Meta lays off 11,000 people
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The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.
Analysts stealing nudes isn't the mission.
90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage.
In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.
They also basically have zero real congressional oversight.
And just because 90% of what they do is purely defensive doesn't make the 10% any more acceptable (x key score, data mining, hooking into Google, etc.)
They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.
So what has your research on this uncovered?
It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.
That is what Denmark is trying to find out:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/denmark-charges-spy-chi...
You know what they say, "if they cheat with you, they cheat on you too". A liar is a liar. If your job involves seeking people's trust in order to betray it, you're not very smart if you think your boss wouldn't betray you.
You have literally no idea whether that’s true. Even if you somehow did, you couldn’t prove it here.
You could be right—but your assertion has zero credibility.
Strong "trust me bro" vibes.
Hand-waving and baseless assertions don't contradict the fact that it conducts activities against it's country's most basic founding principles and laws.
This regrettable line of argument is in line with blindly defending the police in spite of all the police murders, abuse, and outright corruption.
Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.
I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.
However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...
Spot on.
> However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
Wait, what?
Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
https://dodona.ugent.be/exercises/189028897/media/gates1979....
Article says his paper on it was published in 1979, which was 43 years ago. I wouldn't call that 'a few years back'. I interpreted your comment as he took a break from his philanthropy to come up to an efficient solution to the problem like 3-5 years ago.
Strange because Mitnick puts most of his exploits down to social engineering, not technical prowess.
But then taking anything a self-confessed social engineer says about themselves at face value is obviously problematic.
Still, I prefer having someone like Kevin in mind when saying the word instead of any other desperate "growth hacker" that is trying to mislead VCs with their trite ideas that will forever change tech the way we know it.
If we aren't talking about computer security, hacker imo would be someone with remarkable technical/scientific contributions. Indeed, there may be some personal bias for math hackers (cryptographers, theorists) but then their skillsets with the respective programmer ones converge.
Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.
As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").
I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33537629
https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
>I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
I found this article (I only skimmed it and didn't look for counter evidence, sorry) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/a-short-...
https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis...
Pick a different line of attack if you want to slag Gates; there are several others to choose from.
Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.
TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good.
I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS.
My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...
Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
"Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "
Which fundamentals?
The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]?
The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio
And they are vaporizing all of their FCF by reinvesting into the metaverse. Or were until the stock continued to collapse.
It’s fair value here if you assume the metaverse is actually something they can monetize in a big way. Too far off for most investors
He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
This. Yes.
Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.
Greed
It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.
I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have
They lied to content creators about how much money could be earned by switching to video on FB. This bankrupted multiple businesses, including Collegehumor and FunnyOrDie: https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120?l...
Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.
And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"
FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.
You can fool some of the people some of the time...
No, incompetence and naivety.
They were young, dumb and all from the same college/upbringing.
People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to
his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it.
Of course, for those immediately impacted and hurt/angered by his actions I certainly wouldn't blame anybody for venting.
But it would be much more productive to talk about "thing Zuck did good" or "thing Zuck did bad."
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.Not defending Zuck here, would just like to read about that if possible.
This is legal fiction that has no bearing in the kinds of subjects that it often gets brought up in. Simply put, those responsible for a company (e.g. officers of a corporation) have a fiduciary duty towards its owners (e.g. the shareholders), and it means that the owners would have legal recourse against the officers if they were provably pissing money away on things that don't benefit the company at all.
That latter part is a high bar and critically does not mean that they are, for example, legally required to prioritize quarterly profits over the long-term success of the company or to pay employees as little as possible, as is often mentioned. It just means that officers must take action that furthers the interests of the company in the way that they prudently and reasonably see fit.
Obviously this isn't a legal requirement, but pretty much every CEO would be out of a job if they choose country over company. Shareholders are generally not interested in furthering national geopolitics.
I don't think that's true. Look at all the corporate action about Ukraine for an example of interest in geopolitics - lots of donations, public statements, etc. And then there's companies actually in Ukraine, or next door - when politics gets unstable enough, contributing to the stability/security of the country over the short term of the company looks like the right move. Evaluating when that point is reached is probably about as contentious as any other decision in politics.
You are required to abide by shareholder decisions at official meetings, and generally not act against shareholder interests, but there is absolutely no law stating that you must act to maximize shareholder value. (And it's a damn good thing that's the case; things are bad enough as it is.)
It's not about producing profits it's about doing what the shareholders want.
He might have lost Costco and their low margins, but he picked up an army of high-margin D2C sympathizers who have been shown to be generous with their money (if the cause is right).
Google was the next to up the ante in mid-2000s with things like daycare, a ball pit, food, drycleaning. All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.
Food might have been okay by 90s standards, but was pretty mediocre overall until ~2010 when they started redoing all the cafes to have a higher quality food. Still, it was slightly subsidized but not free and many, many employees went offsite or brought food from home.
There was a "coffee pool", where you joined to contribute a dollar or something a week and someone would buy the supplies.
At big companies there were often food trucks. Also a cafeteria, which probably sucked. There might also be a small library where you could hang out and read relevant trade journals.
Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.
This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
Anyway, you don't join Ticketmaster for anything approaching morality. Snakes eat snakes.
> There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.
Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.
Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.
But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:
1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);
2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.
This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.
But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.
But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
Could you expand on this? It's seems absolutely certain, with products like nreal Air existing: https://www.nreal.ai/air
What unsolved hurdle do you see? Heck, there were even prototypes of laser retinal projection at CES!
Drawing an opaque, dark line. Almost all these screens are adding light to an existing scene. The only way they can make black is to just not project light, which means you need to have a dark background to actually show dark.
Ever view a projector outside in a bright sunny day?
I've said this same thing a thousand times. It's not lack of content or use-cases killing AR - the tech just isn't there yet. Form factor is one of the very pressing issues. It seems inevitable that the tech will get solved, but it's not clear whether it's a couple years or a couple decades.
Less true today than yesterday. Less true tomorrow than today. Rinse. Repeat.
Exactly this.
Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?
Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why?
For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment?
I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?
Business shares something with that.
IIRC, the owner/CEO has fired himself some times, Ford had something like it, and I think LEGO too, years ago.
It's slightly absurd to say that "sell" is the only lever shareholders should have over public companies. It may be true in practical terms, but it's still a sad state of affairs.
