Mark Zuckerberg confirms broad layoffs to begin at Meta | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg confirms broad layoffs to begin at Meta

theguardian.com

189 pointscadence-195 comments

Four months salary as severance seems like a really good deal to me. I don't think it will be difficult for anyone with Facebook in their resume to be re-hired.

Although losing your job is difficult, it seems to me like I would much rather be fired from Facebook than Twitter.

In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees". I remember a couple years ago when Nintendo was having problems then all the top execs lowered their compensations. I wonder if top execs at Facebook are also doing that? (doubt it).

But for people with a high TC, it will become harder to find an employer willing to pay the same, especially when all companies are doing layoffs at the same time.

With a high TC usually comes an expensive lifestyle. It's a really hard process to downscale your lifestyle.

I have absolutely no sympathy for the people who stuck by all of Zuckerberg's decisions to choose profit over the health of society, especially when they'll have to... get used to a less-expensive lifestyle.

Luckily Zuckerberg thoughtfully solved the high TC problem by crashing the stock this last year, making jobs at other companies seem within reach.

Many tech companies saw their stock drop in value. I don't think we can blame it all on Facebook's boss.

How many of them lost 75% in the last year?

Quite a few. Netflix, Shopify, Spotify, Twilio, etc.

Affirm, snapchat.

The new Fed interest rates did that, not Zuck.

But Zuck's pie in the sky metaverse shit contributed.

On that high a TC you have no excuse not saving up an emergency fund. Don't tell me it's hard, I am on a tiny fraction of that salary and I managed it.

Oh and you have a four month severance runway on top of that...

An emergency fund and a severance package are great things for keeping the lights on while you look for a new role, but the point is that $200k + $200k in bonuses and RSUs is a hard thing to replace when all the other big tech companies are also laying people off and going on hiring freezes. You're probably going to end up taking a serious pay cut in you next role. Even if you have a full year of your old salary in the bank, you might well find it hard to maintain you previous lifestyle, pay your mortgage, or replace your emergency fund if you have to live on it.

Four months severance is only good if you find another good role within four months. And in the current tech market I wouldn't bet on that.

Something else to consider - if there are a ton of engineers entering the market who are willing to take a pay cut what impact will that have on everyone else in the market? This sort of thing is what drives everyone's wages down.

Definitely agree. With a caveat, though. Tech companies will not want to have a massive diff in comp between the people they keep and the (few, selected) people they re-hire. So we might be entering a downward trend, but it will be slow.

It might be too late for some people, but some general advice - if you earn 400k USD / year, don't develop a habit of depending on this kind of income.

The rest of the world and even your fellow (US) citizens have to get by on much, much less.

These kind of salaries are not at all normal. I would advice you to not live your life as if you'd be able to make almost half a million per year for the rest of your life.

So save most of it and live a normal lifestyle. If the good income continues, simply retire early :-)

Indeed. “Lifestyle inflation” is never a good thing.

If you replied with this you don't understand the difference between income, expenses and savings.

Your lifestyle has to do with your expenses. You can have savings and a sizable emergency fund but if you don't find a job that pays you as much or lower your lifestyle.

I fully understand it, I just keep my expenses significantly lower than my income.

Raising lifestyle to match your salary is a hedonistic treadmill.

Well, not all people are as rational as you.

Every exec at FB is compensated via share price. So yeah, they've all taken a massive hit to their comp. Zuck is down 100 billion YTD.

Most employees at tech companies are compensated via shares…

And share price doesn’t affect the value of their shares?

My heart bleeds for the poor lad. Are you telling me he won't be able to spunk $1bn/mo on fluffy vanity projects in 2023? Say it ain't so!

Can't even buy Twitter.

I am rather sure it will be on discount soon given musk's silly behavior

On the contrary, it's a cudgel and he's using it as one. Quite a few things are more mask-off these days. You say 'silly behavior', I say 'Musk actively allied with Putin to support the Russian cause, and is ready and willing to weaponize Twitter toward that end'. I don't know what it is about that man (Putin) that makes oligarchs like him so much, but if you look at the record it's a hell of a thing.

And so it's not wasted money on Musk's part, it's spent for a purpose, to seize control of what seems to be the most connected social media phenomenon out there. Facebook had to be weaponized through Cambridge Analytica and it wasn't meant to be public-facing knowledge. At this stage apparently that doesn't matter anymore.

