Layoffs at Meta starts next week, leaked on Blind | Hacker News Reader

Layoffs at Meta starts next week, leaked on Blind

teamblind.com

49 pointsdonsupreme23 comments

I assume person posting this to HN is new to Blind.

Blind is 90% trolling, and every single week, in each major company forum, there's a post about layoffs starting next week.

I don't know much about Blind, but in my experience layoffs pretty much always follow the hiring freeze.

Sure, there's high likelihood of that happening. That doesn't change the high chances of that post being trolling.

Interesting; I suppose it's like the those who said Stadia would be shutdown as soon as it was announced in 2019.

Sure, but if you have someone that always claims there will be flooding, it doesn't have any bearing on whether it will flood next week just because the weather forecast says it will rain next week and floods usually happen after rain.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but the rain has a lot more to do with that than the "always claim a flood is coming" person.

it's so common that "source: my wife’s boyfriend at Amazon in the traffic org" is an inside joke you'll often see in response

Well, to be fair, as a passive member, they have statistically been correct over the past semester.

Also, Blind does lack coherency in rumors (and the toxic focus on compensation brings out the worst in people), but it has exploded during the pandemic due to WFH and newcomers seem to be less toxic.

I've actually seen people give good advice there recently, so it's become a bit nicer, almost like Fishbowl (which has its own problems, but I digress).

It's a bit like sitting on a stool at a very rowdy bar. You have ample evidence it's full of intoxicated people trying to assert themselves by showing off, but sometimes interesting facts spill out.

(Edit: which is why police does sit in bars.)

In that way, it may be an attempt for a desperate employee to prevent it from happening. Create a rumor, send link to HN, share on Twitter, etc. Everyone starts talking about it, and it reaches the executives at Meta. They try extra hard to not validate it, and perhaps switch strategies if already planned on it.

Though, in that same speculative direction, it could backfire and give them a great idea: "You know, we already took the PR brunt for for this rumor, might as well go ahead and lower our costs a bit of the next quarter".

This post was made from someone at Google.

That just reminded me of this ongoing Blind thread, which borders on the hilarious (warning: some partisan toxicity, but also some prime snark):

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Googlers-Are-Insufferable-qWz...

> If they meet 15% and keep the productivity alive then raise for some directors

That cannot be true.

If you fire 15% of your team and the productivity stays about the same, you were wasting resources before. If some other guy was running a really lean team, and they have to fire 15%, they will be punished and you will get a raise.

And you would be strongly motivated to hire more useless people that could act as a buffer in case there's another layoff round.

I know, it's Meta, but they can't be that blind.

This reminds me of how in the soviet union they would come up with a plan for what agriculture they wanted to grow. If they happened to be really good at growing, say, wheat, but really bad at, say, potatoes: they would deduce they needed to put more manpower into potatoes.

Rather than what they should have done which was lean into their ability to grow wheat better and just live with potato shortages.

(I'm no historian so I might be characterizing this badly, I admit)

> That cannot be true.

> I know, it's Meta, but they can't be that blind.

You've not actually seen the kinds of decisions corporations execute on in the interests of shareholder value, have you?

Tech companies are better at using data to drive their decisions than non-tech companies; they are no better at using data -sensibly-.

If this actually happens (it's Blind), with the policy listed (it's Blind), the rationale is quite easy to explain - clearly, the one whose productivity didn't suffer -fired the right people-. The one whose productivity suffered -fired the wrong people-. The option you present, that some teams are actually sufficiently lean already, runs against the broad generality the CEO gave of "too many employees, but few work", ergo it can't be true.

I heard from Zuckerberg's wife's niece that it's in preparation for a merger with Alphabet and Amazon.

AlphaMetaZon

Not ironically it does seem in the next 20 years that a merger of Google and Facebook could occur. Similarly Apple and Amazon joining in the somewhat distant future is possible from my crystal ball.

So cyberpunk 2077 is a documentary?

Everything on blind is completely unsubstantiated, doubly so if it’s a, “I heard from…” post. But still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this come true.

Leaked is a stretch here - no copy of an email or similar - more like claimed.

Blind gives you a tag based on your verified work email address. Except this poster does not have a verified Meta work address.

Call it a joke, call it an attempt to manipulate META stock (down 15% this month, maybe the OP is hoping their rumor will bump the stock up?). It's definitely not a leak in terms of how Blind works to verify users

Blind being the semi-toxic mess it is, I could see this being true, but I could also see this as an epic troll.

It is far and away the best site for tech career advice. Toxic advice for a toxic world.

That depends on what kind of career you want to have--and if you want to contribute to the toxicity, or lessen it where you can. I don't claim that correlation equals causation, but at this point I am reflexively suspicious of coworkers who take Blind (or, for that matter, startup-culture Twitter or Reddit) seriously.

I generally recommend to juniors that they avoid those crab buckets and work on cultivating real networks with people they know. YM, of course, MV.

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