12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff | Hacker News Reader

12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff

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309 pointsjiwidi360 comments

It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” The people I know who joined FAANG in the last five years are some of the hardest working people you’ll meet. There are some who get lucky and manage to coast but overall - the quality and tenacity of the IC folks is generally quite high.

I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.

> grinded the fuck out of leetcode

What is leetcode?

If not bait: a website to test competitive programming skills by algorithmic and data structure design questions.

The difficulty levels vary and FAANG is well-known to ask such questions (in the harder difficulty spectrum) intech interviews

Ah, thanks. Wasn't bait, I'm just a bit too old in the tooth to be involved in modern-day interview culture. (The interviews I conduct are far more relaxed, personal, and practical.)

It's a scheme that (1) provides a busywork/proof-of-work barrier to entry to FAANG companies, and (2) fools engineers into believing that they are Robert Tarjan when in fact they can't wipe their own asses.

Canned programming interview questions that teach aspiring young people to memorize and recite a function line-for-line rather than actually be able to discuss implementations with the interviewer like a human being. (I blame lazy, clueless hiring managers and hiring practices for enabling this)

They are canned in a way, but they did first originate from these companies. Leetcode is essentially a compendium of all that.

But you'll be nicked hard if you don't communicate a ton. It's actually bad form to not verbally discuss the approach, big O space/time tradeoffs, testing approach, etc, before starting to code. For a medium type problem that could be a full 5-10 minutes of talking before doing 10-20 minutes of coding.

Also the general advice is to not memorize the answers. There's literally thousands of them. It's to do many in different classes of problems to get a feel for the algorithms and to see the patterns on when to apply what, and to esp. dig deep into alternate solutions provided in the discussion sections because it's not uncommon for an interview to switch it up and ask to optimize space instead of time.

It's really just becoming a mid-level competitive programmer, which takes some grit, but is somewhat removed from being a great engineer.

My impression is that most people who start at a FAANG company are pretty hard-working but over time become less so, as they realize that it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work and as they get too comfortable with the various benefits that working at a large company provides. Personally that's what I find kind of depressing, seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff.

Potential for what? Working very hard for even less pay?

Potential to contribute meaningful improvements to society. It's easy to lose track of in the modern world, but our work is supposed to actually produce value in the real non-monetary sense of the word.

I mean, it isn't like the common alternative to the megacorps are all society-improving companies.

Trading firms, various financial software companies, gig economy apps, crypto companies, and developer tools companies tend to be the things that recruit me most frequently. Not exactly companies that I feel are providing a lot of benefit to people. Just more efficient ways of being extractive or helping other companies be extractive.

I wonder what would happen if more software engineers viewed themselves like landscapers/plumbers/electricians. That is, you have a skill, people in your community need it, now you just need to find those people.

A friend of mine used to work in the bizdev side of a non-profit, managing donations and tracking groups to thank and follow-up with and so on. Incidentally she started complaining about how bad the user experience of the software she was using was, which got my ears tingling. What if people in her position at other non-profits had the same experience to the extent that I could distribute the cost of developing something this group of users found value in (increased efficiency/productivity) that their organizations would be willing to switch to?

I ended up not following through for personal reasons and there are some of the normal "cost of switching" stuff one would have to get past to make this work, but little things like this wouldn't generate hockey-stick revenue but could bring value to the world. If the Thibault can make a decent living making a good free open source chess website or Tarn can make a decent living making the most in-depth fantasy world simulator the world's ever seen, surely there are other modest opportunities out there to be the change we want to see in the world (interestingly both examples here live on donations rather than selling a service/product).

To me, the big difference is that I believe that I can have a greater positive impact by working at one of these megacorps and donating a ton of money to charity. Where I work, I am not generating money for my employer but helping improve an external software ecosystem. This I feel is a small positive thing at a company that might be a net harm to the world.

But the pay is way way way way higher than what I could get by building a website for the local food bank. Instead, I can donate five or six figures annually to charitable causes and still come out ahead for my own income.

If you're serious about it I hope you and everyone else that says this commit by picking an issue of society you're passionate about, researching charitable foundations, and contributing a recurring donation that hits the range of money you're willing to part with.

You should also keep tuned in to the organization (and those that receive grants from them) on what impact your helping create to build reinforcement.

I do. I donate a very large amount of money to an organization that I am deeply involved with that does a lot of good efficiently and effectively. I'm sure that a lot of people just use this as a justification and don't actually follow through but I really am donating an amount of money that would be completely infeasible if I was instead employed by this organization.

I make a good living building software for nonprofits. It’s true there are plenty of opportunities for better software out there. But, as is often the case, understanding the industry helps. I worked for 10 years at nonprofits in non-developer roles and that experience massively increases my value as a developer to my clients. Enthusiasm and being able to code are great, but making an effort to understand the problem space is even more valuable.

Software has a tendency to centralize more than plumbing because 1 plumber can only plumb 1 building, but 1 SWE can write code used by billions. Then you account for efficiencies of scale that generally make it easier for a big business to out compete a small business (e.g. data center costs; in the very extreme case you might think that having enough resources to build custom chips like TPUs falls into this category) and you end up with tech dominated by a few large companies, i.e. basically the situation we have today.

I think a lot of people who work at a FAANG don't see it that way. Adding one small feature to Facebook or Google is going to have a small impact on billions of lives, while a new SaaS app has a big impact on hundreds.

Of course, there is another group whose attitude is more along the lines of, "fuck society, pay me more."

Monetary value is real value. That's literally the entire point of money, a physical and finite object to represent the value people place in the items they purchase. Where you spend your time and money is what you value.

I spend a lot of my spare time in VS Code working on stuff that never goes public or makes a single cent. I value that time a lot. I freaking love writing code and prorotyping my random ideas. This is completely outside the realm of the monetary. Similarly, I like taking walks, especially in the fall and winter. No one pays me to do it and I don't have to pay to do it. I am not saying what you said is wrong, but it is certainly incomplete.

Money is compensation for your free time spent doing things you don't want to do. Your free time spent is valued at the opportunity cost of using it not making money. Money isn't the only source of value but it is directly related to both how much time you spend earning it and what you choose to spend it on.

Money is just the common language you and I use to express what we personally value.

> Money is just the common language you and I use to express what we personally value.

It is, but we do not have equal opportunity to express that value. Some people have thousands of times more money than others, and thus the things they value are over-represented by monetary value. Furthermore, due to marginal utility, the things we first spend money on tend to much more valuable to us than the things we spend extra spare money on, the money spent by the rich tend to be less representative of actual value than that spent by the poor. As that is a huge proportion of the total money spent in our current society (see for example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...), money ends up not being that great a measure of true value as defined by the things that people want and need.

> Some people have thousands of times more money than others

I don't think it works that way, at least that's not the way I think about it/find it useful to think about it.

You have to consider each individual in a vacuum with what they can get and how they can earn money. The money that another person has is largely irrelevant to the individual (aside from the macro economic effects).

>money ends up not being that great a measure of true value as defined by the things that people want and need.

"Not that great" as compared to what? It's the only measure I know of.

> You have to consider each individual in a vacuum with what they can get and how they can earn money. The money that another person has is largely irrelevant to the individual

Ah, but how they can earn money is to a great extent determined by those who have large amounts of wealth (more specifically those who control large amounts of wealth which includes those who own and also those who invest on behalf of others (such as hedge fund managers). Consider how many people are employed by Meta to work on metaverse products, and how much those people earn. Is that because those products have proved themselves on the open market? No, it's because they are the pet project of Mark Zuckerberg who has accrued large amounts of wealth. These kind of projects constitute a significant proportion of our economy.

> "Not that great" as compared to what? It's the only measure I know of.

Not that great compared to a hypothetical measure that was actually accurate. You said "monetary value is real value". And it isn't because it's not an accurate measure. There doesn't need to be a more accurate measure for that to be true.

What this means in practice is that one might be able to make a judgement that say a software job in a renewable energy company produces more value than software job creating a blockchain (even though that job is paid less), or that social worker produces more value than drug dealer even though that pays less. This judgement may or may not be correct, but one cannot rebut it simply by saying "it can't be more valuable, because if it was then it would be more highly paid". Lots of things are not compensated their true worth, and many things are over compensated.

We're talking past each other a bit because we're talking about different things when we say "value".

> What this means in practice is that one might be able to make a judgement that say a software job in a renewable energy company produces more value than software job creating a blockchain (even though that job is paid less), or that social worker produces more value than drug dealer even though that pays less. This judgement may or may not be correct, but one cannot rebut it simply by saying "it can't be more valuable, because if it was then it would be more highly paid". Lots of things are not compensated their true worth, and many things are over compensated.

What I'm talking about is value to one person. For example, if you were the person you were talking about working for the blockchain v. renewable company. If blockhain job pays 150k and renewable job pays 120k yet you choose the 120k job instead, I can say that the extra value you get from working for a renewable energy company vs a blockchain is at least 30k dollars. I can then take that 30k dollars and use that as a proxy for anything else you can get for 30k for the basis of comparison. For example, you have to buy a home with 200 less square feet or you have to send your kids to a different and worse college. The value you place on those two homes or those two colleges is also worth 30k.

This logic works for any group of people as well. The US population as a whole spends X dollars and Amazon and X dollars on climate change

> This judgement may or may not be correct

I'd argue that this judgement can't possibly be incorrect for the individual that makes it (at the time it was made. regret is possible later) and that any other context you try and call it "correct" doesn't provide any insight that can tell you something new.

If money didn't exist as a proxy for value and you were instead compensated a brand new car every year at job 1 and a new house every 3 years at job 2, it'd be a hell of a lot harder to figure out how much you valued your children's education.

The way you're talking about value is using your moral priorities to say what's wrong or right and calling what's right valuable. There is certainly plenty of room for a discussion of good and/or right but I think it's a distinct conversation than what people actually value (as demonstrated by their actions). It's philosophy vs economics.

> You said "monetary value is real value". And it isn't because it's not an accurate measure.

In the economic sense, monetary value is a precisely accurate measure that shows how people valued things in the past.

I think you're talking about what people do with their money and it's societal value (as determined by your ethics) which is, as you say, not an accurate measure.

> There is certainly plenty of room for a discussion of good and/or right but I think it's a distinct conversation than what people actually value (as demonstrated by their actions). It's philosophy vs economics.

I think this gets to the heart of the issue. I would say that I'm making a philosophical argument that the (classic) economic definition of value is insufficient because ones actions are not sufficient to determine someone's preferences unless you hold their circumstances constant.