That or it's megalomanaical overreach. Which is possible :)

I read that as they were spending $1bn/mo on Splunk

Plausible

The fluffy vanity project budget comes out of revenue not Zuck's personal holdings ;)

Maybe for the engineers. The others might have a pretty hard time finding a job that pays as well. All the high paying places in the bay have a hiring freeze.

This, I know more than a dozen journalists that are now working at facebook as PR basically.

More likely they'll reason that this tough decision merits some kind of bonus if it ends up benefiting the bottom line for one quarter.

In other words, all these highly paid developers did not produce something valuable enough to offset their own salaries (and other expenses, so likely 2-3x the salaries).

I suppose these are mostly good, well-working engineers. This should mean that the projects they were working on were mostly useless, bringing too little value for the effort in the short term, or too uncertain benefits at a longer term.

Something did not pan out with the product vision.

Or their value does not show up within a quarterly or annual reporting cycle? Whereas taking them off the payroll has an immediate impact on the bottom line.

And if Meta is indeed stuffed to the gills with highly unproductive yet highly paid people, who is responsible for that? Those people aren’t actually changing.

>In other words, all these highly paid developers did not produce something valuable enough to offset their own salaries (and other expenses, so likely 2-3x the salaries).

The profits from work of those devs are already realized. The future profits might not materialize.

> I would much rather be fired from Facebook than Twitter.

Also, it was all over the news that Twitter fired probably based on performance (lines of code, yeah, I know). Wondering if this will make it difficult for the twitter folks to get hired compared to those from FB.

That LOC thing with Twitter is just a big rumor. There are a lot of dumb rumors about Twitter and Musk floating around. Don’t believe / repeat everything you hear.

They used a thanos style random number generator. If the day in your DOB is an odd number you were fired.

Well, I guess you don't want unlucky people working for you!

It is on the listicle of things to make you highly successful.

- Wake up at 4am every day.

- Only hire lucky people (they get to work for you that instantly makes them one of the lucky ones right!?)

- Fire the unlucky people or the people having a bad day (its a pretty bad and/or unlucky day when you get fired, if they had any luck at all you wouldnt have thought of their name when you decided to fire someone)

> - Fire the unlucky people

The perfect way to select for luck! Fire people randomly, therefore you will on average only have lucky people working for you! Genius!

I don't think they really care who get fired. To those executives in large organizations, individual contributors are no more than a number. As long as they can make the numbers they do care looking better, no one really matters much.

The “print your code” thing happened.

And?

If the dumbest of the rumors was actually true, it may be prudent not to doubt the others.

A dumb sounding thing happened, which wasn’t even a rumor, there were lots of pictures of it - so that means you should believe a lot of other non-credible stuff coming from people who passionately hate Musk?

No that doesn’t follow.

My performance reviews are largely based on the quality of code too. Reviewing code doesn't just mean counting lines.

They fired over 80% of their Colorado employees - no way that was performance-based.

Unless that location was working on a particular problem that meant fewer LoC.

That's not firing on performance, though, it's just nonsense. Some layoffs are _actually_ performance-based, but assuming the thing about the twitter lines of code is true, that's firing based on leadership incompetence, and it would hardly count against people (unless they're applying to IBM in the 1980s, which actually _did_ use line counts for performance management...)

> I don't think it will be difficult for anyone with Facebook in their resume to be re-hired

Why is that? Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient? What is the logic behind this thinking?

Nobody ever gets fired for choosing IBM.

Personally if I see Facebook on a resume, I will assume that they will be expensive

and also they will gladly accept whatever dubious/amoral mission your company has at its heart (to be frank, thats vast amount of IT in the world, nothing FB specific)

Yeah, some people would consider having worked for certain companies a red flag.

I always see this comment on here but never once seen or heard this in real life interactions with people

The assumption is that Meta and its ilk are picky about who they employ and that should be a proxy for an employee's ability or value. Of course, the layoffs will presumably involve those who perform worst so it's not clear if these people will be in a better position or not than someone who hadn't been at Meta.

> Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient?