How many people upset about Meta layoffs were equally fierce in condemning Zuck for Meta's stock performance over the last decade? Seems like yet another case of people wanting their cake and eating it too -- the only novelty is the people affected are some of the most privileged people in human history.
Since when does HN care about the stock price of a random company? The share price reflected the ownership structure so the people that bought in were aware and not coerced to buy the security. We shit on corporate short sightedness and suddenly everyone and their dog has a highly opinionated high conviction bet on what a random company should do with its cash flow?
Personally, I don’t care. If dude wants to try to build the jetsons space car, heck yeah. I’d rather someone in society try hard stuff (positive determinism) than more stock buy backs (like apple) or cash just sitting on the balance sheet idly (like historical google). Even if it 100% fails, society is better if we do research that doesn’t look outright obvious at first…that’s how we get better.
One of those cases where they had to tone down reality so people would believe it, but still came across as unrealistic!
Quite the opposite.
The Three Comma Guy, Gavin Belson, the Conjoined Triangles of Success... Been through all that.
In Office Space there is the «pieces of flair» argument with the waitress (Aniston), it’s much more bitter, and I suspect much harder to keep it funny, because in truth those worker endured much more violent management, there is little space to spin it in a funny way.
--
When I was an early IT manager my team would make fun of me and compare me to the manager from office space... because I would always say "thanks" when I would ask them for something...
But I learned to say "thanks" because at Intel - in the 90's it was company culture to always close an email with "thanks"
When I worked at FB though it was a hostile environment. so no Thanks.
what? no one got beat over flair, and having worked in a lot of serving jobs, the level of violence serving drinks was roughly on par with the number of fights I've seen in the data center.
Living in Richardson explains Beavis and KotH.
It does mention he worked for a military contractor, which probably provided an accelerated environment for learning corporate bs.
Hilarious, yet the way corporate PR is heading it could be real and none would be the wiser.
to quote an old guy: "first as tragedy, then as farce"
Zuckerberg is clearly the responsible for the failures of Facebook.
You can’t have both.
Why not? Nothing you wrote suggests that we cannot have both. In fact, Musk bought Tesla, is not an engineer, has no engineering training or education or engineering accomplishments (the code he was writing for the company that became PayPal was notoriously terrible and had to be scrapped). Say what you want about Zuck, but if you plopped him down at a terminal and made him do the job of one of his own senior Devs I bet he would be able to do it. Musk couldn't do the same for any one of his companies in any of the technical positions.
I find it interesting that someone states something like 'you can't it both ways' without thinking it through and while presenting no reasoning for it, and then just leave it there like it is now a rule we must accept.
You should probably fact check this statement. There are plenty of people on quora or even here who worked with Musk. You are completely wrong on this.
Ive noticed it used this way more and more, presumably as people realize it’s utility as a get of jail free card
It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".
"We need to layoff half of the company. I'm sorry and take responsibility. I have failed our employees and shareholders. Because of this, I am stepping down". That's taking responsibility.
"We had a major F-up. It was my responsibility. And here are the concrete steps I am taking to ensure it never happens again, along with the mechanisms you all have to hold me accountable. If these fail, the following bad thing will happen to me." That's taking responsibility
Also if one of your options for "taking responsibility" is quitting, I guess your view of the world is that you would also fire any of your employees when they mess up, when whole industries have recognized the need for blameless cultures where making mistakes is part of the learning process.
The phrase "I take responsibility" is never accompanied with any sign that the person does in fact take responsibility. It means more than just "Ooops, I did a bad"
Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450753
"Some of you May Die, But it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make" - Lord Farquaad
Which eventually leads to complete stagnation and nobody being willing and/or able to make a decision.
If a middle manager was responsible for a bad decision, their head would be on a spike. But it's the chief executive officer, so he gets a pass, if only because he's in the position of power.
Financial penalties that incentivize him to not fuck up again.
These 11k employees are not a threat to facebooks existence. Not even close. If that was the case FB stock would be tanking.
FB is pulling in record profits. They just are getting a little nervous and they are laying people off. It is ridiculous.
EDIT: Sure enough, Meta's stock is up ~17% since a week ago.
That tells you that companies have far too few mass layoffs.
Management has a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Stock price isn't everything, but it's still prima facie evidence of what shareholders want.
Put him on a PIP with a mentor? :D
Why would they need to use cloud?
If, just for the sake of argument, I said he should resign or compensate the affected people out of his own pocket, I'm fairly sure that people here would think I was being naive. People here are already saying that corporate leaders wouldnt take decisions if they had to be held responsible for the outcomes.
So we end-up with a bunch of people who everyone knows (a) are not responsible for mistakes, and (b) are tacitly understood to be able to make statements that habe no meaning. In other words, lies.
And thus the domain of trust becomes smaller and more fractured.
Saying you take responsibility is about clearing the workers of fault, it's not about thing you will reform or somehow suffer more than they will.
He could go out there and say it's not my responsibility, it is the workers fault. They underperformed. Most CEOs don't want to do that
But either way, it's still inevitable that a change in strategy would entail elimination of some of that headcount.
Let M = Makes the statement Let R = Feels Responsible Notation: ~R = Not R
Answering OP's questions 1 & 2: I think it's safe to assume P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1 So P(M) = 1
So Bayes' theorem simplifies as follows: P(R|M) = P(M|R)P(R)/PM) = P(R)
Thus, OP's point is that the statement tells us essentially nothing about the probability he actually feels responsible or empathetic, and I agree.
Sometimes this sort of thing happens where our priors don't allow for a belief update in response to evidence. For example, does me writing this comment change your best guess as to whether my favorite color is blue? That depends on what you think of P(favorite color blue | comment) and P(favorite color blue | ~comment). Both of those are probably the same right? If so, my comment doesn't allow you to update.
This excerpt from http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20 is relevant:
Professor Quirrell looked at Harry. "Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you're trying to convince everyone you're not Dark, not -"
"I can't believe this! You can't have every possible observation confirm your theory! "
"And that was a trifle too much indignation."
"What on Earth do I have to do to convince you? "
"To convince me that you harbor no ambitions of becoming a Dark Lord?" said Professor Quirrell, now looking outright amused. "I suppose you could just raise your right hand."
"What?" Harry said blankly. "But I can raise my right hand whether or not I -" Harry stopped, feeling rather stupid.
"Indeed," said Professor Quirrell. "You can just as easily do it either way. There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable."
Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.Since all of the priors here are speculative, there’s no use in pulling out Bayes.
The outcome given Bayes is the same as the outcome without Bayes, just a bit noisier ;)
https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule/ has some great follow up info.
Certainly with a prior that the events are independent, then you won't be able to update your probability of R by knowing that M did happen, any more than knowing last nights lotto numbers would probability of R.
In reality, things are even worse, as assuming independence is not fully reasonable, so you will end up with uncertainly about how or if the variables relate. One could assume some form of meta probability distribution of various ways the variables could relate, but then direct application of Bayes formula not feasible. You would still in that scenario not be learning much if anything useful about P(R).
But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.
I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.
Sweet dreams.
Did you find it easier or harder than when you didn’t manage people?
Have you ever laid someone off or fired them? Was it so easy?
I've heard this sentiment from people who have laid those off and it always falls flat to me.
Laying off 1 or 100 people compared to being laid off - especially when the person doing the firing, usually a Director or above, is making 3-4x at least what the line employees are - is like comparing pricking your finger with a needle to cutting it off with a dull knife.
It should be difficult if you're not a sociopath, but they're so incomparable it's not even a statement worth making or considering.
I’m arguing against the idea that if you’re a manager or have money, that moments like this are easy or that there’s no empathy. i’m not saying that anyone should feel bad for directors, CEOs, or whoever, but they shouldn’t paint a ridiculous straw man either.
You could even argue that in Zuck’s position, money is a non-factor. He has more than enough money. What he doesn’t have is a beloved and future-proof company, and these layoffs only push him further from that.
Laying off 13,000 is a statistic.
(Based on a badly misquoted Stalin.)
If this sort of thing bothered Zuck, he would not lay people off.
If it was a small startup (been there done that) then yeah, when you see people day-to-day, and get to know them and their lives outside of work? Really hard to fire people, knowing how it will affect the other people in their lives.
A multi-national, multi-billion dollar company with 80,000+ employees? I'm not so sure.
He didn't pay a fine, it isn't any sort of punishment. He tanked the value of the asset that is the primary component of his wealth. That money is gone whether he "takes responsibility" or not.
Fairly sure that none of the FB employees are paid so low where they have to stop asking their spouses to go on a $20 lunch with friends.
Not saying they shouldn't have saved for a rainy day. This is a scary time to be laid off.
Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.
But that's not taking responsibility.
As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Perhaps he will give up his sixth boat, or his fourth house, or his 13th car? Maybe he's going to wait on buying that private island until next quarter.
Everyone has to make sacrifices.
I think it's interesting how pedestrian Oprah, Zuck, and Larry Ellison are, obsessing over a place Elvis visited for pork barbecue parties while demonstrating 0 understanding of local people and their needs.
It's incredibly embarrassing for humanity.
It doesn't mean anything in terms of action or "self-punishment" but nor should it. The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see.
I'm no fan of the guy, but some people won't even take responsibility verbally. So at least he's not descending that low.
And the severance seems decent so it all seems to be handled fine. Not sure what more you're looking for.
Those are mostly virtual dollars and he has a lot more real ones in his account, while I agree that whatever he does to "punish himself" will be practically meaningless it might have some symbolic meaning. Lowering his and senior management salaries and incentives won't save jobs but will give a better image of the crisis
And lowering the salaries of senior management doesn't make any sense. They're paid market rates. If you punitively cut their compensation in half or something, they'll just leave for another company that does pay market rate. You can't force them to stick around and be "punished", that's not how salaried employment in a market economy works.
Also, punishing management goes against the idea that he's taking all the responsibility here. Wouldn't that just be scapegoating?
That's a joke, a tax dodge, a PR gag, a farce. There's nothing fiscally responsible about it. Taking financial responsibility, if such a thing exists, would involve giving up his equity comp or even some of his holdings. Give it to the employees whose careers you've disrupted through your bad business decisions. That's responsibility.
"Market rates" is likewise a joke.
A: "Market rates for corporate executives are obscene."
B: "They're paid market rates, what's the problem?"
And their careers have been more disrupted than some random software engineer's career.
Also remember that since it's executives who set executive compensation, there is some incentive to inflate it.
(They can, of course, walk away if they disagree. But so can every other employee.)
Were they really? Did they just lose their jobs and are they now underwater on mortgages that their families can no longer afford without that income? How many executives lives were "disrupted" worse than that? Because I'm talking about a significant fraction of 11k people that you're dismissing as "some random software engineer."
Based on the latest proxy, he does not take any equity compensation. He only gets his $1 salary, a corporate private jet for business travel and $10M / year "to cover additional costs related to his and his family's personal security. This allowance is paid to Mr. Zuckerberg net of required tax withholdings, and Mr. Zuckerberg must apply the net amount towards additional personnel, equipment, services, residential improvements, or other security-related costs."
https://www.bamsec.com/filing/132680122000043/1?cik=1326801&...
The excerpt I quoted was written for a different purpose (namely to explain the $10M / year and whether the compensation committee deems it appropriate), so perhaps you feel that the language is somewhat vague as far as answering your question goes. I actually think it's pretty clear as it ends with
> "has requested to receive only $1 in annual salary and does not receive any bonus payments, equity awards, or other incentive compensation."
But earlier on in the document (https://www.bamsec.com/filing/132680122000043/1?cik=1326801&...), they do make the explicit assertion that you are looking for:
> "2021 Equity Awards. Mr. Zuckerberg did not receive any additional equity awards in 2021 because our compensation, nominating & governance committee believed that his existing equity ownership position sufficiently continued to align his interests with those of our shareholders."
Additionally, travel/security don't seem to have any hard spending limit and alleviates Zuck's personal tax liability. (by $27M anyway)
Per the filing you linked:
" Mr. Zuckerberg uses private aircraft for personal travel in connection with his overall security program (including, beginning in 2022, a private aircraft that is indirectly and wholly owned by Mr. Zuckerberg and operated by an independent charter company). On certain occasions, Mr. Zuckerberg may be accompanied by guests when using private aircraft. "
"the costs of Mr. Zuckerberg's security program vary from year to year depending on requisite security measures, his travel schedule, and other factors."
(Emphasis mine)
It was not socialist. It just called itself that.