> What I'm talking about is value to one person. For example, if you were the person you were talking about working for the blockchain v. renewable company. If blockhain job pays 150k and renewable job pays 120k yet you choose the 120k job instead, I can say that the extra value you get from working for a renewable energy company vs a blockchain is at least 30k dollars

Your logic here makes some amount of sense. I think where it falls down is that if you measure in this way then you can't compare values across people (or groups of people) at all. $30k for one person is not measuring the same amount of value as $30k for someone else. If Person A earning $300k/yr chooses to spend $60k on their children's education and Person B earning $50k/yr chooses to spend $10k on the same then you can't even say that that Person A values their childrens' education more than Person B, let alone that they value it $50k more. The opportunities available to different people are not the same.

I actually feel like this problem is significant enough that one shouldn't use dollars to measure value in this way at all, because dollars are usually fungible (a dollar is a dollar is a dollar) but in this case the measured value is non-fungible. Thus making any analogies using this measure liable to be highly misleading or commit logical fallacies.

Well, in your example person A and person B would value their children's education the same, in relative terms. i.e. what % proportion they are willing to spend.

Clearly not in absolute X dollar terms though.

Source?

Working for a FAANG provides negative value since it increases the power of shady adtech oligopolies

Isn't the entire purpose of money, to represent value?

This is just a big company thing. The larger the company, the less impact any single individual typically has.

Better than working hard at a startup that fails after several years of being severely underpaid.

One benefit of working at a small and even failing startup is that you get to do a lot of things, wear many hats, and ultimately learn a ton. It's rewarding. In a large tech behemoth, you are just a code monkey, where every day is just 90% communication and 10% some work that at the end of the day seems meaningless.

Many ppl don't get it. Commumication is work. And it's hard work. Sometimes way harder than coding.

For engineers, the more senior you get, the more communication you should be doing. In most companies, sitting in a corner and quietly writing code will not get you into director-level, however good you are.

I saw the greatest minds of my generation wasted on optimizing AdTech systems...

Making cool and useful stuff is not easy and requires the right ecosystem. For example, take all the immigrants working at FAANG. They could have been working in their countries and building something cool/useful/or something more meaningful to people in their origin countries. But that's not possible, that's one of the main reasons they come to US. Within US, it is similar problem but at a smaller scale.

I can't speak for all FAANG but it hasn't been my experience.

> pretty hard-working but over time become less so

If people start to cruise, they may get pressured by hard-working peers and management. Of course, those who are very good may get away with it as FAANG reward impact and not work, but there are many strong engineers there, so it's very hard to stand out. And those who do are incentized to climb the ladder rather than cruise.

> it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work

It's the opposite. Those who manage to have good evaluations are rewarded.

> seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff

There are tons of cool and useful projects in these big companies. Basically any field of CS you may be interested in is there.

My experience is that people work hard when they get the job. After one year, they realize it's hard to sustain that pace and that they barely meet the expectation with all the hard work. Some leave, some get managed out, and those who stay many years are productive individuals.

Here's my mental model of FAANG life:

- 1-2 years: Work hard because you feel optimistic and self-assured, working on exciting problems with smartest people in the world, lots of great resources - 2-3 years: Start to realize things aren't as great as you thought (e.g., a project you felt passionately about was junked for a random political reasons, people you thought were super smart start to just be normal coworkers, more of a premium on playing the game the right way than doing great work) but the salary and lifestyle is still attractive - 3-4 years: Many people leave to do something else, a bit more experienced but a bit more jaded. Many who stick around have figured out a niche to fill and are mainly in it for the lifestyle rather than the technical challenge

Basically I wish it was more common to sustain and grow the early-days excitement and passion while developing as an engineer. I think with smaller companies there's often more self-determination for junior employees, so that when they "grow up" and start to see more problems they usually caused the problem themself, rather than having to live with someone else's problem, which makes it easier to stay excited. YMMV of course

>I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.

Not sure you meant it, but this is an inadvertent attestation for "leetcode". As in, it's not about the leetcode, it's about the type of person that masters the leetcode.

I think everyone agrees on that. It’s an arbitrary hoop at this point. We’re just trying to find those who are willing to go the distance on the hoops.

In my experience talking to FB devs of varying report at conferences, they are often highly motivated and may thus quickly gain a deep understanding of the technology they get to work on, but their overall knowledge tends to be fairly shallow. Most skills are likely transferrable but a kid joining Facebook fresh from college to move on to another job three years later is still a rookie due to their lack of experience.

> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.”

I’ve participated in some mentorship programs for college grads. There are a lot of students who think that the FAANG career path is basically “Study LeetCode for a few months, get FAANG job, then rest and vest”.

Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense.

I suspect a lot of it stems from sour grapes: People inherently get jealous of high earners in prestigious jobs, and tend to reach for excuses to bring them down a notch.

High earning: yes

Prestigious: no

It’s just a job.

Having a high-paying job at a well-known tech company that average people recognize is the definition of a prestigious job in society.

If you don’t think FAANG jobs are socially prestigious, you’re probably thinking too narrowly within the HN comment section bubble. Talk to first-generation college graduates looking to make it big in the engineering world and FAANG jobs are the definition of prestigious to them and their families.

Given the negative views that a lot of average people have towards some of those FAANGs (more specifically, Facebook and Google), I would disagree that they're viewed as "prestigious" jobs. Years ago, sure, but whatever air of prestige they had going for themselves is quickly disappearing.

You’re misconstruing the company’s reputation with the career’s reputation.

A lot of people have negative sentiment toward “lawyers” as a group, but getting a big lawyer job is still considered prestigious for the individual.

Also, the average person actually really likes Google search, their Microsoft Xbox, their Instagram friends, and so on. If the average person actually disliked these products, they wouldn’t be the biggest brands in the world.

Except part of the problem with these tech giants is they're truly inescapable

I don't "like" Windows but I'm using it right now to type this comment because my option is the other FAANG, Apple. Or specifically going out of my way to use Linux. (This extends also to cell phones with the effective Google/Apple duopoly)

I don't "like" Facebook but it's the only way I can keep in contact with my family across the planet, because they're technologically illiterate and only understand Facebook Messenger

I don't "like" Amazon but they've sucked most of the oxygen out of online retail

You mean they are “inescapable” because people used their own free will to choose them?

- Computers - you admitted that you could use Linux. But Apple and Microsoft provide a better experience for you

- phones - you could use a PinePhone. But you choose to use an Android or iPhone because it is a better experience

- your family chose to use Facebook products even though there are plenty of other messaging apps and methods to share pictures. Facebook gave them a better experience.

- I can’t think of a single product that you can get from Amazon that you couldn’t get from somewhere else. You choose to use Amazon for the convenience

So what you're saying is, these are non-issues as long as I'm still able to go completely out of my own way to exercise as strained a free choice as possible?

Yes, just like I have a freedom of choice to sit down on my couch everyday to eat pizza, nachos and drink Coke or take the much harder route of walking over to ny home gym after work and run on my treadmill, climb my elliptical and lift weights.

There are plenty of people who use Linux as a daily driver, don’t use Facebook Messenger, and order from other places besides Amazon

So, for the sake of taking your...argument to its logical conclusion

Amazon sells an item I'm after

A physical store in a remote town in the African desert also sells it. But not online

Obviously it is my fault for not exercising my still existant, but "inconvenient" choice to not purchase the item from Amazon. Or simply book a flight across the atlantic, various other methods of transit to make the trip to the village and then return home the same way

Name an item that you can only order online from Amazon?

> You mean they are “inescapable” because people used their own free will to choose them?

I didn't authorize facebook to create an account for me, but they made one for me in secret anyway and they buy data from data brokers to fill my dossier with details of my life. Facebook isn't giving me a better experience when they track my internet browsing and app usage.

I don't "choose by my own free will" to make government websites send my data to Google by including trackers in their pages, but I still have to use those sites to get the data they provide and the services they offer.

Lots of people could use a Pine phone, but cannot afford one and the last time I checked into pine phones the "better experience" in that case would have meant "Can actually be used to place a phone call". What kind of alternative is a phone that couldn't place calls? They've likely fixed that issue by now, but let's not pretend that all choices are remotely equivalent or accessible.

If there's no comparable alternative to something it's extremely disingenuous to suggest that people must love it, or that they are making a deliberate choice to use it. Often there is no choice that doesn't involve upending your entire life or cutting yourself off from society.

For example, I could quit my job, leave my entire career behind, and endanger the health and safety of my family to try to find some entry level job in another industry that wouldn't make me use a Microsoft product, but if I'm not willing to do that does that mean I choose to use Windows of my own free will?

At what point does "give up everything and endanger the people you love or else keep using Windows" start feeling less like a choice freely made and a lot more like someone putting a gun to your head? Sometimes a "choice" isn't much of a choice at all, and in the case of using Google or Facebook you have no choice since they are impossible to avoid in today's society.

You can block Google analytics and the fact that your family chose Facebook doesn’t mean you have to anymore than I have to go to a family reunion when the rest of my family chose to go there. Facebook didn’t force your family to use it anymore than they forced them to go to a city you didn’t want to go to for the reunion.

> For example, I could quit my job, leave my entire career behind, and endanger the health and safety of my family to try to find some entry level job in another industry that wouldn't make me use a Microsoft product, but if I'm not willing to do that does that mean I choose to use Windows of my own free will?

There are millions of other people who chose a different career path. There are also developers who never have to use an MS product. I’m sorry you were forced to choose a career where you get to sit in front of a computer everyday probably making a lot more than people in a factory.

> You can block Google analytics

You can't block googleapis or reCAPTCHA and still have the site function properly.

> Facebook didn’t force your family to use it

But I still don't get to opt out of having an facebook account, or opt out facebook collecting my personal data, or opt out of them using it for whatever they want.

> I’m sorry you were forced to choose a career where you get to sit in front of a computer everyday probably making a lot more than people in a factory.

I'm not saying it's all bad, or that it couldn't be worse, I'm just saying you don't always get a choice in things and often the "choices" you have are false choices or forced choices.

I use Linux, don't use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and try my best to avoid ordering from Amazon.

You don't need to go out of your way to use Linux. It is really not that bad. Ubuntu Mate is a usable desktop and there are others, too, like Linux Mint, etc.

It doesn't artificially deprecate your hardware like new Windows releases do. And everything that you install through the package manager is kept up-to-date by it for security fixes, including your browser, mail client, word processor, text editors, Python packages, and so on, without you having to seek out updates manually.

Let’s not pretend that Microsoft has an unreasonable deprecation strategy. I have a laptop from 2008 [1] that’s running a fully supported Windows 10.