I think for many there is a good chance of learning valuable skills at these companies. In my time at Meta I became a more proficient engineer by being around those who were a lot better than me, and I also got a lot better at non-technical stuff like giving people feedback, leadership, communication and so on. It's obviously not impossible that I could have learned these skills elsewhere but they are weighted heavily at Meta etc and it's more likely one will have absorbed them.

None of this is universal, of course. Any particular person might be great or terrible independent of their tenure at Meta.

There is even a "very emotional" scene in Silicon Valley where Gavin Belson does just that

Enjoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

This show delivered so well, on so many things, over and over.

I can see why they stopped producing it, but I wish they didn't!

One of the few shows that did well, didn't start recycling the same idea over and over, and ended before it lost an audience.

At least for the next decade or so, the representation of SV and startup culture will be quite cutting.

I really would have liked a few more seasons too. I feel like they could have taken it to a whole different level as Pied Piper became FAANGP.

But I’m also glad they didn’t jump any sharks and gave it a good wrap.

"saying goodbye is always hard" so true.

"though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."

>I remember a couple years ago when Nintendo was having problems then all the top execs lowered their compensations.

The culture of shame on failure is pretty strong in Japan and sometimes goes too far. After the crash of Japan Airlines 123 where over 500 people died, two high level people related to the accident committed suicide. Not something I'd like to see normalized. Loosing more lives is not the solution.

Surely there is a middle ground between not assuming any responsibility and killing yourself over it.

I never said there isn't, I just pointed out some existing facts.

> I don't think it will be difficult for anyone with ______ in their resume to be re-hired.

I seem to read this comment every other day, hopefully it’s not adding up…

I think this golden age of software development has come to an end, and I think many in the industry are in denial.

Zuck could personally give 3000 fired employees $1million each and that would be less than 10% of his net worth.

Doing maths that depend on paper worth is pointless.

I know you're probably just making a point but you realize this isn't true right? He would have to liquidate meta stock to make this happen, resulting in the price dropping and requiring him to liquidate more etc. etc.

He could probably take a loan against his stock.

Four months of pay may not be that much if you moved to another country or continent with your family for this job.

While it's probably easy to land on your feet and find something with a good pay in SV or London, it's probably not the case everywhere.

4 months of pay for this kind of trouble doesn't look like a good deal to me.

4 months of pay at the highest paying software company in the world is FAR more generous than you're going to see from any company anywhere in the world.

Your comment is comical, given the state of labor laws in most of Europe.

True, those labor laws are under attack, but they still stand, and such layoff would be so costly there that they could hardly happen.

4 months is not generous, it is under the legal minimum in many countries, provided you've been with the employer long enough.

However in the same "many countries" the tab is picked up by the state in a form of unemployment payouts. Not 100%, granted, but can go as high as 80%.

And you've just outlined the reasons why 94% of Big Tech is in the United States. Number of unicorns in the United States in March 2022 = 607, number in mainland Europe = 42.

You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?

> would be so costly there that they could hardly happen

This is NOT a good thing

By that same logic you'd make the argument that "94% of abusive work places" exist in poorer countries with far less worker rights. Is that something you want to happen to the US, third world country like working conditions just so corporations are more likely to hire Americans? Or maybe we should be working on upping the baseline standards surrounding workers rights?

> This is NOT a good thing

I think this depends on ideology a lot. In europe the sentiment is to improve the life and livelihood of the average person on average, and not that of a few CEOs, and labour laws reflect that.

The cynic inside me tells me this results in universal health care, better infrastructure, less divide between poor and rich and thus less crime on average, ... in europe. In the US you have super rich CEOs fueling policies to make the rich richer. Maybe my reasoning here is not true, but I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time.

The counterpoint to the items you listed as Europe doing better than the United States (better infrastructure is very debatable) is that Europe suffers from perpetual stagnant economic growth, extremely low tech worker pay, brain drain of the best talent leaving for the US and few revolutionary tech ideas. The American ideology can't be dismissed as simply benefitting a few CEOs when there's so so many Americans earning compensation well above what's possible for a European. Granted, it comes at the expense of the lower class in the US, but as you point out, it depends on the ideology.

having lived in both the US and Europe for over a decade each - I'd rather have happier poor people that happier rich people.

The sign of a first world country isn't having a bunch of billionaires - you have those in Brazil and Russia. It's when the poorest people in your country still can have healthy, meaningful lives.