There’s a Baptists and bootleggers coalition to pervert the meaning of socialism. Right wingers want to call everything to the left of Ronald Reagan socialism so they can paint it all as evil and a subset of people that are fairly bog standard welfare capitalists want to call themselves socialists because they think it sounds edgy and cool.
They are both wrong. Socialism involves collectivizing the means of production. Not a wealth tax. Not a greenhouse emissions rule. Not forcing companies to put women on their board. Not repealing at will employment. Collectivizing the means of production.
If you want to call for nationalizing Facebook then you are a socialist (and a fool.)
Or is this just a glib low effort put down?
When there are an estimated 7 to 9 million excess deaths recorded for the duration of the USSR, there's certainly going to be some survivorship bias with any polling.
The fall of the soviet system to capitalism was a mess, but it doesn't actually tell us anything about how people felt about communism vs capitalism. The statistic presented was in defense of socialism/communism. But, the transition from the soviet union to capitalist Russia was messy in its own right. Russia was looted by oligarchs taking advantage of the disarray.
All that being said, it looks like the poster was referencing this article, which is based on a survey conducted in 2009, long after the collapse of the soviet union...but one year into a worldwide recession. So I'm still not sure what conclusions one can really draw from that survey.
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/1223/Why-nearly-...
I no longer buy into either ideology as inherently good/bad anyways. At the end of the day, the powerful will exploit any system to their own benefit. I do believe that Communism is inherently dangerous, but only because it relies on an involuntary contract from everyone in the system to participate in a specific way. That contract violates the human impulse to act in their own short term rational interest. So you need to enforce rules, and that means establishing a more authoritarian governing body. Communism demands personal sacrifice of the accumulation of private wealth- and humans are naturally selfish. It just doesn't scale well.
Salvador Allende became President of Chile in 1970, he presided for 3 years before being taken down by a coup supported by the US government. In the time he was in power, he pushed a socialist program for Chile. Let's see some highlights of his "prisons, labor camps and starving", eh?
- nationalization of large-scale industries (notably copper mining and banking)
- a programme of free milk for children in the schools and in the shanty towns
- payment of pensions and grants was resumed
- increased construction of residential buildings, averaging 55,000/year
- all part-time workers granted rights to social security, and increased payments
- proposed electricity price-increase withdrawn
- bread prices fixed
- 55,000 volunteers sent to the south to teach literacy, and provide medical care
- obligatory minimum wage for workers of all ages was established
- free milk introduced for expectant and nursing mothers and [young] children
- free school-meals established
- rent reductions
- construction of Santiago subway rescheduled to serve working-class neighbourhoods first.
- state-sponsored distribution of free food to neediest citizens.
- minimum taxable income-level was raised
- middle-class Chileans benefited from elimination of taxes on modest incomes and property.
- Exemptions from capital taxes were extended, benefitted 330,000 small proprietors.
- According to one estimate, purchasing power went up by 28% between October 1970 and July 1971.[53]
- The rate of inflation fell from 36.1% in 1970 to 22.1% in 1971
- Average real wages rose by 22.3% during 1971.
- Minimum real wages for blue-collar workers were increased by 56% during the first quarter of 1971 - real minimum wages for white-collar workers were increased by 23% - Although the acceleration of inflation in 1972 and 1973 eroded part of the initial increase in wages, they still rose (on average) in real terms during the 1971–73 period.
and, much more;
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#Presidency
By contrast, the UK today has 27% of children living in poverty[1], and the UK government has voted against free school meals for children, and just tried to push through a tax cut for the rich, and electricity prices have gone up while energy companies are posting record profits, housing construction is down and prices are up so normal citizens are being priced out of the housing market.
[1] https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-fi...
He's lost literally 73% of his wealth over the past year and change (assuming it's all META ownership). That is a spectacular drop.
And the people getting laid off are getting very generous severance packages.
So I don't know what you're talking about. The market has punished him, and quite severely, for his missteps.
But it's not like he was being evil or malicious or something. He overhired thinking growth would continue. It didn't. Now he has to lay off. A million managers have found themselves in the same situation before.
Is it worse to lose a billion dollars when you have two b, or a thousand dollars when all you have is 2k?
The marginal utility of money for power and influence in our societies seems to start a few orders of magnitude above the upper middle class, and so far doesn't seem to bend down very much as money increases.
But just saying that you're taking responsibility is not actually taking responsibility. It's empty words.
Taking responsibility would mean owning the situation as being caused by you, and critically evaluating your actions to see if there were different paths you could have taken given the same information, or if there was other information that you should have added to your decision-making.
There are some mistakes so grave and unjustifiable that resignation would be the appropriate way to take responsibility for them, but I don't think a round of layoffs pending an expected economic downturn after excessive growth qualifies.
This is very far from Zuck's first mistake. In any case, though, I offered an alternative: making himself accountable to the board of directors. He is not accountable. He can't be fired, he can only resign. The fundamental problem is that Zuck gets to define the terms of his own accountability, which is almost an oxymoron.
That was me.
> he is literally not accountable because he answers to no one
Zuck said he wanted to take accountability for overhiring and then having to do layoffs. So the question is, what does the theoretical possibility of employees resigning or users leaving have to do with accountability for overhiring and layoffs?
He, like Vladimir Putin, is only accountable to himself.
Ideally, society should not allow this type of business structure if a company is public or a reasonably large size (say 5k employees).
You know why the food sucks so bad when you know who they are catering to :p
Absolutely this. Others in this thread are saying that the fact of having lost a lot of money is enough for him to be "accountable". But IMU the specific arrangement with Meta class B vs class A shares is that the group of other institutional investors lost _more_ but didn't have any ability to influence decisions, replace the CEO, etc. Zuckerberg's large on-paper loss isn't accountability for decisions he made, but is just the risk of being a wealthy person with a lopsided portfolio.
Both because of his role in deciding to hire so much, and because he's dead set on pursuing a metaverse vision which is controversial, I think "accountability" would require him to at least make it possible for other shareholders to vote on proposals on an equal footing.
> What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right. When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.
This was a tactful announcement and a generous severance after providing a job with pay and benefits in the top 0.1% for potentially many years.
My personal belief is that I would like to see discussion of the system that gets us to the point of mass layoffs. As rich as Zuck or Musk or whoever is, they are still close to gears in the system than orchestrators, so we should probably have a discussion about if this situation is something we could modify the system to prevent, and if we want to modify the system in that way.