After Apple abandoned my old Core Duo 2.66Mhz Mac Mini that was introduced in 2006, I put Windows 7 on it. Windows 7 got its last security update in January 2020 [2]. Yes my old 14 year old Mac Mini is still running. My mom just stopped using it right before Covid as a secondary computer for kids she was tutoring to use Chrome.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Not...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

I am glad that it is working out for you. Not having security updates since January 2020 is a problem though. From what you're saying, it seems that you could upgrade to Windows 10 but then you're forced to stay on an old version of the OS whose EOL is approaching. This generally doesn't happen with Linux, and this is not the only benefit that Linux has.

I’m saying that the old Mac Mini that Apple discontinued support for in 2009 - Microsoft kept “supporting” until 2020. That’s 14 years of life for a computer with 1.5GB RAM, a 60GB spinning hard drive, USB 2, 802.11G. The only saving grace was that it also had Gigabit Ethernet.

My mom kept it because it was useful. But you can buy a $200 Dell (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-300...) that would serve the same purpose - a computer to run Chrome - that would run rings around a 16 year old computer. At some point it just becomes nerd pride to keep using. She does have other computers that she uses that are newer. But once it was EOL, she never used it.

Personally, I wouldn’t even think about getting any x86 laptop in 2022. Using an Intel laptop with its horrible battery life, heat and fan noise compared to an ARM Mac is like using a flip phone after the iPhone came out

I agree with you on Intel, and their CPUs also have the undisableable Intel Management Engine[1] problem.

But feeding the market power of a big company so that it can become a duopolist or a monopolist is not a good idea. Such market power is always used to perpetuate that power and to extract value from you. Hopefully with efforts like Asahi Linux,[2] Linux can soon be a daily driver on the M1, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

[2] https://asahilinux.org/

Apple is part of a duopoly in personal computers with around a 10% market share?

I did not say that. Microsoft is though (which was part of our previous conversation) and Apple as a company is a duopoly in smartphones and I expect them to aspire to using the same strategy in other domains.

> I use Linux, don't use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and try my best to avoid ordering from Amazon.

you don't use Facebook but that doesn't mean you don't have an account there and that they aren't using it to track every mention of you by anyone you know who also has an account. They're also buying data about you from data brokers and using that to fill your dossier and tracking your browsing/app usage history through facebook buttons and "sign in with facebook" features.

That's the problem with inescapable companies like facebook, Microsoft, and Google. You don't have to like them, you don't even have use them, but they'll still be collecting your data and making money at your expense. You aren't allowed to opt out.

It is only considered prestigious if you are part of the section of society that respects lawyers to begin with. It is a shit job where you most likely exploit people's misery all day, sort of like a telemarketer. That is the sentiment you will find outside of the already rich (which as a rule have significantly fewer principles).

Go outside the SF/HN bubble and try to find people with a negative view of Google. Out in the real world nobody cares about ad tracking. In 2020 I walked around suburban Colorado wearing a FB Messenger hoodie and had multiple people comment on how cool it was that I work there and ask what it’s like.

>Go outside the SF/HN bubble and try to find people with a negative view of Google. Out in the real world nobody cares about ad tracking.

I wasn't speaking specifically to ads/tracking. Out in the "real world" there are plenty of people who decry "big tech censorship" and have strong views about said tech firms that are tied to their political views.

Yeah but that’s like 1/100 people you meet. Most people don’t care about the stuff you care about, jjulius.

>Yeah but that’s like 1/100 people you meet.

Depends on where you live and who you're frequently around; my experience seems to be quite a bit different from yours. I also don't expect that people care about what I care about, appletrotter.

For the general population, it is a whole lot less.

The Verge has done some surveys on this[1] (not of their audience but of a national sample) and in 2021 90% of respondents had a positive view of Google, 89% of Netflix, 87% of Amazon, 79% of Apple, and 66% of Facebook (Instagram was 72%). I think plenty of people might have some kind of negative opinion about each of those companies, but view the jobs there as prestigious.

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22702798/verge-tech-surve...

I know and work with a lot of people outside of the tech sphere, and nowhere near SF, who have quite negative views of Google and Facebook. Mainly in the Chemistry and Biology spaces, though to be fair those people are generally very highly educated and tend to maintain a high awareness of what goes on in the world in general.

Your claim about the "real world" sort of boils down to "people are less likely to dislike Facebook and Google if they do not understand what they are doing", which isn't really a great thing to be able to claim.

I’m on the opposite coast working for $BigTech remotely. Just to keep the answer simple, when people outside of tech ask what I do I just say “I am a software developer” [1] and leave it at that. The same answer I’ve given for 25 years across 8 jobs. If they then ask where I work I say where I work, I tell them.

They usually just shrug and the conversation continues. Most people outside of the tech bubble just think a job is a job, many don’t even know the compensation of the large tech companies.

[1] The title isn’t strictly correct. But close enough. It beats droning on with the longer explanation

> Given the negative views that a lot of average people have towards some of those FAANGs

A lot of tech people. Believe it or not, Google still scores near the very top of "most trusted brands" when 3rd party analysts do studies. The tech community is highly negative of Google as a brand, but "average people" don't actually have a negative view.

I don't know about Facebook - haven't seen any recent data.

Well tbh catering to a crowd that exists in reality, like HNers, still probably makes more sense than extrapolating over a crowd of mythical normies in the absence of data.

I work for a FAANG. It’s just one of the eight jobs I’ve had in my 25+ year career.

Just like the other 7 jobs, it’s just a means for me to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

Admittedly more money than I’ve made before.

It's prestigious to people in tech (for those that know about the pay and the challenges of getting in). It is far less prestigious to average folks who are likely to think that Google is basically like any ol' office job but cooler decor and free lunches.

If you ask the average non tech person if working for Netflix or IBM is more prestigious they aren't going to laugh at the question like we would.

In some places, a job at a company someone has heard of, or a job that doesn't require you to be on your feet doing manual labor all day is prestigious. These tech companies are still jobs that carry prestige and life changing money for some people, it's all relative.

When I was a corp dev living in Atlanta working at an unknown company in 2000 making $70K a year, many from the small town I came from thought that was impressive. People were impressed for some reason when I told them I was a developer at GE in 2008. It really doesn’t take much.

Netflix and Facebook are tough places to coast or to rest and vest. Other places, if one just meets expectations, he/she is fine.

"Meets expectations" is part of managing workforce promotions.

I was offered a (non-tech) job at Netflix for a position 2 levels below my current title for 3x my current salary. When I expressed surprise, the HR rep said that Netflix was "top of the market" because they expect employees to work hard.

By the time I finished going through the interview process, the person who was supposed to be my boss had already left due to burnout. The person who was supposed to report to me had become my boss by the time I received an offer, but left by what would have been my start date. I would have ended up in charge of the department if I had taken the job.

Netflix, at least, is a grinder, and they pay correspondingly.

Anyone who has a spouse or children should also consider that in the very unlucky event the worst happens and a divorce or child support or alimony order is ordered while working for a FAANG, the judge may consider your FAANG income as your 'imputed income' in the future so taking a lower-stress job may not incur recomputing of your support orders. That is, your choice may look something like "grind at FAANGs forever" or wither in jail and/or always on the edge of bankruptcy. That's enough to scare the shit out of me from working at this double+ salary high-stress jobs.

This is not legal advice, IANAL.

I mean if you have this kind of concerns, isn't it better to get a prenup? Doesn't it solve the problem?

Or just not getting married... in my part of the world getting married is the exception rather than the norm.

Where is that?

In most parts of the world, married or not married, will give your partner the same rights and responsibilities.

Which part of the world? Even without civil partnership?

Does it mean that there's a legal battle to define whether a certain person can be considered a partner?

It's called a de facto union. Example:

"Unmarried Couples ...This page is about partners in a stable relationship who are not married or registered with any authority..." - https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/family/couple/de-facto...

Generally speaking pre-nuptial agreements in California mainly cover assets and income sources that a spouse had before the marriage. They wouldn't impact how a family law judge calculates imputed income for alimony or child support due to taking a higher paying job during the marriage. There are some additional complexities there so talk to an attorney if this is a concern for you. A post-nuptial agreement can also be an option.

Life changes. People can often grow in their careers, and also grow apart. And even if you work in FAANG, self-respecting spouses will demur or reevaluate the relationship if you go asking for a prenup. This kind of thing is almost unheard of for people who work for wages and do not have an agent, legal team or other type of representation already.

Prenup should be the default, any other agreement is fundamentally adversarial IMO.

If you get a new job they can re calculate spousal support. That's been the rule for decades, and MRA FUD notwithstanding courts will not force a spouse to maintain a job they hate to maintain the ex spouses standard of living... Unless there's evidence that you are taking the new job for the purpose of lowering your spousal (or child) support obligations, in which case they will impute income. (But note that appellate courts have been more willing to strike down imputed income orders than they traditionally were).

A post divorce party increase generally does not result in higher spousal support unless it might restore an earlier level of spousal support, but either way it would increase child support.

Not a lawyer, but married to a divorcee.

This scenario doesn't work as you expect if you get your first high-paying job and are served with divorce papers a week later. You have to be making that much money for something like 1-2 years for it to be considered any sort of baseline.

IMO, salespeople are hit hardest by this due to economic boom/bust cycles. You live an extravagant life when times are good, then get divorced during a recession and end up absolutely ruined because your earning potential (and imputed income) are tied to factors beyond your immediate control.

Bankruptcy does not relieve you of child support obligations. Unsure about alimony, but I doubt it.

If you have to get a lower-paying job after maintaining a higher-paying one, you can file for a modification, but you can only do this once every 3 years or so. It works both ways too-- your ex can file for a modification of child/spousal support (every 3 years) if they anticipate raises or promotions on your part.

Do you mean for a mid-level engineer with experience, or a college grad like the parent comment? My impression is if you were to try rest-and-vesting as an L3 (junior) SWE at any FAANG firm, you are eventually going to get PIP'ed out. It is very much "up or out" at least to L4 or L5. You may be able to hang around for two years, but then you're going to find yourself back in the job market.

That said if we are talking about mid-level/L5 engineers... then yes, I agree. From a far, it seems very possible to coast for a full 4 year equity grant if you situate yourself correctly, and have a manager that lets it slide.

Not for juniors,of course.

An L3 who remains an L3 will get PIP'd. If they're tenured it's possible, but if they're forever senior people will start doubting them. Staff, I think, is the first level that can really be "sat" in. I say sat in because at Staff "coasting" probably has a different definition that's what being used by the phrase people are referencing. It's more like you don't have to chase advancement to stay employed.

Which doesn't really make sense. Not necessarily every senior engineer wants or even should become Staff. It's a completely different role, it also has much less vacancies than for seniors.

Forcing seniors to go up or out is an illogical way to shoot yourself on the foot... They are the experienced engineers who can train the next batch of junior/mid-level that might want to become Staff later. Seniors are usually the engine of onboarding.

