"Headcount was 83,553 as of June 30, 2022, an increase of 32% year-over-year."
Like ... why? They hired 20 000 employees net in a year? And Zuckerberg now somehow says that they need to tighten the belt?
Like ... why? They hired 20 000 employees net in a year? And Zuckerberg now somehow says that they need to tighten the belt?
- Prestige. There are a lot of companies (especially VC funded startups) that have massively over-hired because a large headcount of high-end engineers is a signal to the market (and importantly, VCs) as to your seriousness.
- Talent denial to competitors. If you don't want anyone to catch up in a space (say, VR) you can get a long way by simply hiring the entire talent pool dry. This is however an incredibly expensive strategy that presumes you have a gargantuan amount of cashflow. I suspect this was a large part of FB's strategy, but they are no longer in a financial position to sustain it. Google has done this to a large extent for AI, and do not appear to be letting up.
- Just like code, forming new teams is easier than refactoring old teams. In big companies every part of the product feels essential (until the crisis moment, where every cut is on the table and a more sober accounting occurs), and so the default inclination in good times is to keep every team but add more teams/headcount in order to take on additional work. In bad times one is much more inclined to exchange one initiative for another, rather than simply accumulating initiatives.
- You retain engineers by giving them money/stock, and by giving them a well-defined system towards advancing within the company. Typically in BigTech advancement into the senior ranks is defined largely by ability to lead major efforts that require significantly-sized teams to build out. You need a steady pipeline of junior engineers in order to keep more senior engineers on the advancement track. Orgs that stop growing have their engineers' career advancements slow/freeze and will eventually suffer attrition for it. If your org isn't growing, it's shrinking.
- You retain management by giving them more reports. Power and influence within the company is largely correlated with the number of people you manage. This is both for stupid signaling reasons, but also for real practical reasons - the more resources a manager has the more they are able to take on initiatives that move their org (and themselves) forward.
Everything from management to IC is aligned around continuously growing orgs. It takes a massive external shock to undo this dynamic.
Also FB has been hireing way more than I thought for a long time:
mhio posted further down:
2017 20,658 43% yoy
2018 30,275 47%
2019 39,651 31%
2020 52,534 32%
2021 63,404 21%
2022 83,553 32%
Between 2016 and 2018 a 4 person team would go 4->6->9. Assuming even distribution of new hires.
Any team bigger than 4 would probably need a split.
I just don't see how any organization can grow this quick without cracking big time.
I think modeling the median tech employee as someone who wants to sit around and do nothing is inaccurate - most want to do something productive or fulfilling. Left to their own devices the average engineer in the average tech corporation will trend towards doing something.
The real trick is whether or not that thing is of high value to the company.
You can think about work almost as a gas - it expands to fill the container it's in. Which is to say, if you hire more people, those people will come up with work to occupy themselves. And I don't mean this in a "people are stupid and they will work on stupid menial shit" way - they will actually (in the median) try to come up with something they think is meaningful and important!
The problem is that this "bottom up" approach where people at the leaf nodes of the org tree come up with their own work requires intense curation from the top, otherwise the natural tendency is for lots of teams to form to very excitedly ship a lot of stuff of dubious value to the business.
tl;dr: The problem isn't engineers sitting around idle, it's that unguided engineers tend to get very busy shipping stuff that doesn't matter, or may actually be destructive to the business.
Side note: Google is like this internally, and I suspect (having never worked at FB) that Meta is likely similar. Upper management provides very little product guidance, so figuring out what work should be done and what they should ship is decided very close to the leaf nodes of the company. This IMO goes a long way to explain why Google cancels so much stuff - many, many engineering hours are spent shipping products that do not matter, and eventually the company has to wind it down.
Is there a break down somewhere of how many are SWE vs SRE vs support?
[1] - https://engineering.fb.com/category/production-engineering/
I'm a former Meta PE who reinterviewed internally as a SWE and then left because I was told that I'd have to move countries to finalize the conversion (because my location was a non-SWE site).
2017 20,658 43% yoy
2018 30,275 47%
2019 39,651 31%
2020 52,534 32%
2021 63,404 21%
There are about 65000 CS students getting a diploma each year in the US. I wonder how many of FB employees are SWEs.