Meta is preparing large-scale layoffs this week | Hacker News Reader

Meta is preparing large-scale layoffs this week

reuters.com

137 pointsyodsanklai30 comments

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497012

I'm pretty surprised that one fell off the front page so fast.

It's a prenouncement sort of thing and the convention is to discuss such things when they actually happen mostly because otherwise you end up having the same discussion N times. 'preparing to notify' is classic announcement-of-announcement and those get downweighted routinely.

HN tries to downweight posts that get too much engagement too fast. This is described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089

After the rate of posting cools down a bit (from not being on the front page), it can bubble back up.

thank you sooooo much for sharing this, because I've been on here for what seems like forever and never had this explained... resolves one of my bigger gripes about behaviour of the ranking algorithm, I only wish details / stories like this were more widely shared

There are a lot of features that are out there that are lightly documented / only hinted at in the "this is how it works".

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

You might also like to add the second chance pool to your pages to browse rather than just the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

People flag things they don't like, and it increases the decay rate.

That seems too easy to game.. how many flags does it take?

Shrug, it helps reduce "unwanted" content in the community.

I'm sure it depends on a few different factors (upvote, comments, possibly keywords). Mods can also pin or de-list stories as they see fit.

It also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power. If one abuses the function I imagine mods can / will [silently] neuter the account to have less (or no) effect.

There was also an interesting story recently about hacking HN ranking. The author created a bunch of accounts and got stories delisted from the frontpage by having too many noob accounts give a story an upvote over a short time period, apparently this triggered an anti-spam mechanism.

At some point it seems like a waste of time with poor ROI. You can make a story go away, so what? It's not like it'd work indefinitely, if it became widely abused the mods will catch on and modify the system.

I think the goal of HN is to have fun and interesting conversations, and connect with people. Excessive manipulation would be harmful with no real upside.

Here's the link:

https://reverseengineeringtogether.wordpress.com/2022/10/18/...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255477

Hehe, it got death by flagging. That's pretty funny.

It also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power.

Pretty sure this is not true.

The easiest way to 'manipulate' what's on the front page is to just send the mods an email about posts that could use a bit of a downward shove. Pre-announcements, dupes, etc regularly get tossed out. The front page would be all dupes and rage if that didn't happen.

100%, I email Dang quite frequently when I see fucked up shit. Not sure whether he likes me or not, because I've also been the source of problems sometimes. Nevertheless, he's consistently polite and helpful :)

As for the flagging, it's what I've seen claimed but don't know for sure. Thank you for the reality check, @pvg!

They should add 'there is no secret cabal of high karma users' to the FAQ. That'll clear that misconception up right away!

what's wild is that since the Twitter layoffs last week, recruiter messages on LinkedIn to my account have gone from ~10/day consistently to 0 since the announcement.

Twitter sounds an awful lot like SGI or Sun. For many companies, they will take this as the sign to batten down the hatches for a bit.

We still don’t know what high interest rates are going to do to businesses like Uber.

On that note Metas Bay Area HQ is the old sun campus. The back of the Facebook sign at the entrance still has the Sun Microsystems logo as a sort of reminder that nothing is permanent.

And Google's was SGI.

Kind of like building a house on an old burial ground. Trouble abounds!

> The back of the Facebook sign at the entrance still has the Sun Microsystems logo as a sort of reminder that nothing is permanent.

Pretty freaky if true

It's true, or was at least: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...

Except sun was selling servers, and servers indicate activity in the web market. Twitter on the other hand is a poorly managed company. As is uber.

Nothing in the article supports the "large-scale" qualifier in the title. There's also no link from Reuters to to the alleged WSJ report, but that is unfortunately par for the course.

I could understand a title like "Meta is preparing layoffs this week", but not the one used by Reuters. Alternatively, the Reuters report could include details possibly contained in the original WSJ article. Or maybe "Meta is preparing to layoff thousands this week" as others have reported.

If it's only 2,000 and the workforce is 65,000 strong, that's 3.1% of the workforce. Is that large-scale?

First, 3.1% is kind of big.

Second, there's legal definition of Mass Layoff as per WARN act.

> at least 50 employees are laid off during a 30-day period, if the laid-off employees made up at least one third of the workforce

> 500 employees are laid off during a 30-day period, no matter how large the workforce;

> an entire work site is closed down and at least 50 employees are laid off during a 30-day period.

It's WSJ's wording from https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-is-preparing-to-notify-emp...

This has to be the greatest time since 2008 to be hiring tech talent.

Yeah but most companies dont need leet code programmers, they need developers. The market for devs is still strong.

Kind of a blanket comment and seems a bit spiteful and unfair. Granted interviews at those companies could use a refresh and there are probably “leetcode” programmers there for sure, but there’s also plenty of talented developers at those companies.

I'd love to interview as a ' developer '. But I'm a crappy leet coder so I never get to that. I've blown quite a few FAANG interviews due to this.

To be fair, I'm self taught so I don't have a great data structure background. I've still had a good career though.

Did a ton of leet like coding in high school and forgot most of it. Pretty irrelevant to most jobs. Unless you build low level tooling then you really dont bubble sort on a daily basis.

1. Anecdotally these layoffs seem to have affected mostly non-technical roles.

2. The US produces 65,000 [1] CS graduates each year. This doesn't include immigration and people who go into tech having graduated with non-CS degrees.

The layoffs are significant in their local context but I wouldn't think they're large enough to perceptibly affect much on the ground for SWEs.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-...

Good luck to all my ex-Metamates, I hope it's not as deep a cut to the bone like what Elon did with Twitter. I'll be shocked if Twitter doesn't suffer multi-day outages by the end of the year given how deep some of the cuts sounded.

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