Yes. Accepting responsibility is more preferable to not accepting it and blaming it on other people/things, period.
Let's say you have two leaders in this situation. #1 says "The macro economic climate is bad, so we're laying people off." #2 says "I made a mistake; this was my fault." All other things equal, I know which one I'd prefer to work with... How a leader comports themselves is just as important as their results -- especially in bad times.
Adding "and I take responsibility" without actually substantiating that makes it sound way more hollow.
Do people want him to fire himself to show he means it, or what?
I think the meaning is pretty clearly "Many of you are being let go not because of poor performance on your part, but bad decisions on my part."
It's acknowledging fault.
Increasing value of company stock
He’s the primary controlling shareholder and defacto owner. What other kind of accountability would make any sense at all? Even if he fired himself, he’d either have to shut the company down, or find someone to replace him and manage them, which makes him their boss.
Edit: to correct dumb statement around share ownership. But you know what I meant.
Does everybody take a job expecting to leave it? I don't think that is the case.
They aren't losing money or posting losses.
Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?"
Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and not blaming others for your failures. It doesn't mean that self immolation follows soon after.
I move on from bad breaks pretty quickly but there are few things that I've held on to. Things that still burn years later and all of them involve refusals to accept responsibility. Hearing someone say: "Yep, it was me. I fucked you and I'm sorry. Here's what I can offer." isn't nothing.
Layoffs suck but the rate of hiring in big companies wasn't sustainable. A correction is here. It's temporary, but, it's real.
If you've tried to hire outside of FAANG over the past decade you'd know one thing: FAANG is hoarding talent. Every developer I've really wanted to hold on to has gone to a big tech company.. I can't blame them. But, here's the thing, so have many of the contractors that I didn't end up hiring for very good reasons.
These layoff messages, down to the structure and content, all sound the same because PR people follow best practices just like everyone else. You wouldn't ask why all Redux or Angular apps use similar patterns.. They're using patterns, that's what patterns are for.
Real numbers here: $250k for a mid-level UX designer and $575k (base comp) for an Angular dev. That's expensive. And, depending on the candidate, not worth it.
There's a lot of reality outside of FAANG and finance.
This is still by far the most common case, and in fact it is probably becoming more common because large index funds have recently increased requirements related to ownership share structuring (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/08/05/sp-and-ftse-russe...).
In this specific case though, the investors knew that Zuck had complete control and they decided to invest regardless, so I do not have any sympathy for their complaints.
Edit: In this instance, the "bug" led to 11,000 people losing their jobs.
This makes the assumption that the current path was the only, and best, path, and that the CEO doesn't see a better path in the distance, or some danger immediately ahead.
Most of the big tech companies were made by people who ignored the crowds yelling at them to keep going straight. And, many of the failed behemoths of today did just that.
It is not the same for a billionaire to loose money as it is for you or me. To take a concrete example. Elon Musk could just close down Twitter right now, and waste away his 44 bn USD he spent on it. After that squander, he would still be the richest man on the planet.
But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
That would incentivize extremely risk-averse decisions by business leaders and lead to society-wide stagnation. The result would be far more suffering overall.
We actually have a reason to believe that the standard risk attracted business is a net-negative for society. These businesses tend to rely on government bailouts when their risky behavior doesn’t work out, or they lay off a large number of people, or they cause massive environmental damage, etc. I much prefer a business that plays it safe and doesn’t risk our environment and our economy while maximizing the profits they give to their shareholders.
Secondly, there is no reason to believe that a CEO is any sort of supreme decision maker of a company. Perhaps a democratized workplace—where the workers have a say in whether the business should engage in a risky behavior—is better at evaluating the risk. If that is the case then a CEO dictator might not want to lead the business into a risky endeavor at since they might get sued if it goes wrong, but workers who have only their jobs to loose might vote to do exactly that.
I find the society-wide stagnation prediction lacking in imagination.
This doesn't seem logical. Companies aren't some static things. Especially social media companies, which usually have very short lives. A corrective, appropriate, action, in response to a changing market, could very easily be a reduction in headcount.
All evidence suggests Facebook has no future [1].
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad
What's your metric for screwing up? Is it short, medium, or long term? Should short term goals/profits be the only goal of a company?
1. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/11/teens-abandoned-facebook-p...
As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker. A company screws up if it fails to bring profits to the workers. Laying off 11,000 workers certainly falls under a big screw up by that metric. I know companies—such as charity/non-profits exists who have humanitarian goals, or even amusement, as their goals, however I don’t see Facebook there.
But we live in a capitalist society and most companies’ goals are profits for their shareholders. Facebook seems to have screwed that goal up as well. And instead of letting the person who lead the company into this failure pay the price of failing, they take it down on the workers... This seems quite unfair, and is even illegal in many (most?) countries.
I can't extract any meaning from this. Could you be more specific?
Maybe a scenario will help. What if the company becomes not profitable enough (there can be reason's that don't require leadership fault), and it will fail unless workers are let go? Do you let it fail, causing all to lose their jobs, or do you trim the fat, allowing some to continue?
I would assume you would want to look at the whole, more than the individual.
Please note the above happened to a company I worked for, during the last recession, and it was, very objectively, not the fault of the leadership.
I apologize if I interpreted your response incorrectly, but it was, again, very indirect.
The purpose of my question was to help me understand your perspective, and to help you present some meaning to your statement "As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker."
Facebook is extremely rich, facebook can afford to break apart their business and give part of it to those 11,000 workers. Heck facebook can even afford to keep those 11,000 workers earning 6 digits while being tasked with doing nothing. In either case, it would be in the interest of the worker. What is not in the interest of a worker is having a leadership that makes bad decisions, wastes the time of the workers, and then lays them off. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.
> The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business
Starting from scratch is rarely an efficient, or possible, solution, especially anything with IP involved.
> after being compensated from the failing business
Were they not compensated for their time during employment? Wouldn't being compensated for the failing business require knowing the future? I'm not asking this negatively, I'm just trying to understand perspective. Have you ever worked for a startup, or been involved in a small/medium business that's not-yet profitable?
I think you would find extreme risk aversion in a system implemented like you describe, if the only option were continuous success or quick failure. Are there any areas of the world that prefer bankruptcy over headcount reduction, where we could look at the statistics?
> similar how a shareholder can sue for lost profits.
Only if there's negligence or fraud, which you have about zero chance to prove in this case.