Some people like to be good at what they do without having to chase higher positions to perform a different job, I really don't understand why a company would force seniors to go up or out.

"Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years, which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board....Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice..." - https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-stack-exchange-podcast/epi...

I find 1.1 years as average incredibly low. Is this really the case?

"Ex-Googler" is somehow still a huge positive signal to some people, usually the ones who don't ask too many follow-up questions.

It's a symptom of how broken Google's internal culture is. It can become clear REALLY fast if you're on a dead-end project that'll never result in a promotion.

A lot of the time, it's because the project isn't some new and shiny thing getting pushed by a director. Lots of critical, difficult tasks don't get attention - which means that new engineers get saddled with them, realize they've been fucked out of a quick promo, and then leave for greener (on multiple levels) pastures where they'll be better appreciated.

> Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense.

This is where,

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33209621

and

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33205375

> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.”

People who think this look at a product made by 83,000 people and to them, it looks pretty similar to a product made by 83 people.

Some of those workers are working on a large-scale product that scales imperfectly. Sysadmins to rack new servers, human moderators to respond to users' reports, whatever. 1 per 20,000 users and a few billion users is a lot of workers. On the other hand, none of these companies are famous for their high-touch, responsive customer support.

Some of those workers are working very intensely on things that are completely invisible to end users. Applying security patches to backend servers. Training their workers to recognise the signs of modern slavery. Building their own in-house Linux distribution. Products that get cancelled before launch. Getting that newly acquired company onto your corporate platform.

And some of those workers are working on things that are marginally invisible to end users. Ad sales, feed ranking algorithms, spam detection.

Some of those workers are working on new, customer-facing but peripheral things, that have escaped notice because they're at a small scale, or unpopular. Shorts on youtube, for example.

To a critic, these manual scaling support, invisible and almost-invisible efforts don't count - and if you only count customer-facing features, that seems like a lot of developers and not much development.

The big disconnect is that the overwhelming majority of value is never presented to users. It would be trivial to make a viable alternative to the Facebook that users experience; just too difficult to get enough users to move to whatever new platform you make, and you won't be making money to support it.

When you have six figure employee numbers, the internal tools have more users than many startups do. You start to find that off the shelf tools don't work any more and you need to have people customizing them. Then you start seeing things that are specific to the company - people walking too far to get to conference rooms, and someone staffs up a tool to optimize meeting room allocations. You end up with tons of people working on things that are invisible to end users just to keep the machine running.

> When you have six figure employee numbers, the internal tools have more users than many startups do.

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy :)

Well, then you have a hiring advantage against many companies since you won't apply this judgment. I'd say LinkedIn is probably the least productive engineers, but most Googlers are right up there with the least productive. Facebook is bimodal.

But that's how I've found it in hiring.

> they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in

While I definitely agree with your assessment regarding laziness (I don't think I know or have worked with anyone at or from a FAANG that I would describe as "lazy") my experience is that grinding leetcode and systems design is entirely independent from "can actually write complex code and design real world systems".

In the dotcom shadow actually knowing how to get your hands dirty and solve real world problems that might not be sexy or at "Google scale" was the essential differentiator for candidates.

That change won't happen over night though, and I do also suspect you are correct that many of these people will have no trouble finding new jobs. They will have trouble finding the same TC.

IMO Google and Facebook are very different in this sense. At least from a user point of view, Google's sites seem to typically be well implemented (the annoying thing about the company is more that they are wasting lots of good brains on a mismanaged projects that only get half-released and ad tech).

The best thing I'll say about Facebook is that their site doesn't give the impression that a ton of talent has been wasted on it.

Google's sites are always half baked and unfinished. It gives the impression no one thought about the frontend. Facebook one could say is too polished. Too many people are involved adding too much, tracking each movement. Tons of talent has been wasted on Facebooks site.

I have worked with a few people who later joined Google. They were OK but not the best people I have ever worked with. So don’t believe that “the best people work for FAANG’s”. It’s BS hype.

Not all of those 12.000 people are going to be in technology, my guess is that most of them won't be.

The article is also poorly written. The author clearly know that Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook? Given that Meta, not Facebook, have 83.000 employees (which seems like a lot to be honest), the 12.000 is across all Meta owned companies. That could mean that Meta is dropping a bunch of projects that doesn't make money, firing the people working on them, while those working in profit centers a safe, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if moderations is going to take a big hit.

As others pointed out "quiet layoff" is a weird term to use, that could mean that initially they won't rehire, at least not externally, when people quit.

Previous news was that managers at Meta were told to put some percentage of their reports on PIP's, the thought at that time was they were preping for layoffs, and the PIP's are a prelude to get people to quit on their own accord

> Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook

This is the cost of idiotic name changes. Nobody I know refers to Google the mothership as Alphabet. Meta took more hold, but it’s still fairly common to call the whole thing Facebook.

Isn’t the reason for the Meta name taking (some) hold just the giant push for the “Metaverse” as the future of the company?

It’s not like Alphabet is doing anything… alphabetical. And if they did they’d call it Google Spelling anyway.

Meta really tries to have the new name replace the old in many contexts: when you start any of the apps it say “from Meta”, the Oculus Quest is now the Meta quest, the stock symbol changed, etc.

Alphabet is really a holding company and not a brand. If I open Google.com I don’t see any mention of alphabet. I can’t even imagine how their logo looks like.

(Meta/Facebook employee, but I don’t have any knowledge of this besides public stuff)

If they called it Google Spelling, that would be our signal that it would be killed off in 18 months.

It was a pun on "alpha"(the investment/speculation term)-"bets".

The original idea is that the Google founders would use Alphabet as holding company for their "alpha-bets", but apparently since Pichai took over of Alphabet as well this venture is probably also "Killed by Google"...

Google never changed its name, it's still Google and calling it that is appropriate. Google introduced a holding company Alphabet to own several companies (Google, Waymo, DeepMind, Verily, etc).

Facebook changed its name to Meta.

Comparing the two in the way you did is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.

>Google never changed its name, it's still Google and calling it that is appropriate. Google introduced a holding company Alphabet to own several companies (Google, Waymo, DeepMind, Verily, etc).

>Facebook changed its name to Meta.

Hey, thanks for that clarification. It was really nice of you t-...

>Comparing the two in the way you did is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.

... oh. Okay then.

content reviewers are not employees, they are contractors through third party companies like Accenture, so likely not included in the 83K employee number

That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?

There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.

Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB.

In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.

EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.

"allows for redundancy in development" is an incredible euphemism for "is unable to coordinate cross-team work"

Eh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here.

If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.

> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams)

Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.

Its more like, if x team doesn't deliver a functionality that y team needs, y team would need to come up with an alternative/short term solution in order to answer y customers/users. Sometimes alternatives doesn't go away even after a permanent fix comes along.

Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.

That's pretty much what multiple people working at FB at the time told me over the past years. It was also the conclusion of a third-party analysis of the FB mobile app which literally included multiple libraries for doing the same thing for different parts of the app which were developed by different teams. This was also true for the Facebook web app at least during the early React years.

I doubt this is an unusual situation.

I'm not falling on my sword to defend Facebook here, BTW. The company does a lot wrong. I just suspect it's not much worse than anyone else.

> that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways

Spend more time talking to average people.

They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

> They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.

A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.

At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook and their average user makes 1 posts per week.

So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.

I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and don't use it ever.

But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons.

1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption.

2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!

I really like the car analogy for this. I will frequently go 2-3 days a week without using my car. On the days I use it, there's a roughly 75% chance I am going to drive 5-6 miles to the gym and back, and nothing else. However, a car is a necessity for me. If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day.

> If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day.

And that’s the difference between us. If my car disappeared into the ether, I would immediately launch a series of ether-disappearing experiments, systematically trying larger and larger items and video recording the results. I would post these to HN, admittedly in the hopes of going viral while also doing my best to move science forward.

But you? Noooo, just pop over to your insurance company and get a new minivan, leaving the rest of us in the dark about your amazing ether disposal system.

> At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook

1/4th of all people is a staggeringly large number.

Also, Meta is more than Facebook and they don’t need to post to be using the platform. They have about 3.7 billion monthly active users.

I really don’t understand this knee-jerk drive to try to downplay the scale of a company that has half of the planet as their active user base.

You’re missing the point of the parent comment. News Feed and FB posts are a small fraction of activity in the FB family of apps. Messaging is massively important to billions of people worldwide. WhatsApp or Messenger usage is greater than SMS is some countries.

I have kept my Facebook account mostly to interact with business. Most of them, especially small ones, keep their FB pages more updated than their websites.

Facebook Marketplace is a whole world of its own. It's become like the Etsy/Ebay/Craigslist in Central America. Payments are confirmed by sending screenshots of bank transfers, and deliveries handed by private post or an informal network of couriers that visit towns and neighborhoods on specific days of the week.

Sure, until they are sick and they suddenly realize the quality of the medical equipment is actually more important. Or there is a disaster and they realize getting electricity or having satellite comms is more important. God forbid you end up in a war and the quality and innovation in your weapons determines if you live or die. Don't even get me started on food.

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.

Guess how they'll coordinate with friends and family and stay up to date on news from the government and emergency services. Do you think Facebook's crisis response features are for show? I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page.

> I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page.

Do either of those pages get the power back sooner?

How about regulating and resourcing the power systems so that storms don't frequently take them out. I've lived in the same house for over thirty years and I can count the number of outages on the fingers of one hand. Two of them were planned and all were of less than 24 hours duration.

I'll grant you that I live in an area that doesn't have a lot of storms but even so the electricity company cuts a wide corridor either side of power lines to make sure that trees cannot fall on the lines.

Meta is running data centers and subsea cables. Communication isn't icing on the cake, especially in difficult times

Whatsapp is pretty much the cornerstone of personal and business relationships here in India. I’ve closed more deals over Whatsapp than over phone calls and emails and Zoom calls combined.

And WhatsApp before Facebook famously ran on a tiny budget of humans and money per user.

Exactly. WhatsApp was fine before Facebook, and will be fine after Facebook. They only acquired it to stifle competition.

Same in Brazil. WhatsApp outages become the main national news when they happen, because it became so fundamental in everyday's life.

It is not just people talking to each other, several business rely almost completely in WhatsApp around here.

I think pretty much Europe + Africa + LatAm + Asia (minus East Asia) is using WhatsApp as defacto personal/work/business communication platform. Even in govt. domain.

IG is also still the top social media as well globally.

this just reminds me how US centric some of us default too, myself included.

Same in Mexico and probably Spain too.

I've never used Whatsapp, but I understand it's popular in some countries (to the point of being a de facto common communication medium like we'd use SMS for in the US), but how is it monetized?

> but how is it monetized?

