liquidate 10% of their AI infra while they're at it?

dbgrman5• 3 months ago

They’re trying that with meta compute

alex11386• 3 months ago

AI or not, I can't wait until the tech platforms decide they don't need any workers to actually, you know, work on their product, and so it gets worse and worse

Facebook is kind of a functionally useless product. The feed has always been a mess. You can get banned at any time, there's no account security, and so on and so on

i_love_retros2• 3 months ago

We're going to need UBI really soon. I fear for society as we know it if it doesn't happen.

ProllyInfamous3• 3 months ago

-OR- a global meatgrinder to dispose of excess younger/impoverished males.

Between you and me and the internet, I'm rooting for UBI.

i_love_retros2• 3 months ago

Can't we throw billionaires in the meat grinder instead?

sharadov5• 3 months ago

As much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.

snarf21• 3 months ago

I think it is hard to call IG and WA bets. He simply bought the competition that was set to wreck his platform.

hx8• 3 months ago

Meta actually pioneered the Buy The Competition strategy in a brand new way.

1. Larger acquisitions. IG was $1B for a 13 employee company. WA was $22B. We were all talking about how big those numbers were at the time, but looking back they seem like mid-sized acquisitions. Before, most companies would have looked at these numbers and tried to build it themselves, or underbid, or just not pull the trigger. Blockbuster and Netflix. Yahoo and Google.

2. He meet the user where they were. He made no meaningful and instant change to the apps. There was no rebranding. They still have their own login screens and apps. Many casual users might not notice their major platforms are owned by the same company. Compare this to more old-school tech companies like Oracle buying Sun, or a national cellphone provider buying a regional one, or whatever happens with AOL-Time-Warner-Discovery.

btian• 3 months ago

Why didn't other CEOs buy them to wreck Zuck's platform?

sharadov5• 3 months ago

Not as easy as it sounds, most acquisitions are not integrated well. He was astute in determining they were going to be 100X what he paid( and he paid a lot by the standards of the day).

pgoggijr• 3 months ago

Sure but these are low-risk bets for him personally. When they don't work out 8,000 folks pay the price and he is still one of the richest people on the planet who will never have to worry about money, food, housing, or healthcare.

benjaminoakes• 3 months ago

I know you're right about Asia and Latin America, but should any one platform or person have that much power?

throwwrwqrqr• 3 months ago

no one can dare to ban an American company unless they want to be invaded or sanctioned

sharadov5• 3 months ago

No I don't that's why I said I don't like him or the platform. But the products are great, and there is no competition. And neither India or Latin America built domestic products to rival Whatsapp/Insta/FB.

whoisrosh• 3 months ago

It may be explained more by his FOMO, he tried crypto, NFT, metaverse, VR and now AI. This feels more like correction of mistakes at pandemic than bold bet at future.

officerk• 3 months ago

You might want to read Sarah-Wynn Willams 'Careless People' or listen to one of her interviews. Your opinion about him might change.

sharadov5• 3 months ago

I plan to read it, I've no doubt he's a douchebag, but most hyper-successful CEOs are psychopaths.

upupupandaway5• 3 months ago

OP is not saying Mark is a good person, but a ballsy CEO. And he is.

dbgrman5• 3 months ago

I am sorry but people going and wanting to go back to meta after being laid off is exactly why Meta keeps getting away with it.

I am in some ex-meta groups and people tell they got laid off and in the same sentence ask how/when can they apply again. If someone is laid off for supposed ‘low performance’ and they still want to go back because it pays 10-20% higher than others is just weak. Have some self esteem!

On the topic of recording clicks and keystrokes: they have one of the most extensive surveillance-ware on employee devices since 2015. So its not new. Its posted publicly to avoid some law suits in near future.

On the topic of training ai with this data: where do i even start. Meta is so delusional. NO ONE uses the ai in whatsapp, messenger, facebook, instagram. Many people don’t even try it. So regardless of the quality of the model, no one wants to speak to meta’s ai. Even if they produce a very efficient coworker, why would anyone touch meta’s ai? I wouldn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 months ago

Alternative to archive.is

Text-only, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS on blogger, no geo-blocking, no BS

    curl https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/meta-tells-staff-it-will-cut-10-of-jobs-in-push-for-efficiency \
    |egrep -o "(type\":\"paragraph)|(type\":\"text\",\"value\":\"[^\"]+)" \
    |sed '/Read More:/{N;d;};s/type\":\"paragraph/<p>/;s/.\{22\}//' \
    |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm

    firefox ./1.htm

ramon156• 3 months ago

no DDlS on blogger

Can you explain what you mean?

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...

gmadsen• 3 months ago

What is the intended purpose of giving a generic notice like this to employees? Are they suppose to compete for job security or start interviewing elsewhere?

cdrnsf• 3 months ago

Eh. I haven't used any of their products in well over a decade and don't miss any of them. Zuck is spineless and totally unlikeable.

hmokiguess• 3 months ago

I wonder if workers are now realizing that working for a corporation that predates on the vulnerability of humans through dark patterns isn't the best career move and have been trying to push for a better agenda internally, which leads to leadership shaving off to reset culture but framing it as "efficiency".

Does anyone affected by this or that works at Meta would dare speak about it?

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

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