Honestly, from my point of view, the US is a 3rd world country, but I expect that viewpoint to be very controversial.

You're right, I find that point of view to be very controversial. I've been to rich and poor parts of the US and Europe, and currently live in a US state that's in the bottom quintile of per capita incomes among states. There's absolutely no comparison to actual third world countries. I'd love to hear your supporting arguments for your position.

> Honestly, from my point of view, the US is a 3rd world country, but I expect that viewpoint to be very controversial.

As someone who lives in a real third-world country...I'm of the opinion that this is a silly thing to say. Yeah, the world's biggest economy ($23T GDP) that constantly sends payloads to outer space and back is third-world...maybe you could come live in a place with 80% of people below the poverty line and see what third-world is.

This is a good perspective, I can’t imagine anyone who has lived in or spent any significant time in a third world country making such a ridiculous claim.

When a country’s poor can still manage to be overweight, have cell phones, have gaming consoles, have automobiles…your perception of poor might be a tad subjective.

And before folks go off on the “what abouts”, yes I realize there are some folks in the US without those things, but let’s face it, you sample just about any “poor” person in the US, you will find at least 50%+ of the things I listed.

I doubt that you could do that with a random sample of the poor in say Burundi

Cell phones are ubiquitous now even in poor countries.

I think a good way to summarize it is: The life in the EU is good for everyone, In the US its great for the rich and high earners, but hell for everyone else.

> but hell for everyone else

Maybe "not as good for everyone else", but "hell" is such a big exaggeration. I know plenty of working-class people -- think barbers, construction workers, baristas -- who live happy lives.

The US isn't some dystopia where if you're not a millionaire you're living in a slum.

>In europe the sentiment is to improve the life and livelihood of the average person on average, and not that of a few CEOs, and labour laws reflect that.

Please, I live in an area with high taxes and I've yet to see the return on the investment. Healthcare? If you have a minor condition and you can wait or if you have a dangerous condition and you cannot wait then it's great. For all the other illness that are life-damaging but not life-ending? I hope you are rich enough to pay for a private practice. That's what my family has been doing for years on top of the above-mentioned taxes.

As for CEOs compensation: even low earning people in the USA are above average earning in Europe (I repeat, on top of high taxes) while in Europe the best way to make money is through inheritance. Yes, in the USA your parents socio-economic status is very important in giving you a head start but you at least you can participate in the race, while here there's not even a race to speak of; even if I do everything right: STEM degree, programming, speaking multiple languages and so on and on and on... you will probably end up in the same economical status of your parents. And let's not speak about the unemployment of Southern Europe: a different can of worm that has eaten the future of an entire generation, especially men: it is a bomb ready to explode.

> even low earning people in the USA are above average earning in Europe

The state of Mississippi, which many enjoy comparing to third-world countries, has a higher average disposable household income than does Germany. People, especially Americans of a certain class, have a very twisted view of how wealthy the average European is.

And Mississippi is truly the shittiest state with by far the highest poverty rate and lowest literacy rate. The other 49 states are even nicer than europe.

> the sentiment is to improve the life and livelihood of the average person

Policies based on good sentiment almost always result in hidden costs that run counter to those sentiments. Strong employees' rights in Europe mean that companies are much more reluctant to hire, since poor performers cannot be let go easily. This is especially devastating to young people who cannot find a foothold in an entry-level job to develop their careers; see youth employment rates in Spain (over a third) or France (one-fifth).

Same with rent control and other tenant protections, which is another sentimental policy that results in poor real-world outcomes. Sweden famously has a national average waitlist nearing a decade for rent-controlled housing, but this problem is by no means limited to Europe; if you compare states in the US with strong tenant rights vs. strong landlord rights, you'll find that the latter has much lower rents at comparable population densities.

> I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time

There has been more immigration from Europe to the US than the other way around for decades, so a lot of people do value the factors that enable those tech unicorns to flourish in the US.

I am also not sure how you got the 42 unicorns figure for Europe, https://europeanunicornmap.com/ lists 130 of them and I am guessing it keeps growing.