Banks that use WhatsApp for customer support, or restaurant chains that take orders via WhastsApp bots, pay WhatsApp partners for API access.

The payment goes to the WhatsApp partner. What I'm not sure is, if it is distributed between Meta and the WhatsApp Api provider.

I assume Meta gets their pound of flesh somehow or another, but I really just wonder if it's a good business. Famously, Twitter seems like a terrible business (and that's independent or whether you think it's a useful messaging/microbloging/whatever service).

It’s likely not a very profitable business. Very limited scope to advertise on private messaging without really pissing off your customers. Whatsapp has opened up the API and I’m already getting sick of spam messages from businesses abusing the API.

I reckon its a bit like email. Great as a top of the funnel customer acquisition tool. Not that great from a money making perspective.

Whatsapp had 55 employees and 1.5b monthly users when they got acquired by FB. I very much doubt that the product is fundamentally better now that they are part of a company that has tens of thousands of employees. Same could be said about Instagram I guess?

It's the tyrrany of the rocket equation. Each dollar of revenue costs more than the last, and the money keeps getting spent until they are paying $0.999999 for earn $1

>They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.

Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.

IG is a photo sharing site with ads interspersed and WA is E2E texting. We gotta tone down the rhetoric here.

They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news.

Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.

Facebook and Instagram have the same ad tech behind it, and that's the most poisonous part.

To add to this, it's poisonous because it makes increasing "engagement" a primary goal for these platforms.

Those work together. But I find the most insidious aspect of these platforms is how it allows companies to exploit our vulnerability to unhealthy behavior. Even if you grant that Instagram's content isn't toxic (which it is, but just hypothetically), the ads are terrible. I, for example, don't drink. I was never an alcoholic per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and in many ways I miss it. Instagram shows me ads all the time trying to convince me how fun it is to drink, and why so-and-so drink is delicious and amazing. Now extend this to shopping additions, misinformation campaigns, et cetera.

Important doesn't mean "good". These apps literally rewire people's brains to stop being able to take in long-form information.

No wonder that we get stories of students now revolting against challenging courses: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough...

"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."

The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.

So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.

I'm sure that those things are important to those people. But they are less important to the world than the engineering that goes to make sure that there is power to run the servers, routers, laptops, and mobiles. Less important than the engineering that makes the motors that move the trains to get people to work and production lines for the food we all eat.

No idea, it’d be nice if a few of those 80,000 could get the “hide” button to work properly when I hit it on my iPhone Facebook app. I hate when people post gross closeup pictures of spiders (my friends are weird) then the “hide” button grays it out for a second then instantly re-serves the post in the same spot in my feed.

It has been like this for years now.

It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).

I wonder if that "phantom message" was intentional. It surely got you, and me, to check the Facebook messenger app several times.

The unfollow feature works great. And so does the unfriend.

As does the Super Unfriend feature, which comes in two flavors, indefinite and permanent.

Honestly a lot of the pictures are people in a spina bifida parents support group sharing pictures of their child’s spinal surgery. I don’t want to straight up block these people or even unfollow them as they might have questions I can answer sometime in the future, like I’m good at helping dads get used to the idea of cathetering their daughters without feeling like they’re a total weirdo.

So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing.

There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.

Oh god yes. Facebook and Messenger have so many such bugs, coupled with general slowness and clunkiness. Having 80k employees would sound so much more reasonable if all of Meta's services worked really well; right now it seems more like they do the bare minimum.

I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.

Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.

Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.

Update: I think Zuckerberg or someone with some swat at Facebook is watching over us here because this morning my friend posted a picture of a scary spider and I hit “hide” and wouldn’t you know, it actually hid. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I doubt it!

Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.

I live really close to their largest data center and only about 500 people work there. It’s 4x larger now than when they initially broke ground and even then it was insanely huge.

Edit.

I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.

You don't need people in a datacenter. You only need a skeleton crew for hands when things physically break, everything else should be done remotely

So what then is the argument about them needing more employees to serve more users?

The frontend apps are all the same, whether they have 3 users or 3 billion.

The front end apps are not all the same. If you built an app that handles 3 users well do you think it would easily handle 3 billion with no tweaks at any layer (app, framework, OS, network, hardware, edge traffic routing, internal dc network fabric, caching layer, storage for binary/ graph/ KV/ relational, cluster scheduler, security )? Another example, ML backed products (eg. Search, any RecSys) requires tuning features based on product specific needs.

You also end up leaving massive efficiencies on the floor by not hiring more specialists as you scale. This is a good read which explains it in detail https://danluu.com/in-house/

I would also suggest reading their published papers on in house systems to understand the challenges that come with operating at a large scale.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595

I’m sure FB could operate with a range of employees 40k-100k(?), but that number scaling with users is far from surprising.

You've mostly explained backend-related issues, no?

Yeah, most of that is backend issues. Part of them dictated by product requirements eg. We require serving 5 year old, <4MB photos with 99th percentile latency of 1 second.

Product and UI has its own complexities, but it seems clear each product is unique and would require different logic.

Then at most 3 people per product frontend would be enough? But the real number is more like 300+, so I can see the parent's point.

When your datacenters are huge, things physically break constantly.

What size crew do you infer when thinking of a “huge data center”

I’m still thinking it’s just enough to repair failures in a timely manner (and assuming there is spare capacity so you are not blocked if something breaks). Which means only a few hands on deck and the rest being triaged remotely.

Or not maybe we are still in the 90s when you need someone sitting at a desk in a server room to handle password resets :P

I'm in the same area, and agree the scale is dramatic. One land surveyor a friend ran into has been working there for 7 consecutive years. I think if I were in that role, I would want to see different environments from time to time.

>only about 500 people work there

I'm actually surprised there would be that many. This report [1] from the US chamber of commerce says 157 after initial construction and I've seen numbers lower than that. (Some may be a function of presumably outsourced workers like security guards and janitorial services.)

Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational. (Obviously engineers do work connected to datacenters from other locations.)

[1] https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/ctec_datacente...

> Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational.

I really wish local politicians would get this. Here in Norway, several small communities got wooed by businesses wanting free land and cheap electricity for data centers, in return for promises of hundreds if not thousands of jobs from all those supposedly using the data center.

One even ended up having to buy back land they gave for free[1] for ~$700k.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/ballangen-ga-bort-tomt-for-a-fa-...

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

> That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?

At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products.

I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.

To understand if that’s effective scaling, you have to know how much the average employee is costing Facebook and how much revenue the average MAU is generating.

Cost-effective is a different matter from labor-effective.

Poor/thrifty users take the same amount of work as users who click on ads and buy stuff.

> I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees

The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).

In 2016-2017, Valve had 360 employees[1], for 67 millions montly player[2], which make 186k active user per employees.

But then, Valve was one of the most profitable company per employee count.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation

[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a...

Easy to rake in profits when the majority of your business model is skimming 30% of a sale for being a glorified CDN with a skin.

Makes me wonder how many people work in just Apple's "services" divisions. Things like the App Store or iCloud, not hardware or MacOS engineering

Steam has way more features than that.

Iff it's only a glorified CDN, why noone yet did the same and have taken their market share? Epic Store was kind of a fiasco.

Still waiting on Half-Life 3

At least all the games that valve did make were excellent. Can't say the same equivalent about any other FAANG.

So what is it they do?

When I did a deepdive on Facebook ~5 months ago ("Inside the Facebook Engineering Culture"), I confirmed with people inside the company the company having ~75,000 global employees, ~32,000 working in tech.

While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users.

Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users).

The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee.

There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house).

Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently.

I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean:

1. Increasing their profitability even further

2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives

I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has.

All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate.

As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495

I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.

This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.

Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.

Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.

Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.

Not a surprising conclusion based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.

It is surprising that FB would allow the business analysis side of the house to grow equally (or even at half the rate) engineering based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.

When someone has a team or an area they are responsible for, they will try to make that team and responsibity grow as much as possible, whether or not it's good for the organization. This is not obvious to the perpetrators.

I don't really think Mark Zuckerberg is the source of having an aimless PM org. I think that he should serve jail time for wire fraud and overseeing a defective product that causes people harm. But I think that's disconnected from his abilities and vision as a founder, engineer, and creator of one of the most successful companies in the world.

When money was "free or cheap" (low interests) and plentiful I believe many of these large tech firms added head count as a competitive strategy: "If they're behind our desk then they're not behind a competitor's!" Now that interest rates are going up and talk of tighter times are in the mix, "waste" reduction is the new and upcoming wind that these and all firms are adjusting their sails to. Additionally, keeping rumors of mass layoffs can slow and paralyze smaller firms that are looking to hire because many may be holding off longer to actually hire current candidates in hopes of, and counting on, many many more potential applicants in the near future. Plus with the influx of developers they may be hoping for a buyers (employers) market with regards to compensation in the next few months.

Facebook is an ad company, and if that market is declining, those cuts may come from non-technical groups meant to serve those accounts and markets. There are likely other programs necessary with high marketing needs that I could imagine need culling and thus fewer people.

> 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks

> some 12,000 employees could be out of jobs soon.

> "It might look like they are moving on, but the reality is they are being forced out,"

If Meta is going to fire 15% of their staff within the next few weeks, it's not going to be quiet. The way they usually fire under performers isn't abrupt. People get consistent bad evaluations over a couple of halves, then go to a performance improvement programs. I'd assume that this type of things is a legal requirement in Europe.

Not sure how this is going to work.

I assume whole teams will be let go. That would be a lot more expedient and less prone to discriminatory accusations than the more extended method you describe.

I think they aren't firing people, they are laying off people. The difference is one has cause (not doing work up to standard, performance, behavior probs) the other is just giant corporation randomness of cancelling products, teams and managers being approached with "give me 15% of your team" types of requests.

They need to file legal paperwork for layoffs of this size so "quiet" isn't really a good description.

This many people is like $1.2B annually in savings if every person averages to $100k (which is conservative). They have stated they are leaning into AR/VR and their quarterly reports show other businesses are flat or shrinking. Its okay to have a business division that has a known profit margin and market share and not invest in furthering to expand it.

Reading through the comments I see a couple of recurring themes.

For what a quiet layoff means, that's easy. All these companies have a performance review system. Employees are effectively stack ranked. Facebook in particular has a target of 10-15% in subpar ratings. These are ratings below MA (Meets All Expectations) including MM (Meets Most), MN (Meets None) and NRL (Non-Regrettable Loss ie an employee who quits that they don't want back). This is the tech equivalent of IBM or GE firing the bottom 10% of staff every year.

So all you do is you get aggressive about PIPs and forcing those subpar ratings out. That's how a quiet layoff will work here.

