Blind: Meta's office to be closed on Wed – 15% layoff (5% Eng 50% recruiting) | Hacker News Reader

Blind: Meta's office to be closed on Wed – 15% layoff (5% Eng 50% recruiting)

teamblind.com

77 pointsdonsupreme46 comments

There have been a bunch of submissions about this, but for practical purposes, stories about a pending announcement fall in the "announcement of an announcement" category.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Let's wait for the thing itself. On HN, there's no harm in waiting.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Bloomberg is reporting similar. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-08/meta-plat...

Blind is really a poor source for verified information.

https://archive.ph/HU7j2

I wish I could down vote this (submission of a Blind link).

I'm surprised Blind posts are even allowed on HN

OK: let's initially assume the company is made up of only engineers and recruiting. Let R be the percentage of the company that is recruiting, so 1-R is engineering. Then 0.15 = 0.05(1-R) + 0.50R so 0.10 = 0.45R or R = 0.10/0.45... thereby 2/9th of the company is recruiting.

If engineering is less than 1-R (as it certainly is), we can model this with a new variable E: the percentage of the rest of the company that is engineering, with E=1 being the prior case. Then 0.15 = 0.05(1-R)E + 0.50R, and you eventually get R = (0.15-0.05E)/(0.50-0.05E).

To check this: if E were 0 (so, no engineers) then that would imply the percentage of all people at Facebook who are recruiters would be 30%, which makes sense as 50% of 30% is 15%. This means that our prior estimate of 2/9ths of the company--or ~22%--is a conservatively low estimate for R.

(FWIW: I'm guessing--as that's ridiculous, right? ;P--that there are a bunch of people being fired who aren't in either engineering or recruiting... that, or people quit Facebook so often that they have to have an army of recruiters just to maintain a steady state of employment.)

Here is an article from one year ago (October 27th, 2021) that might provide us some context:

https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...

> Facebook's hiring crisis: Engineers are turning down offers, internal docs show

> Just under two weeks ago, Facebook announced that it planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to help build, among other tools, its planned "metaverse" (an announcement on those efforts is scheduled for Thursday). In Frances Haugen's testimony to the United Kingdom Parliament earlier this week, she said that she was "shocked" to hear that news. "Do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers? It would have been amazing," she said.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-hiring-metaverse...

> Facebook wants to be the company that moves our lives into the shared virtual reality known as the metaverse — and apparently, the company needs to hire 10,000 engineers in the European Union to make that happen.

I'd really love to know what percentage of the people being fired as part of this layoff (if this rumor turns out to be true) are specifically working on the Metaverse (and then, how many of these people are in Europe). It would be amazing if it were 0, and all of these people work on a "legacy product", such as Instagram... or Facebook ;P. METAVERSE AT ALL COSTS

How come not 100% of recruiting? Would be a long time until they start hiring again.

I'm not saying this is the case, but if Meta is pivoting towards a metaverse future, it would make sense to slim down on the facebook hires whilst keeping some hiring activity on the metaverse front.

They need AI expertise for Reels recommendations.

Source: A quick look at what jobs Meta is still hiring for.

So double-down on cloning tiktok, yay?

My Reels recommendations are exclusively attractive women doing sexually suggestive things -- is that AI expertise? It's horrible. Does the platform have other content?

It’s an AI mirror…

That’s assuming it actually worked.

Bad recommendation engines often get stuck displaying stuff that has generic appeal.

Something Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t get that Tik tok’s does is that just because I watch something doesn’t always mean I want more of it. Because I am pathetic, I may watch a few loops of a thirst trap short, but I do not want more of it in my feed. Tik Tok understands this; but Instagram sees the “increased engagement number” go up and fills my explore page with it.

Even if overall headcount declines there will always be top talent they want to pull in for strategic advantage. In layoffs they just want to shed (what they see as) their lowest performers.

It is a terrible idea to lose 100% of your talent in any one department, because then you have to start from scratch.

Hire contract recruiters. Seems like a strange dependency to have on a company to fuel additions to fixed costs (talent). Make it "elastic" and grow and shrink on demand.

Let's say a company wants to maintain a staff of 100 engineers instead of 150 engineers. And had 2 recruiters on staff. In this example, they hadn't really been growing, just kinda stable.