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
Would you agree to lose 100% of you money each time you make a mistake? If not, why should he?
A real consequence would be them loosing everything except 5000 USD
In a case like this, I don't think the point should be whether Zuckerberg "would actually feel" a consequence: it should be whether the people getting laid off—as in, the ones who were wronged—can feel it.
If you mean unlimited, this seems like an unreasonable expectation. FB employees receive a 4 month severance package, 4 months should be plenty of time to find a job for a developer/office worker.
That's more than fair.
Very generous I'd say.
If your decisions lead to 11,000 people losing their jobs, and you "take responsibility for that", then you should be 11,001.
Edit: Happy to take the down votes, but also happy to have a dialogue around why this might be a flawed take.
Plenty of CEOs have blamed the economy, the pipeline, the customers, the competition, the weather, etc. He's accepting he made some decisions that over-extended the company and as a result they have to make difficult layoffs. (Which has happened at every company I've been a part of and is happening at many other companies just in the past week.)
What if you want to hang on, and hope to hire more in the future?
When someone is accused of a crime, they can plead innocent or guilty. That is step one.
There are more steps after that…
They don't WANT to forgive them, or provide them with any redemption. Regardless of the apology, you will use it to push back further. Look for any hole in the apology to point to. If that fails, criticize the apology for being too late, or only to save face... in any case, make sure to proclaim that you're even more angry after the apology.
I'm not saying people should never apologize, but I get sick of this whole routine and all the acting. People will always just do what they want and it will just be based on a knee jerk sense of how much they like you.
But they aren't, this isn't “taking responsibility”, this is just following the latest spin doctor trend in public communication.
Taking responsibility for a failure means stepping down.
People can disagree about whether the package is satisfactory, but that's completely beside the point. The severance package is the make good Zuckerberg is offering: it is an expense his company is paying when they do not have to.
It is the implied answer to the question "Oh yeah? How is he taking responsibility?" Argue about whether it's good enough, but it is an answer.
What they're complaining about is that Zuckerberg can't take responsibility here, it's too late (being responsible would have been gambling less), but he is claiming he will which is more obvious marketing speak (sounds good, doesn't make any sense).
When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.
That would be a meaningful way of saying he is sorry as well as setting a precedent for all other billionaires who just "take responsibility" and continue on
If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.
If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.
If you somehow forced someone to sit and practice drawing a hand for eight hours a day, they would get surprisingly far as an artist.
Being a founder isn’t too dissimilar. Determination tends to be decisive.
If you spent eight hours a day trying to make a small group of users love you, you’d get surprisingly far.
I think that’s what they mean about potential founders at Stripe. There’s a lot of potential energy that a layoff might release.
Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company
I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)
I'll bet a lot of those "low performers" just had a hard time jumping through hoops at the circus, but will do just fine out on the savannah
> It’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing.
Is this supposed to mean anything at all?
There's certainly less demand for Facebook's style of social media, for sure.
I don't think a recession with low demand and high interest rates is a good time to start a company at all.
It depends on how you define "startup." They don't necessarily have to keep staring at screens for their living.
It was mass layoffs of real estate and banking workers in 2008 that kick started the food truck industry.
EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".
When I roll on to a new project and it is more/less work than my previous one, I don't think of it as a pay increase or decrease.
No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.
Why would they perform better in another industry where presumably they do not have qualifications either (nor ability)?
You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.
Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.
If i put out a job ad: Need a software develioer with skills in COBOL, latest react and assembly, to lead a team of 10 for $30k
And I cant hire anyone
It will still end up in government statistics for shortage.
This is lile if we all put out ads on Gumtree/craiglist 'will buy a Toyota, brand new, for $1000", and someone counts thise ad and concludes there is a shortage of Toyotas.
Not all organizations get lots of value from developers.
It also means they're not losing a lot by not having a developer, so they're perfectly ok with having the position open until someone takes it.
If I want to hire a top proffeshional for minimum wage, its not a job offer, its just wishfull thinking.
Demand elasticity makes any report on the volume of demand irrelevant unless it also covers the pricing of that demand.
Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland based on the most widely used definition of Central Europe [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#/media/File:Cen...
Have you seen the second map in the introduction?
Every country changes their belonging to a region based on the perceived value bias of what is being discussed.
A user here humorously put it that Slovenians see themselves as Western European when it comes to how honest and hard they work, Southern European when it comes to weather and food, and Eastern European when it comes to drinking, partying and having fun.
But geographical location however is immutable, so let's stick to that instead of the other more biased definitions.
Proceeds to using precisely biased, political, definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_member_...
Compare that to a new grad at Google Germany making 130k€. Somebody with ten years of experience there would be making closer to 300k€.
If prosperity distribution had kept track during the last 50 years (wealth has increased dramatically due to tech), the average salary would be 6 figures, so it’s actually better for wealth distribution to have tech folks making higher 6 figures to put pressure on the 8+ figure class.
1. the US is somewhat of an outlier, while Germany is grouped together with other wealthy countries
2. the US' Gini has been steadily growing last few decades - implying inequality is getting worse
3. Germany's Gini is very slightly declining in the last few decades - implying it's staying roughly stable
I don't think higher-than-average is particularly good at all - you're in the neighbourhood of places like Qatar, Iran, DRC and Argentina. In fact the only way you'd use Gini to suggest the US has a ok level of wealth inequality is if you presented two countries Gini coefficients side-by-side to someone who doesn't normally think about Gini, presented them without any other context and said "look, they're kinda close"
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:G...
Also this obscures the fact that it is far better to be poor or working class in the US than somewhere with a similar Gini coefficient.
I think you might want to lookup what Gini tries to measure. You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad, and now you're having to backpedal and say that actually Gini kinda sucks but the USA isn't so bad.
No, I'm pointing out that at lot was being made of a small difference in a ratio that's really sensitive to marginal differences. I'm noting a marginal difference that makes the US look more different than other OCED nations than it is in fact and more like autocratic developing nations than it is in fact.
I'm also pointing out that it isn't a good measure at all. It's as coarse as GDP and more misleading.
It's a little bit funny to say that a metric is skewed by measuring the thing it is designed to measure...
It's not a very good way to measure what it is trying to measure[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Limitations
[1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/495/images/IZAWOL.462.g...