We have plenty of almost unicorns here in Europe, then they tend to be smaller. Albeit the European Union market is roughly equivalent to the USA one in term of population or wealth, it is heavily fragmented legally and culturally. If you want to grow out of your country, you get to address the challenge of various different cultural differences be it for your product, running a business or entirely different laws. And sometime there is not even a market cause your solution is already addressed in some of the other countries.

> You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation

Those would involves RSU which I guess do not get vetted, even so 4 months several when having a $300k salaries yields out a $100k severance.

> is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?

I am not sure it would be that large. At least for France it is 25% of a monthly wage per year of tenure. So for a 5 years employment that would be 1,25 months. Then you get unemployment benefits, usually a package to assist in finding a new job and of course you keep your healthcare coverage. The system is entirely different really. We get less lump sum but have a lot of other benefits which definitely help in rough time.

4 months of SV SWE pay is going to be higher than 10 mo of German SWE pay. The market rate is much much lower. Those labor laws might have something to do with that.

How does the cost of living compare? The wage in SV might be higher, but with astronomical rents etc, you might actually be better off in real terms with the German 10 months.

It’s a reasonable point in general but not in this specific case. German (and western continental Europe in general) software engineering salaries are like dotcom and everything since didn’t happen. It’s not just a percentage here or there.

> Those labor laws might have something to do with that.

No it doesn't. Life expectancy in the United states is declining. Perhaps labor law has something to do with it.

It is not comical, you pay for this benefit in Europe with lower salary.

Europe laws mandate severance for roughly 1 month pay per year served. Unemployment payments can last more than 4 months but you won't get even remotely close to your previous salary, especially with a FAANG salary.

This seems a way better treatment than what you would get from labor laws anywhere in Europe.

Note that FB isn't giving a flat 4 months (for US employees); the email says that severance is "16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service".

Not really. If my employer wanted to lay me off, they'd realistically end up paying me at least 6 months worth of severance. But I live in a pro-worker country and am in a union.

The legal minimum compensation in the Netherlands for 'termination due to worsening financial conditions of the company' is given by:

Compensation = (years worked at company/3)*monthly salary.

This comes on top of the minimum notice period, which is given by:

notice period (in months) = floor(years_worked/5) + 1

In many cases, employers and employees agree that the employee will not work after having received notice, but are asked to be available to help answer questions their replacements might have during this period. The employee still receives their salary during this time (even if they find new employment), so effectively this notice period can be added to their compensation.

So for many employees in the Netherlands, the minimum legal compensation is better than what these employees will receive. In practice their compensation is often better than the minimum legal compensation.

Most developers in SV bounce around companies every 2-4 years, so using your Netherlands formula, they'd only get Compensation = 1.3 months of salary, Notice = 1 month.

It doesn't make it "a very good deal".

It’s more than you get in any normal place in the US, in many states you get a thank you handshake and someone holding the door for you. It’s a risk you choose to take when you work in the US instead of somewhere in Europe or some other country with better worker protections.

They are not leaders. They are just finely tuned machine parts. Don't expect them to think, say or do anything the machine doesn't need.

I don't know FAANG engineers with their very high self worth would take the humiliation of lower salary as oppose to layoffs.

> In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees"

Even if reflect badly on founder/CEO to say "I erred by hiring tons of below average engineers who couldn't deliver so I am fixing it now" It would reflect worse on those engineers in real world.

> I don't know FAANG engineers with their very high self worth would take the humiliation of lower salary as oppose to layoffs.

Do you apply negative stereotypes to people you don't know as a normal part of your daily interactions?

they raise a decent point. there's countless FAANG people on here making $250,000+/yr plus RSU and claim they are underpaid. What happens when they end up in the real world being offered half that with no stock options?

Probably start a company with the money they've (hopefully) saved, and make more than slaving away for half their old salary (if half is the only option, which it probably isn't).

Thats a good idea. Not sure its broadly applicable in events of large layoffs.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of tech companies in the US hiring remotely with compensation between $180k - $250k right now. RSUs might not be the same as SV companies, but we all know those RSUs are worth sh*t right now anyway.

But those companies aren't looking to hire the 10,000+ developers that have been, or will be layed off in the coming year.

> there's countless FAANG people on here making $250,000+/yr plus RSU and claim they are underpaid.

And you think they don’t?

No, I just read news, interviews and observe public behavior of these employees on various political, social, economic and technical issues to have an informed opinion on them.