Lay off 50 engineers and all the recruiters? Sounds great, except... in a given year, a handful of engineers would be expected to leave anyway from attrition. Either leaving for other opportunities, retiring, or getting fired for various reasons, who knows.

In this case, after a layoff, you can often expect a few more to leave for other jobs because they think it's a bad sign, or they miss their friends, or whatever.

So you probably still want to backfill them. You probably also want flexibility in case you realize one team needs some specific skills you didn't have.

So if you're then expecting to hire 5+ people over the next year, the cost of a full-time recruiter vs a contingent fee of ~25% (+/- some) per hire using a third party recruiter still makes sense.

I would honestly trust 4chan over Blind. This is the least reliable source possible.

Blind is all about trolling.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Blind is anonymous. Anyone can post false rumors there.

Anyone can post a false rumor anywhere. Blind has equal amount of trolling as leaks, you just have to know what to look for.

You know what I mean. Journalists are at least somewhat accountable

I thought that you had to verify your email work address for blind; so doesn't this mean not "anyone" can post false rumours, only meta staff?

If so, I can’t believe anyone would sign up for that knowing your employer then directly knows you’re on blind (and in the worst possible scenario, do a password reset and potentially see your activity). I assume blind keeps your own history; I’ve never actually used it so per speculation.

So they send you an email with an activation code but you don't need to click on any links or otherwise interact with the email. Theoretically, someone else who knows your email could have registered you... Probably not too believable, but you could send the email to your coworkers too to improve your anonymity set

> If so, I can’t believe anyone would sign up for that knowing your employer then directly knows you’re on blind

Why would anyone care?

Depends on what gets shared.

> do a password reset and potentially see your activity

They can't

Anonymous Meta staff

Bloomberg is reporting this too: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-08/meta-plat...

Mainstream media is also full of false rumors

Journalists for mainstream media outlets don't post anonymously

5% engineering is not a whole lot. Pretty much all the under performers.

I mean it depends on your definition of "under performer" but it'd probably be a lot more than 5% by most.

Technically 50% are at or below the median ... though in my experience the actual low performers aren't that high in number, at least where I've been employed.

I've never liked this logic. In almost any circumstance a "median" isn't a perfect point on a plot. Saying "half of the world is below average intelligence" is just dumb because you could easily argue 75% of them are "average" and not above or below average.

Wed is FB's usual WFH day so is this anything new?

Many media outlets have been hinting at recession and predicting layoffs for sometime as all of the BigTech supposedly have a freeze on new hiring. Let's not forget that a war is going on in Europe and it is only going to escalate in the coming months ... next year is going to be even shittier.

Meta’s issues are not related to the macro environment. Meta has issues much more specific to its own business:

- they admitted a revenue shortfall a couple of quarters ago caused by Apple’s ATT which made tracking opt-in

- “Facebook is for old people” and other platforms are seeing more engagement

- They are wasting billions on the metaverse.

While Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon (disclaimer where I work) have all seen declines in stock price and revenue. There is no indication that neither of them are having the same existential issues that Meta has had.

If Meta disappeared tomorrow, would anyone care or would they just move on to the next fad? Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have shown the ability to pivot and to adjust. Google hasn’t. But so far hasn’t had to.

If Meta disappeared tomorrow, would anyone care or would they just move on to the next fad?

I do think people would care about WhatsApp.

Of course, someone with deep pockets would snap that up. Google comes to mind—what’s one more messaging strategy?

Messaging apps lose popularity all the time. It doesn’t take much for the network affects of a messaging platform to collapse.

WhatsApp is ubiquitous in many parts of the world (like here in India), but it's also easily replaceable with telegram or signal. It won't be missed for too long.

Google, Apple, Amazon all make products that are useful, whether we like their business practices or not.

If Facebook disappears overnight, I don’t think it will matter much. If anything, it would have a positive impact on society.

If Twitter and Facebook crash and burn next year, then that alone would make 2023 bearable

It's interesting how much more people find Twitter to not be useless/bad when literally nothing of material value has changed.

In the grand scheme of things, Twitter is less than a nothingburger. They were worth less than $30B and advertisers don’t really care about it.

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