Use profit margins to determine what wages should be. I wouldn't be surprised if the wages are fine on that basis, actually. But let's draw the right conclusions for the right reasons.
EU - esp. Germany and some other European countries - have abysmal salary compared to rest of the developed world and a poor wage growth over the last 10 years or so.
Heck, even countries like India have experienced faster growth: netto, a senior tech professional in India can earn more than what what they'd get in Germany. And that's not even accounting for 3-5x difference in cost of living.
This salary calculator is extremely accurate https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
In any case, I agree with your overall statement: even if 86K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners in Germany, in reality it's hard to afford a decent house (not flat) with that salary (unless you wanna work until you're 67...)
Thank you for the calc though, seems really helpful.
But i don't see that being necessarily true and largely depends on type of software you build and the culture of the company. A lot of people are decent engineers and are not interviewing for FANG for a variety of reasons are for no reason in companies that may or may not deserve them. I think its hard to build street cred to get people to work for less, but interviews should always have a good bar.
You don't need some Google genius to do a lot of this work, and sometimes a regular person will do a better job than some wonderkid who spends too much time and effort trying to automate it
My brother moved from FAANG to Atlanta to work for Home Depot. His comp went down from 400k to 140k. Which is still great for Atlanta, but there is no situation where a move from FAANG to any other company comes without wage deflation
Of course, that's like $100k or less with current exchange rates, haha
I don't notice any request for sympathy in the GP comment.
Is this ignoring finance, promotions, or (until recent layoffs) private/public big tech/unicorn-like companies?
Like, even within FAANG the pay bands are huge for the same level.
As an aside, you're talking about switching from a company that supposedly makes revenue selling ads but really is inflated with free money to one that makes revenue from selling hammers. People who made this switch before the free money are going to be fine. Now that 11,000+ people are going to try to make this switch, they're going to wish they had.
The other thing that happens with this is your job becomes much more practical and less oriented to whatever fads are sweeping SV and HN. Some like it, some don't.
You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries
https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/react-jobs?contract=True
In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy
And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.
The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.
It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.
With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.
I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.
I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.
I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.
I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.
You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.
Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow
Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.
I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).
Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations
Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).
Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.
50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.
That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.
Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.
Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.
just like we saw in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s
MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.
I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.
They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.
So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.
There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in Lalaland.
The main thing is figuring out what's the full impact. If it's 10%+ of tech workers, the golden days are over for the vast majority of tech workers.
Proportionally these numbers would not make a difference in a small European country.
Now all that easy money is going away.
The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.
If recovery starts taking a few years, quality of life drops a lot.
This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.
At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.
For instance, Amazon in Seattle benefited as thousands of engineers found themselves out of work in 2000 and 2001.
In addition, AWS was largely inspired by the fact that Sun Microsystems refused to cut their pricing. Amazon was using a lot of Oracle databases and Sun hardware, and when Sun wouldn't negotiate their prices down, Bezos began to figure out A Better Way.
Bezos was particularly irked because there was a flood of practically new Sun hardware available (due to the crash) but Sun wouldn't negotiate on price, despite the market being awash in high quality used hardware.
Basically Bezos didn't want to spend $80,000 on a new Sun server, but he also didn't want to run hardware that was used.
So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.
> Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56878
so double the numbers for a sense of how many people G actually employs.
In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Hiring students is much cheaper so companies may still hire them whilst letting go of other expensive employees at a cost of quality.
Keep in mind it's always about people, not about soulless entities.
Welcome to most of Europe.
Also wanted to add that when we want to feel less trapped we can very easily escape to many other nice places that surround us in the near vicinity, I usually go for bookstores and coffee-shops (from where I’m writing this comment), other people also choose parks, bike-rides, stuff like that. We manage.
1. Apartments can be perfectly fine for a happy life, everywhere across the world.
2. Conception and child upbringing do not mandate having a house.
According to the companies that's all that's happening here.
As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.
If you can do the work, awesome, no one cares how you feel about it. But that's the keyword: *IF* you can.
People who went into IT for the love of it are diligent by default (from my personal experience) and CAN do the work. Then you get people who enter IT for the money (nothing wrong with that) and not all of them can do the work.
Those are the show-stoppers usually which incur various debts (from tech-debt to actual financial debt) because you end up having to carry them.
Let's not pretend as if they don't exist, there's so many of them.
A person like that was moved off of my team recently, and the general lift on the team from just having them gone has been astounding. Everything is up: velocity, stability, even just the vibe of technical planning sessions.
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
Weinberg, Gerald M. The Psychology of Computer Programming (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971)
Dunn, Robert H. Software Quality: Concepts and Plans (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990)
Christenson, D. A. et al, "Statistical Methods Applied to Software", collected in Schulmeyer, G. Gordon & McManus, James I. Total Quality Management for Software (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992)
And while one can certainly debate the "is the advice given in something that is 30 or 50 years old still valid" - that debate itself is interesting in considering what was going on in the minds of managers back then and how they tried to solve these problems.
There is a certain lack of institutional knowledge and a desire to throw much of it away with the phrase "we're agile" or some other management buzzword of the day... and yet Brook's Law is still as valid today as it was nearly five decades ago (gotta keep an eye on that... I wonder if they'll do a third edition in 2025).
Years ago when interviewing people I didn't have to wonder as often how passionate the candidate actually is towards the field, or whether they're just looking for a high pay job.
These days I get those doubts a bit more. I think most people are still at least somewhat passionate though (bad/awkward programmer tooling which we've gotten used to are somehow great filters....)
He said he hopes people voluntarily decide not to work in tech. Why suggest he wants to disallow?
Basic things like the KISS principle have been thrown in the garbage can, almost all that matters is how the tech we’re now using can further increase our career prospects.
Well I predict two things:
One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.
Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.
| Apple | Google | Meta
market cap | $2.245 trillion | $1.163 trillion | $261.8 billion
revenue | $387.5 billion | $278.1 billion | $117.9 billion
employees | 154000 | 174014 | 71970
revenue / employee | $2.517 million | $1.598 million | $1.639 millionIf bay-area comp drops, what do you think will happen to developer comp in the midwest? (refer to programmer compensation before 90s+ SV was a thing)
Nonetheless, I don't think the point changes. One group getting less doesn't usually mean that it's going to transfer over and some other group will get less. Most likely, everyone is going to get less.