There are hundred thousand of FAANG engineers, how many of them do you know personally and not some talking head from Twitter?

Public reporting of tech and tech figures is anything but unbiased.

Name something that is unbiased in media public reporting.

While I agree with you, reporting on tech is maliciously negative: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553

That's a very one-sided framing; even if we accept the assertion that tech is heavily-scrutinised, I think it would be at least equally reasonable to say that increased media scrutiny of the tech companies is happening because the tech industry itself is often maliciously negative.

I don't think it would be at all 'humiliating' but I do think it's the wrong trade-off for FAANG employees and for the companies.

Consider that FAANG employees are already the top less than 1% of the industry. Even in a down-market they can wander down the street and end up with a job with comparable pay and probably better conditions in a week - and a signing bonus to boot.

If a FAANG reduced their compensation broadly, all the employees would be at an opportunity cost disadvantage vs just finding a new gig. The company would be at a disadvantage relative to its peers in its ability to retain/replace the talent they need to get through this period. Worst of all for the individual, it resets the market rate for top engineering talent.

So the choices are:

(1) You take 5-10% of engineers, give them a few months beach time while they brush up on the leetcode so they can land the same job for the same pay at a company a few blocks away plus a signing bonus

(2) Everyone at your company takes a 5-10% pay cut and the best talent leaves anyways but now everyone gets paid less too.

Option (1) feels like the game theoretic optimal.

In general I agree. I feel that macroeconomic conditions will affect efficacy of 1).

Its so funny reading the naivete and hubris of many here."Even in a down matket,FAANG layoffs can jusy wall down the street and fnd different job with comparable pay." How naive and optimistic. I truly hope we do not get to experience a down market, so many on here will have adjust their expectations to reality. There so much ignorance and naivete about economics I read on here. And yes even those that feel secure in their jobs currently, will eventually see a paycut in some ways.

This.

> ... so many on here will have adjust their expectations to reality.

Define reality. This has been my experience for the last 10 years, and frankly, it's been the experience of a number of folks I've seen laid off and fired from similarly situated companies in the last few months.

Could that change? For sure. I'm talking about the situation on the ground - today - from personal experience within the last few months. Why are we attempting to optimize today for a reality that does not exist right now? Let's cross that bridge and adapt when we see what it actually looks like.

> And yes even those that feel secure in their jobs currently...

Speak to some FAANG employees. I'm not sure any of them have ever felt secure in their jobs because these companies operate with very little fat and aggressively prune ranks every 6-12 months.

> ...will eventually see a paycut in some ways.

In a hypothetical future, yes it could happen of course. Has it happened yet? No. It hasn't. Should we find ways to cut our own pay now in advance of a reality that may not materialize? Not in my opinion, no.

I thought part of the point of this place was to share what's happening in our industry right now in addition to doomer projections.

An average Netflix employee is responsible for $2.6M in revenue. $2.375M at Apple. $1.6M at FB and Google. $920K at Microsoft. [1] Now adjust that down to just the engineers. At NFLX, that's $6.5M in revenue per engineer. These companies would be nuts to hire anyone other than the best and to pay for it. Even in a world where they reduce headcount they will see attrition and they'll need replacements - and they'll pay for them. If that changes, let's revisit.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

> interviews and observe public behavior of these employees

Did you consider that this cohort might be self-selecting, leading to your "informed opinion" being somewhat biased against the average?

> In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees"

To some extend. But it’s true too. It is their fault.

"I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees - I can gaurantee that my performance related pay for this year will only be $200 million instead of the $500 million I was expecting to be paid."

the problem is job market flooding

"First, Let’s Fire All the Managers" - https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

They keep all the managers to make sure the remaining employees end up covering the work of the ones laid off:) Im sure they laid off a few managers here and there though

People who advocate for firing managers forget (or are too junior to have ever learned) that managers...were once the regular line employees, bu they did well enough at their jobs to get promoted into the positions of managing other employees so that the other employees could also do well in their jobs.

Managers are usually the most competent employees at actually getting shit done, because they have to do their own shit on top of managing what the employees are doing.

I have not worked anywhere where the above was actually true, except in the beginning when scaling an organization. In mature organizations managers are hired for having managerial experience, not getting shit done on the line.