The second theme is who will this affect. It's naive to think the answer is "low performers". I don't think the young will bear the brunt of this either. Young workers are as a general rule cheaper. Diversity will inevitably enter the picture. jAs a whole, people who good for whatever diversity metrics the company cares about will be forced out less often than those who aren't.

It's actually older workers who will bear the brunt of this as age (ie in the US being over 40 is a protected classs by law) is not a diversity metric I've seen any tech company cares about. Don't bleieve me? Go look at your company's diversity policy. It'll mention specific protected classes. See if age is one of them.

As always, leaf nodes in the org chart and some low level managers will pay the price for poor leadership right up to the executive level. Nobody cares about the metaverse. It's a strategy from a company that has no idea what it should be doing.

Previous discussions:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122417

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104679

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087097

I cover what's happening inside Facebook for software engineers, and I have confirmed that the 15% needs improvement target was not set as guideline for engineering teams, based on talking with several engineering managers within the company. However, this article is making its round amongst software engineers as well, creating lots of fear and uncertainty.

Right now, for engineering, what is happening is the revamped performance review process running its course. As with every year, the target for "needs improvement" is 10%, which is not new. Those going on "needs improvement", in the past, did not all go on PIPs. Also, PIPs at Facebook have not been nearly as draconian as at Amazon. With all these details, I find it a very strong stretch to say that "15% of Facebook's workforce may lose jobs."

Originally I wrote in a lot more detail about all of this - and why the Business Insider article likely doesn't apply to engineering - behind a paywall. Seeing this trending on Hacker News, which article I find misleading - an article referencing a public Blind post! - I un-paywalled my reflection, and my own analysis on the situation at Facebook. I personally doubt there is a need for layoffs at Meta, and I'm surprised no other publication points this out. Analyzing the financials gives a very different picture on whether or not any form of layoffs would be needed.

My response / reflection: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/meta-layoffs/

Engineering managers and even directors have no knowledge of large changes like this until the very last minute.

These sort of information is strictly VP+/SVP+. Unless you have talked to a few VPs, your prediction is as good as reading tea leaves.

The original Business Insider article - referenced by the article linked on this post - writes [1]

"Executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as 'needs support' in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said."

So, as per Insider - and the article this post is about -, this information should be below the VP-level now, at director levels, and widespread in the organization as per Insider's reporting. I talked with people who supposedly should have been told about this 15% target. In engineering, I could not find any sources (including at director-level people).

We'll see soon enough if the Business Insider article is right, as the article claims:

"Several employees told Insider that as much as 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks."

Let's check back mid-November to see if this did happen by then. If it would, there will be plenty of news on it.

I would not see the business sense. It does not mean that I am right. I offer my analysis, and I cannot predict what will happen, beyond assigning likelihoods to events. I assign a low likelihood of engineering layoffs happening at Meta the coming months. I see an even lower likelihood when considering that right now Business Insider reported about the performance review touchpoint happening - as previously planned - which tends to not be a trigger for letting people go, at least not in bulk.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-quiet-layoffs-will-...

Strong feeling the WFH cull is starting and the economic downturn is a good excuse for them to clear house.

They didn’t build all those huge HQs for them to sit empty.

Huh, WFH cull? Zuck himself works from home (or his Hawaiian island compound) half the year now and the company expanded the WFH option to the majority of employees and may even consider shrinking offices (or certainly stopping real estate expansion) and adopting hot desk policies

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-rem...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57425636.amp

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3888616-meta-platforms-working...

Doesn’t seem like an effective management strategy ? Working from the Hawaiian compound…

Many people have found themselves to be more productive working from home.

Not sure why you think Zuckerberg would be any different.

>>Zuck himself works from home

yes because it is unheard of that execs would do one thing for themselves and require something else for people that work for them.....

Until Meta gives up on the Metaverse, I don't think we will see a cull that's WFH oriented. Surely if Meta can't find a way to work in the Metaverse, no one ever will.

Now other big companies that continue to invest in HQs: I wonder.

I agree that would be smart but I actually don’t think Meta at the top understands that.

Zuck himself has said in interviews how great it would be to have Meta transport people to business meetings in a way that feels more meaningful than the current Zoom experience.

What's mind-boggling to me is yesterday's report that not all the VR employees have VR headsets, and Mark is mandating weekly VR Horizon meetings for people in the org. This had to be know by everyone in the org, except for Mark, that they didn't have a policy to get the employees headsets, and everyone was too afraid to tell him. The dude is living in a bubble and his underlings are just telling him what he wants to hear. That's no way to build a product or team, when people are afraid to tell you anything negative

In a leadership role it is very possible to know what's going on, observe, wait, and if it isn't getting to where you want it in the time you need it by, then you interviene.

This happened with Facebook Android app years ago, nearly all mobile devs were in iOS and they were ordered to use Android phone until the app performed as well as the iOS version. Feels like deja vu VR edition.

> They didn’t build all those huge HQs for them to sit empty.

I don't think that creating fear and uncertainty will bring the ranks back to the offices.

What do you think would?

The excuses for not are running out.

Ordering them back to the office and accepting that x% will quit and possibly work for a competitor.

This.

I have been downvoted several times for telling this. Remote work will be a net negative for tech people. Apart from the obvious productivity losses(lack of collaboration, and supervision), work is likely to move to places where salaries are lower, and they are likely to be big job cuts, as people realise get invisible and managements feels they don't need them.

Can someone elaborate on the quiet part of quiet layoff?

Business Insider’s journos are low quality. They will have heard about the quiet quitting movement and now the word quiet is in vogue and they’re applying it to all articles because they think it sounds good.

The reality is all layoffs are made quietly. It’s not something companies like to shout about

Quietgate is coming can you feel it

Heh. I wonder what else we’ll all be subjected to quietly in the coming years.

Hopefully not IRL ‘a quiet place.’

Online newspapers quietly dying due to nobody paying to get past paywalls would be my bet.

Loudcels are not ready to take the quietpill.

That's not true, mass layoffs are usually announced and get a lot of press

The difference here is the "layoffs" are that they are changing performance targets so more people get fired over the year instead of laying off a bunch of people at once

No, the reality is that layoffs have legally mandated public announcements, but pressuring a lot of employees into resigning all at the same time doesn't, which makes this a layoff that is quiet.

I don't know how California works, but in some other states when you fire someone without cause, the company is on the hook for additional unemployment payments.

Forcing 12,000 people to quit instead of firing them would save Facebook millions.

Would be awesome of those 12,000 didn't quit and just did the absolute minimum/nothing until they were actually fired. Wonder if facebook (or any company) would blink. But game theory dictates every employee thinks about self-preservation and would try to be the first one out.

The maximum unemployment benefit in CA is $450/week[1], $100k/52 weeks is $1,923/week. Even if Meta paid the full amount of $5.4M per week the net is they are still saving tens/hundreds of millions with the reduction.

[1] https://edd.ca.gov/en/Unemployment/UI-Calculator

Correct. IBM laid people off for years making sure to stay under the amount which would legally oblige them to report it publicly.

It's not a publicly announced layoff. These people will be "managed out" - they'll be put on PIPs, given shitty work to do, have constant reviews, never given any chance for a promotion or a raise, until eventually they choose to quit.

> until eventually they choose to quit

This is the part I don’t understand. What’s to stop people from not working and getting fired/packaged out instead?

I was being nice. Building up enough evidence to legitimately fire them is also a part of the "managing out" process.

Got it. Feels like this will be a lengthy process and require a lot of work, i.e. collecting evidence and documenting over multiple quarters, having people manage the process, all for 12k people. And my understanding is when you get PIP’d, you get offered a package of some kind to leave. I would be surprised if this approach is cheaper than just laying people off.

It will be pushed to line level managers, who will be overworked and stressed about it. But if you just make your managers do more, it doesn't cost the company anything.

It's embarrassing and awkward, and you can just go get another job instead of going through all that

A mass layoff of 50 people or more within 30 days from a single work location requires public announcements in California. Presumably Facebook is managing all these departures so they are 'resigning' or something, so they don't have to make an announcement. https://edd.ca.gov/en/Jobs_and_Training/Layoff_Services_WARN

> a single work location

What do WFH employees qualify as?

Interesting question. A company might try to skirt the law that way but I'm guessing a judge would squash it. So it would probably the main office you report out of, the HQ or the entire "remote" WFH cohort.

Reasons can be many just some ideas:

- Probably because they try to avoid needing to given an press statement/explanation to some more official entity.

- The whole meta verse could be going not so grate.

- Advertisement might not be going that well for meta either.

- Facebook is mostly used by older people and at least where I live most of the people have zombie Facebook accounts (i.e. they have one check in once a week due to family/old people connections and don't use it any further then that, so they might count as active users but are de-facto not)

- There had been a lot of whispers going around about people being unhappy about how some of the big tech companies kill competition by buying small startups and then silently dropping them after some time. This can count as not fully legal anti-competitive behavior in some situations so they can't just fire the people they brought, which might have contributed to them overgrowing.

- Silicon Valley has IMHO overpaid developers in average (and _only_ in average, and specific to SV) now that they have for years effectively killed most competition in one way or another (bought up, talent starvation, etc.) they might feel that it's time to lower wages for which they first have to get right of many existing contracts. What is better suited for this then a unstable economy where 1) they have an excuse to fire people 2) they can press lower wages because people are frightened and care more about having a ok paying job then potentially getting a greatly paying job.

- I feel some of the big tech companies work rather inefficient, sure they do have problems only people at their scale have, but then some small dev teams can sometimes compete with their products if you ignore that (and ignore network effect).

- Maybe they want to hide some fishy lay of schemes about not how many but which people they lay of. Potentially outright conflicting with employee protection laws in some states.

uh, I guess this are all wild rumors I have, in the end we will have to wait and see.

Probably because they try to avoid needing to given an press statement/explanation to some more official entity.

There are both federal and state laws that require companies to let the government know if they fire a certain number of people.

Trying to dodge a law that apples to every other company sounds like par for the course for Facebook and the other SV companies that aspire to emulate it.

That's the thing with quite layoffs. You for example could convince people to quit instead of being fired obfuscating the actual size and patterns of the layoffs.

And I mean especially Facebook is well known for not caring about low as long as they are not forced to.

> - The whole meta verse could be going not so grate.

It was pretty grating so far…

It is Facebook, who broke the wage-suppression cartel collusion between Apple, Google, Intuit, Adobe, etc. Love to see how FB layoffs can play out in terms of ToC at other places.

So, I don't have a source to back this up, and without a source this will be worst of the rumour mill, but I'll say it anyways in case someone has a source to back it up or refute it.

A few weeks ago it was explained that Facebook is telling affected people they are no longer on the team they were on before, and they have X weeks (4?) to apply internally and find a role on a new team. So you're not fired, you just don't have a team and failed to find a new one, so.. see ya?

It was hard and took a lot of digging but I was able to find a source for what you said:

https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/12000-facebook-empl...

It's always in the last place you would think of looking

On the software side, I think this is related to Meta shutting down entire projects at a time.

Their employees have some fixed amount of time (3 months?) to find another team in the company before they are forced to exit.

It would be easy for the company to arrange it so that high performers find a team easily and low performers are phased out quietly without a team picking them up.

I am not sure how many of the people that the article is describing are software engineers. Contrary to other comments, I believe a large proportion of the workforce that will be removed will be technical.

> It would be easy for the company to arrange it so that high performers find a team easily and low performers are phased out quietly without a team picking them up.

Yes - in fact this should happen naturally by simply restricting each team's headcount growth, together with shutting down other teams.

In my head, I imagine Zuck would prefer to just force all the employees into one large room and dump as many knives as there are jobs he wants to keep in and let nature take its course, but I could be a bit of a cynic.

Squid Game style?

I think there's a legitimate issue with how salary expectations have increased during the pandemic. These expectations will now have to be corrected. What's happening at Facebook is just part of that correction.

Google is doing the same thing, as are other tech companies.

2023 is going to be bloody and brutal.

I haven't seen it. I was thinking more like gladiatorial games - doesn't Zuck see himself as a Neo-Augustus type leader?

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-expl...

Structured to avoid the "WARN Act": https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn

That is, a bunch of people coincidentally ending up on performance plans, to Meta, might not be a "layoff".

The government takes a dim view on WARN act avoidance so if that is what is in fact being done it will come back to haunt Meta... It may even spur unionization among engineers. IBM PIP'd a bunch of older folks and that ended up in them settling a major lawsuit to avoid the airing of their dirty laundry.

"Quiet quitting" became a thing, now every writer feels a need to use it in a sentence.

I think they believe it show how they are current and on top of things?

Once "quiet quitting" took off the news was awash with stories like :

"You heard of quiet quitting, but quiet [firing, terminating, layoffs] is the next big thing".

Classic news feeds, find something trending, modify it slightly and hope your version trends too?

I’m assuming they labeled it as quiet because it falls outside legislation such as the WARN Act.

Mass layoffs are supposed to be formally announced, well structured, and within a set of government-mandated guidelines.

I assume that some percentage of these employees are developers, engineering managers, etc... I assume that a large percentage of those have high salaries and are based in the Bay Area.

I wonder if they will all be absorbed into the local job market, or if some will have to take lower salaries at remote companies, and perhaps even move to more affordable places?

My sincere belief is that there are a large number of employees whose total comp is over $400k and they provide far less value than that. But the arms race between FAANG drove up salaries to illogical levels. As people are pushed out they will not be able to hop to another FAANG. While total comp at startups might be similar but the equity isn’t liquid like FAANG is.

Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup. It will be a psychological shock to go from a FAANG environment to a small company.

In summary I think there will be some hard life lessons for some previously extremely well compensated tech folks. I hope they saved a lot of their past salaries.

> whose total comp is over $400k

People with high comp aren't there by chance, and don't keep their job if they don't perform consistently at their level.

> Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup

I worked in both environments, and it was quite similar to me. But FAANG was more stressful than the startup (which had investor cash to burn, and no angry customers). Also management is always behind your back and pushing you to your limits, in an environment were almost everyone is good and hard working.

No, maybe 20%-30% didn't make it by chance, they made it by straight up cheating on the leetcode part of their "virtual on-sites".

Blind has been salty about this for years, especially since now many of the FAANG cheaters are getting promoted...

How are they getting promoted? I hate the idea of cheating. Interviewing is unpleasant on both sides, and I don't want to compete with cheaters. But getting promoted isn't easy. It's been common advice to get a promo at another company if you are having trouble at your current job. Sure promos can be political and involve luck, but hopefully they are backed up by real impact.

This is HN, maybe we will get a bunch of new startups!

If at all, $400k is too little, considering Facebook revenue is ~$1.5 million per employee.

Ouch... you just think like what if there was one choice they could have made differently back then that they would have changed the fate for these 12,000 people, and the rest of their company. But they didn't make it...

The total number of layoffs will probably be less than 12,000 for now though

You can't keep paying new college hires > $150k/year with zero experience and not assume the money won't run out some day. That bubble had a slow leak and now they've finally run out of oxygen. I'm surprised it took this long. Zuck losing his goddamn mind with this metaverse nonsense didn't help matters.

Metaverse might have been a clever scam to prop up stock value. It was obvious to everyone that Facebook (the website/app) is a mature business with limited growth potential, so Zuck had to throw a new bone to clueless investors (who, in the age of zero interest rates, were throwing insane amounts of money on anything with a theoretical potential to go big) in order to keep the exponential growth of stock value. In that light, spending a couple billions a year on it doesn't sound too bad. Btw now that zero interest rates are over, this whole sharade makes way less sense. I wonder if there'll be massive cuts to the VR division.

*charade

(yes, weird spelling)

It’s Frensh

They were talking about tricks to prop up the value of Meta's shares, so it could have been an intentional pun.

Fair point.

Apple has invested billions in AR/VR and is building a headset.

And almost every crazy bet they've made in the last few decades has paid off e.g. AirPods, Watch.

Apple is a proven product innovator. "Meta" is just the same old PHP website it's been since 2005, only with some acquisitions and low-value in-house stuff tacked on.

Jobs was a proven product innovator. What did Apple innovate in periods when Jobs wasn't at the helm? Apple Watch?

Apple watch is great.. I mean I never really wore watches consistently until I got one especially with the smartphone as I never needed to just check the date and time on a watch anymore.

So headphones and watches are "crazy bets" now. Good lord.

Apple is kind of a similar story. They've moved from being a high-growth, tech-based stock, into a stable, brand-based stock a couple years ago - about the time when Warren Buffet spotted it and added them to his portfolio. Perhaps they're also looking for a chance to catch some second wind.

Apple is easily on their 3rd or 4th wind. The Apple II debuted in 1979 was hugely successful in try 80s and early 90s. They lost their way in the 90s until the iPod pretty much saved them. The iPhone was their greatest achievement and made them the valuable company they are today. They’ve had many winds and innovated over decades.

> Metaverse might have been a clever scam to prop up stock value.

Did that even work though? I know that when I heard about that, it immediately made me discount Facebook's job offer (I was interviewing at the time).

> You can't keep paying new college hires > $150k/year with zero experience and not assume the money won't run out some day.

Actually, you can when you make an average of $1.2 million/employee/year in revenue. And an average of $300,000/employee/year in profit.

> That bubble had a slow leak and now they've finally run out of oxygen.

You seem to be confusing Facebook with a no-profits-in-the-history-of-ever unicorn.

I don’t get why people keep saying this, it’s like they want companies to pay employees less. No one goes around saying “Investment Banking, now that’s a bubble, no way they can keep paying their employees that much!” (Goldman Sachs revenue / employee over $1.1 million) Presumably the person commenting on HN is in fact an employee and not like Mark Zuckerberg in disguise, though I guess it would make more sense if the people saying this were startup founders angry at having to compete for talent a FAANG wage levels.

>“Investment Banking, now that’s a bubble, no way they can keep paying their employees that much!

For what it's worth, and from the other side of the pond, it looks like IB has been on a rediscovery journey since the late 2000s financial crisis.

First of all the likes of GS are not regarded anymore as the next coming of the Messiah when it comes to holding a job, or at least that was the general feeling around 2006-2008, even going into the financial crisis years. And second, some formally big IBs are actually on the extinction path, I'm thinking mostly about Credit Suisse's IB division and if I'm not mistaken Deutsche is in the same situation.

Credit Suisse seems not to be doing great lately, after a few years of scandals.

Adding quiet onto the beginning of every trend relating to employment is beyond annoying

Quiet layoffs are a real thing.

Companies often announce layoffs for various self-serving reasons. Facebook isn't doing that in this case.

They have to spread them around if they are to avoid getting in trouble. The US has notification laws for large layoffs (laws intended for factory towns, but applicable to any company of size).

Only the second time I noticed it. Maybe its a quiet trend.

If only we could get Quiet Journalism

You can actually! Just move to N.Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia. It is pretty quiet there.

http://www.pyongyangtimes.com.kp/

http://alriyadhdaily.com/

https://sputniknews.com/

Doesn't seem quiet!

That could be actually funny with a better delivery.

Pyongyang Times showed me that sending wreaths seem to be a very important part of Kim Jong-Un's days.

On the technical side: impressive load times, plain JQuery + Bootstrap (respect), and lots of care with keeping IE8 compatibility.

9/10 with one point lost due to lack of HTTPS.

Also the `<nobr>` around Kim Jong-uns name. Presumably because it would be offensive to not have it all on the same line.

it is indeed quiet annoying.

How can you find a new position internally if there is a hiring freeze?

Catch 22?

“It’ll just work itself out naturally.” - Bob Slydell

15% isn’t very quiet.

It is if you don't announce it to the press or even your employees.

How is this legal? Seems that even USA provides some guarantees that it won't be quiet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

By categorizing all employees leaving as "discharge for cause, voluntary departure, or retirement", which are explicitly listed as 'not a layoff' in the WARN Act https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/100/s2527/text

I don't think they would be able to justify firing 12000 people for that, but sure, anything can happen under American law.

I can't imagine Meta winning in the end in California - the courts there are quite employee-friendly in such matters, and FAANG employees can generally afford lawyers.

Hopefully not via metaverse meetings

Turns out they didn't actually give all the VR devs VR headsets and no one had the guts to say "Uhhh hey Mark? We actually never put together a procedure for giving all the VR engineers and designers a VR headset"

I’m assuming it’s those engineers on high 6 figure salary?

Facebook has 75,000 employees?

Doing what?

playing second life

The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology.

Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

Quite the opposite where I live. Many older developers are shortly before retiring and companies have difficulties to get and train successors. Those that are not into development go into IT, which currently takes anyone. If you are a bum with a network cable, you will get hired.

I just think that companies like Facebook are a special case. Here it can be very true, and Meta certainly might consolidate their product lineup. High stakes and generous compensation, but these developments can mean that your position gets cancelled.

If it weren't for TikTok and some other competitors, they probably would have kept their jobs. But the market changes quickly. Facebook is now a network for parents and their children will look elsewhere naturally.

Very interesting. In my retirement I've spent the past five years helping refugees get their foot in the door (mostly Syrian and Afghan students/recent grads, but about 20% have a lot of experience). This year has been brutal, we shut down in August because everything dried up.