Four months is not that great depending on where you work and your tenure, I previously worked in Financial Services and there were three rounds of redundancy in my 10 years, luckily/unluckily I was never selected. The offer at the time was 6 weeks salary per year rounded up to the nearest full year and paid for your contracted notice period, capped at max two years salary. There were plenty of people that hit that two year cap and plenty more that took home more than a years salary.

Layoffs at the top companies put downward pressure on the entire job market - fewer open positions, less mobility for everyone, more competition... if you're working at an average non-tech company and want to move up in salary, now you're competing with a bunch of people who have big tech on their resume and who were good enough to pass the big tech interview loop in the past.

I would disagree with that. Your company probably has a hiring freeze at the moment. You are not competing with external people. If you are a crucial person to your company, you are actually in a decent position to get an increase. If you are not crucial, you are on the list for the second round.

No way, increasing compensation for current employees was difficult even when the market was hot. I'm not buying that the companies with hiring freezes are giving out raises (certainly not more raises than before).

Both make sense, while new grads always hurt.

> "and who were good enough to pass the big tech interview loop in the past"

I would rephrase that to "who were willing to go through the big tech interview loop in the past". The big different between the people who go through this and don't is not ability but desire from my experience.

I agree that the way those tech interviews are designed makes them more of a marathon that tests determination.

Doesn't change that the prestige of having it on your resume will cause many other companies to blindly hire you.

> The big different between the people who go through this and don't is not ability but desire from my experience.

I know 4 developers that work for FAANG companies, I don't know why, but all 4 of them are women.

One is a brilliant programmer, team leader and generally a wonderful person to hang around with. The other 3.... well... I have no idea how on Earth they made it, they're clueless when it comes to programming; of which 2 have serious personality issues also.

Funny you should say this. I often had this feeling that those interviews favor a certain kind of personality somehow.

It depends.

- It's unclear if the layoffs hit software engineering, or if it's mostly business roles.

- Engineers from FANG (or whatever the acronym now is) aren't competing for all the roles out there. They generally aren't looking to join banks/insurance/telco or what they would consider "boring" roles.

If you are looking to join a cool well paying startup in SF, then yes, I imagine the competition is extra tough right now.

From their Q3 earnings report 2 weeks ago (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_news/Meta-Reports-...):

> we expect headcount at the end of 2023 will be approximately in-line with third quarter 2022 levels

Was that a lie or are they re-hiring in the future?

Can there be legal ramifications for giving wrong information like this? In any case I assume these type of accusations might be quite easy to defend

If they are firing 50% like musk maybe, if they are firing 10% it's all perfectly in line with that guidance.

"we expect" is not equal to "we ensure"

According to the WSJ article:

> “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” he said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”

So it doesn't sound like they are lying in the Q3 report. Their current plan is to shrink some teams and grow others resulting in about the same number of employees a year from now.

> slightly smaller organization than we are today

"slightly" doing a lot of work there

Firing 10k today, and hiring 8k over the next 14 months, would be 2k down, or well under 5%, certainly fits "slightly" to me

Doubtful, what with most of the recruiters gone

They hired way more than 8k over the pandemic. Doesn't seem unreasonable to hire 8k over the next year even with half as many recruiters.

If Meta is removing non-essential employees I wonder if we could see the core react team having to leave at some point. That could be quite the shift for frontend work.

to svelte

React to Solid, Angular and Vue to Svelte.

Cross your fingers!

I'm sure Vercel would be happy to take full control of React by hiring the core team.

That would be amazing. I'd love to see React detached from Facebook's needs, which don't matter to most companies, and be taken over by the community instead. Honestly React is kinda useless without its ecosystem anyway, the vast majority of which is third party already.

Next would be a great steward to inherit React.

Meta name is cursed. The slide begins the moment they changed from FB.

The slide really began with Eternal September…

The whole metaverse & VR thing is a scam. People seem to forget a thing from the past called 2ndlife.

There was an article on BBC news the other day about people investing in property in the metaverse. It blew my mind because it's not a finite space like the real world... the idea that people are spending thousands speculating on virtual real estate in an unproven environment that has almost zero uptake is mind blowing.

Great way to do some money laundering

This has happened in every mmo for decades now.

This is just history repeating itself. Happened with Second Life, too, nearly 20 years ago: https://www.zdnet.com/article/reality-pricks-the-second-life...

It's not a scam, it's a Hail Mary play to control the platform that Facebook's services run on. Without that control, it's at the mercy of upstream vendors.

It's not going to work, but there's a good reason for why they are trying.

I don't know why they didn't make a Facebook phone based on Android.

They did. It just didn't work

Think they tried but nobody wanted it. The video chat thing too.

That's true - Portal? I know some people who have it; it seems okay.

Second Life was just another window in your computer. VR (or AR, XR, etc.) is new hardware paradigm for displaying stuff.

Edit: not really "new" – first AR/VR display was in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland, but current tech allows us to have standalone device with good ergonomics and plenty of performance

Oooh, Second Life with 3d glasses. Revolutionary.

Or VRChat, which does everything Meta is trying to do years ago

VRChat makes standalone headsets?

I was referring to the "metaverse" VR vision Meta is having trouble implementing.

I think it's the reverse. The name change was a response to seeing an inevitable slide looming in the future.

Some data from the inside:

RL hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.

Most bootcampers are gone, even ones that were performing well.

Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need.

I think we all know that how this is received will be entirely down to where the cuts come. If the cuts come in the Metaverse R&D, the stock price will jump and everyone will be more or less happy - you can believe in the Metaverse and that project and still understand it is a massive overinvestment. If the cuts come in the legacy business with the Metaverse protected I think that will be an indication that no Meta shareholders can honestly expect to see the revenue from the social media business, Zuckerberg will burn it all before he hands it back to shareholders, so in that case this could be a horrible performing stock. And of course that's important because most people at Meta have significant stock based comp.

He's almost certainly cutting core so he can continue to invest in the metaverse. Rightly or wrongly, he thinks this is the right decision.

Just in time for Christmas.

Christmas is 2 months away, and they're getting 4 months severance and many companies ramp up hiring in January...what's your point exactly?

This is a terrible time to get laid off, as no one will be interviewing till the new year.

Hence the 4 months of severance, which keeps them paid until mid-March.

Right. January and February are write off months, not much happens. So by March you still have no job and no more income.

A new job including job search takes around three months.

A round of interviews, signing of contracts, background checks and then finally a month of work before you get your first pay check. That takes you to May. Thats if you pass the interviews and are chosen to be the employee.

The way things are going, not many people will be interviewing next year either. There may be a few openings for attrition but they will slow too as there are less places for people to leave to. In this kind of environment employees are going to hunker down and wait for things to pick up (and hope they don't get laid off).

I think a lot of people being laid-off are going to struggle to find employment at anything even close to the kind of level of reward they're used to at the big tech companies (because you just know the people that are hiring are going to take full advantage of the sudden glut of developers to pay less!)

I'm sure one's wife will completely understand.

A company I know fired 50% of their devs 1 day before Christmas without any prior notice. Many people got a message during their daily meetings and some were just outright blocked when they attempted to login without any explanation.

Merry Christmas Meta.

Keep the change ya filthy animal

These severance packages are very generous

> Meta’s head of human resources, Lori Goler, said employees who lose their jobs will be provided with at least four months of salary as severance

That is sweet. Can enjoy the holidays

> Zuckerberg said he was accountable for the company’s downturn

Lol then reduce your stock size? Offer your employees your money. Honestly, all these CEOs coming out with the same line is just nonsense

Sweet for many, but very tough for those on visas who will have to now leave the US and abandon the lives they built there.

I'm not familiar with visas, do they not get any time to find new jobs?

They have to find a job willing to sponsor the visa, all within tight timelines. There's a 60 day grace period once you're laid off, but if the new petition is filed late, you have to leave and re-enter, etc. The timing is also difficult in this case, as hiring often slows down in Nov/Dec.

Since when it became reasonable to build a life on such a weak foundation?

It's the risk they take working in a foreign country.

Many Americans have no job security or savings either. Hard to feel bad for foreigners who come here and earn Facebook salaries while sending money home and displacing local citizens and economies.

I am the child of immigrants who did just that, BTW. Global labor is only good for capitalists and owners, not for everyday workers and residents and communities.

Why give them his money? Were they not very well paid to begin with? Or rather they expected to be set for life once hired by META?

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