We worked mostly with lingering start-ups who failed to launch, mid-tier companies, and small companies. It all dried up, or the requirements shifted a tier (before mid-level was 3-5 years, now 5-7. Senior positions are basically looking for people with Principle / Staff engineering credentials). Of course, YMMV, we were navigating very specific situations which worked out well for people who are otherwise discriminated against / out of luck for finding work.

Also, anecdotally, the salaries attached to the stream of recruiter spam I receive in my personal e-mail have plummeted. Maybe this is good, smaller companies will be able to hire more staff since salary expectations are lower?

You get salaries in your recruiter spam? Amazing.

Where do you live? In Poland, developer after 40 or 50 is very rare - the market exploded in late 00s and 10s. That's very far from retirement and average age of developer is still in the 20s.

The US probably.

This seems a very catastrophic and quite miope (based on "everybody you know") assumption!

Hmm a bit doom and gloom i see.Its just meta's loss, these people will surely find new roles or start a company or two that might take down meta with that ghastly metaverse attempt.

Sounds like a great way of shooting oneself in the foot. They routinely complain about lack of seniors, where do they think seniors come from? Thin air?

> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé.

Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once.

When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.

I think reality will hit lot of these people. Similar thing happened in Finland with Nokia. A massive company for location, with compensation and internal politics and culture of big company. Many found it hard to adapt in new environment. Thus outside connections it not necessarily being positive thing on resume.

Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?

Yeah, I've found a sizeable portion of these people will gladly stall a project indefinitely by bringing a "but does it scale" mindset to a deployment that fits on an instance and a few AWS services.

Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc.

What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.

> Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time.

Definitely worth fixing this one.

No see, some guy from Heroku wrote a blog post about comprehensive build artifacts so now that's what we have to do. What don't you understand about comprehensive build artifacts? Maybe we can get on a long, long, long call to discuss how I'm right and you're wrong, I did work at $HUGE_COMPANY after all.

We can't possibly do things the wrong way, no matter how dumb our current practice is.

Immutable-ish builds are a great idea, but you should fix why on earth it's taking 2 hours for a Docker build :)

It already is a black mark since years if it was your only relevant employment.

Not because they are bad employees, but because they to used/focused/conditioned on Big Tech work. Which has often very different requirements and processes. Or in other words for such employees it can be especially challenging to onboard them. Which historically seem often is combined with an increased risk of them leaving your company not to long after on-boarding, weather that is for a different startup which now takes them or for founding their own company because they have the money reserves to risk it.

Or in other words, it's in general a risk you don't want to take when hiring.

Exceptions include: You have problems to hire anyone qualified. The person can somehow show through other qualifications that this isn't really a risk (pre "big tech" work, sometimes open source contributions but not always, etc).

But the ex-FAANG engineer grinded leetcode harder than the guy with 1000 GitHub stars on a passion project.

Person with 1000 GitHub stars likely gets wrecked in leetcode style interviews. Just ask the creator of homebrew (yes, THAT homebrew) about what happened to him when he got an interview with Google

Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

I don't think that's really true. Having a FAANG on your resume increases your chance of getting an interview, but very few companies will employ someone simply because they've come from a FAANG. It will always come down to how well you interview and what your tech test is like. Experience counts for a lot but most companies just don't need the sort of experience working at Facebook gives you.

Anecdotally, when I've interviewed candidates from FAANG, they've generally been a weak "would hire"; i.e. decent enough but not overwhelmingly good.

I wonder how many FAANG candidates' primary interviewee skill, is memorizing pointless trivia, and endless thought twisters.

Mostly off of books bought on amazon.

None of that provides for creative thinking, or real world problem solving. Nor demonstrates it.

Do these candidates interview well with normal corps? I wonder.

I wonder if you’ve been through FAANG interviews in the last 8 years. It sounds like you haven’t.

I’ve not found other companies interviews to be particularly good either. Non-leetcode interviews get biased a lot towards personality, resume, and ability to BS.

But since any exercise you choose is going to be flawed in some way, to me it's about getting as much diversity of signal in the time you're willing to spend per candidate. For smaller orgs, 3 hours of interviews is a reasonable cap, and I find I just don't get enough signal from leetcode exercises relative to the time they generally take (in my experience as a candidate, it's been 1-2 45 minute exercises).

That's a very short-sighted perspective.

Most companies don't need "rockstars". There's a lot of good tech produced outside of the FAANG bubble.

> The next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers.

A junior or mid-level developer is not the same as an average developer. There are plenty of senior "average" developers, and junior "rockstars". All of this is fine.

I think the problem is that FAANG developers are being seen as the worst of both worlds: solid performers but with Rockstar expectations (salary, desirability, job hopping). And a bias towards overcomplication.

(I am not making any claim this is true, but it's the view I encounter)

Personally, having worked in very small orgs (8 people) and moderately large ones (800), there is definitely a culture shock moving down an order of magnitude. You have to be more generalist and keep a very goal-oriented view. Small company work tends to be much higher ambiguity; you have to think about delivering something that may change within a few months, and where outages are seen as 'a good problem to have'. Scaling is less important than agility.

I think you’re overestimating the ability of having a FAANG on your CV. It might help you to get an interview, that’s kinda all.

Unless you’re were an early employee, in which case you’re probably going for co-founder roles anyway, that’s if you haven’t retired already.

I'm sorry, but this seems like total FUD. Yes, We're coming out of the most insane time ever in the history of the planet to be a software developer, but that doesn't mean there's any reason for new entrants to the industry to despair. People might be popping fewer bottles of champaign for the next little while, but compared to the US economy overall software workers are still living incredibly privileged lives. If you can code, no matter your years of experience, there's a job for you out there.

People should not use Facebook as some kind of canary in the coal mine for tech companies overall. Facebook's star is no longer rising due to recent privacy changes on the Apple platform, but the software sector overall will continue to grow. I don't believe Facebook's decline is some kind of harbinger for the entire industry, since most of the industry is not dependent on violating user privacy to the extent that Facebook has over the last 15 years or so.

And even if the core of what you say is true and the industry overall is headed for contraction, I don't believe the pain will last anywhere near 5 years. Even in the present "crisis" state, anybody with any talent should be able to find a new position in a few months. Looking back to the 2008 crisis, most people were back on track well before the 5-year anniversary.

TLDR: Don't listen to the doomsayers. Even with recent headwinds, I believe tech is still the highest value play for most young people entering the industry today. Unless you've got the chops and the prestige resume to be top of the class at a top law or business program, this is your best shot so you should commit mentally to doing whatever is necessary to maintain your place here. Even if there are a couple lean years, you're going to come out ahead in the long run as one of the people who knows how to control the machines.

My take is that companies hired like crazy during the pandemic and these people will be junior employees who have larger overhead, smaller output. Problem with tech right now is that it

1. Failing to justify valuations that were reached during the pandemic. Which come crashing down when interest rates starts rising. So many got caught with unsustainable budgets and commitments

2. Mass quitting that happened during the pandemic which was plugged frivolously by mass^2 hiring.

I don't think tech companies are going anywhere before getting their lost employees back. My thesis is, layoffs will impact new/young hires and newly created units/departments

Absolutely.

Trainee staff are not efficient (by definition) and provide a low ratio of productivity to investment. However, so long as your new hires have net positive impact, it's worth having them if gross velocity can expand your share of a growing market.

The market has been ripe for about a decade now, thanks to quantitative easing and cheap capital propping up consumer spend. In addition those low interest rates make it inexpensive to borrow money and hire that army of developers.

Coming into a more cautious market, however, where things are more expensive, the balance shifts more towards spend control and getting value for money. Which is why I think junior hiring will slow down for a few years: more experienced staff are more productive relative to their incomes, and they probably won't be promoted out of IC as quickly as they used to due to businesses slowing down.

I think the age of retraining in tech as a no-brainer is behind us now. To be honest I think that was happening already as the junior market became saturated. New entrants might have to spend more cycles applying for jobs; coding bootcamps may shutter.

You are assuming the market is homogenous. The vast majority of developers are not in the same league as FAANG devs. It's very unlikely a FAANG dev is going to go from $$$ to $. The market is not so bad that people are scrambling for any job they can get.

> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

I could also imagine the brand signalling not working in the favor of anyone leaving there around now.

Normally, people sometimes leave there because they've decided they want a different kind of work, or a different environment.

But, for the near future, there might be a large number of people forced out of there, ostensibly for poor performance.

When you're sifting through resumes, as much as "got into X" can look like a positive, "possibly spat back out by X" might cancel that out.

Those 12k are probably not even all in R&D/tech side.

Even if 12k are out in the market, there's still a massive shortage for software developers and even though we are training an insane amount of new ones per year the vacant spots are still growing.

Software has eaten the world, there's no industry today that don't depend on software to increase efficiency. There are more and more devices requiring software, in all levels of products from infrastructure to consumer goods.

I really don't understand where do you think we have enough developers so that even "average" developers would suffer. They have experience, they will end up where other "rockstars" (side-note: I absolutely hate this terminology) have left for greener pastures.

I think you should really look at the landscape before writing such a haphazard take, or at least bring some sources on why you think that this will affect in any way the job prospects of new developers for the next 5 years. There's absolutely nothing to sustain your argument more than "I think this".

> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology.

...like what? What other career exists with such a high average and median income?

>> Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career

and what would that be? In the US at least #LearnToCode was used because we were off shoring every non-tech job, and now those are going away so what is left?

This global recession will be ruthless. I'm hearing of mass lay-offs even outside of tech now. I suspect people in the tech industry can expect to stay out of work for 6+ months.

The US for example is in a predicament economically with no clear way out, other than a hard recession. And that's without mentioning the energy crisis still to hit there and the food crisis that is slowly unfolding.

Apocalypses really make you stop and think the worst, but eventually you say to yourself, “No, Armageddon with my life.”

I see what you did there. Well done!

Reading this comment takes me back to covid era rumors

Covid was a pretty awful 2 years for a lot of people. Plenty died and plenty have odd lingering symptoms.

A substantial number of people are still dealing with economic nightmares as a consequence of it. The global economy as a whole is.

And the crisis crisis, that happens when there are so many crises that it becomes a crisis.

Reminds of that Xzibit meme "yo dog, we put a crisis in your crisis so you can despair while you despair"

you're hearing of mass layoffs, meanwhile US unemployment is 3.5%

The number of employees they have is mind boggeling. All for two websites, a messenger and a very long tail of stuff nobody knows or cares about. And facebook is currently crashing and burning.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what these 100k very well paid people are doing all day.

I am very grateful to facebook because without it our business would not exist. But meta is killing their golden goose. People are leaving, advertising is barely worth it and every week there is a new glitch in core functionality. Just recently they moved the message inbox for pages from fb.com/page/inbox to some completely new URL. The old URL just shows a generic error. It's a small thing but it shows how they operate without any regard for their users.

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