Rising tide lifts all ships as they say (and the opposite is true as well)
I make ~$300k/yr and could probably swing $200k/yr if I didn't save anything (I save ~$100k/yr currently). I just can't imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.
1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world. 2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100/wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family. 3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.
As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000/mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I'd need $100k/yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.
We could downsize and save $10k/yr, but that's not really making a substantial dent long-term.
$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.
Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren't going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.
Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.
Here's what I'd add: Its extremely difficult to hire really talented senior engineers. Its easy to look at layoffs as "great, we should be able to find senior talent now"; but the opposite may actually be true. Layoffs, at least in otherwise "fine" companies, will predominately not impact senior engineers, and they'll also be less likely to leave. Moreover, the industry is effectively building a wall to breach into seniority; the pathway from junior to senior is harder and harder, even going back a year or two, and many of these junior/normal devs were massively compensated at these roles.
My heart goes out to the junior devs right now; there really are two industries and job markets.
Shit, I get messaged about a thousand software jobs per year and I'm just one guy.
There's jobs for everyone who was laid off, but unclear if they're as good/lucrative.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/02/heres-where-the-jobs-are-for...
So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.
Are you assuming a 4 year cliff or why would one lose 4 years worth of stock?
Interesting point you're bringing up. Personally I wouldn't count unvested stock as part of my wealth.
Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k/yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.
I think there's going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets/from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.
Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.
Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.
Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) 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.
edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers
Edit: I was wrong but this is why acronyms without explanation are annoying.
What are bootcampers, does this just mean recent hires? Or people who came in with no specialist skills who rotate until they find a team?
Basically a high powered onboarding program that is really good.
I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.
Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.
Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.
Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!
Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.
This is super idealized. How many layoffs have been going on in startup land recently?
Lots of small and medium sized companies, and I know for some that it was not their last move before going under.
We had a hiring boom driven by cheap money, which is now ending. Now we get the inverse.
Has nothing to do with insane large corps and saintly SMBs.
The link between actual business logic and company valuation broke down around 2010.
This is not to say that every single person being laid off is of low value, that’s not true. It’s just it is hard to lay off only low performers, some average or even good performer will always be collateral damage. But, overall, if you want well-performing companies to not do mass layoffs on recession, the only way is to make it more palatable to people to see mass firings in good times.
The quarterly revenue was about $27bn but net profit $4bn, so you're off by a factor of 7 or more on the estimate. R&D expenses alone are $9bn, and the largest operational expense is employee comp, by a LOT, distant second being data centers. For added measure, they also reduced real estate footprint along with the 11k employees.
The company has also essentially doubled in size every year since ~2013, and that was certainly encouraged by false positives in terms of future projections when the pandemic hit. So this is really not surprising, and a major cost-saving function for them.
Granted these are comparing annual cost versus quarterly figures, but the overall narrative still stands.
Are RSUs included into this number?
Meaning they expected to continue picking up speed, not maintain their speed
Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.
I bet 50% of US-based HN readers are.
It's just 2 years with 200k individual or 300k combined income, or 1M NAV.
A good thing to remember when you're tempted to sell short.
But in fact stores reopened and people went back to massively buy at stores instead of offline. Parenthesis is closed.
I know someone who had worked there for 17 years that got laid off and only got 4 weeks because of it.
They never got around to laying me off, I ended up quitting much later than I should have.
Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
When he volunteered to get laid off (with the intention of getting a severance), the person he said that to fired him on the spot for "not being a team player."
Eventually, every last one of us were laid off. But it took six months and I used the time to find a new role and I also received a four month severance.
Sometimes voluntary layoffs are announced, but really you need to be able to read between the lines and smell that something is coming before the layoff is announced. (The reason is that layoffs are usually kept confidential because no one wants to incite panic.)
What I did a few years ago was have a 1-1 with a VP and basically implied that I was ready to do something different. I ended up with a great severance package right as the pandemic was taking off.
And more hours may not be a direct request- anyone at the periphery of the dev process- in the past this was QA, now gets cut because devs can do it, SWE roles might have to start doing more ops work, etc...
When I last left the financial industry, it was so bad, that VPs- and that was back when it least had some meaning- at least it did when I first got the title around 2010, started having to do mundane weekend work like checking out the system after network/firewall changes, etc.
It can be death by a thousand cuts. Now the financial crisis was way worse because essentially everyone was hurting, and losing money- and interestingly I "got out" of that bad situation by going to tech. But that's just how these bad situations play out and deteriorate.
That said, companies are still profitable. There was a LOT of overhiring in the past few years. I don't expect things to get so bad, at all.
Either way I hope those laid off land on their feet.
The advice to "take the first layoff" is weird, you rarely have a choice, if ever.
Oh how I wish I had volunteered cuz a year later basically everyone including me had quit anyway.
The next round was a security guy waiting in your office with a box and a packet of information about how to apply for unemployment.
I've never known a company that is in the process of layoffs not jumping at the chance to VRIF an employee because it is a far cleaner termination and honestly less stressful and upsetting for all involved IMHO.
The bigger factor is are you in a position that requires the company longer to replace you? If so you may just be in that shit position of being kept on another 6 months until the next round of layoffs and get a package half as good.
As the first poster said always get out first if you can as the packages never get better the worse a company does.
Never fool yourself into thinking you're too amazing to be let go and that is why you 'survived' this round of layoffs. The worst case is as I said, you are too good to be let go of yet.
(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
HR is there to protect the company. Sometimes that aligns with protecting the employee but when shit hits the fan ask yourself does HR work for you or for the company?
I know I sound a bit 'down' saying that but it is an unfortunate reality that companies are not very loyal to their employees when times get tough.
Find a trusted friend in the company who is a survivor and ask them. Survivors have strong information networks for office politics and know such info.
Even in an economic downturn an engineer with Meta on their résumé is going to be well positioned to find employment inside of the three months or more pay and six month insurance runway this deal provides.
Having said that, if you're going to be worried about possibly/probably losing your job 6 months down the road what does it really matter if you have signalled you're not very invested in staying? The company has signalled they're not very invested either is how I look at it.
>(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
Of course I am saying this as someone in Europe where firing someone "normally" is a lot more complicated and time consuming and comes with a whole list of other issues a company needs to make sure they manage properly. They can't just turn round and fire you with no pay because you "showed you were not very invested in the company as you asked if you could be let go when we were letting go of several thousand people". That is a 100% guaranteed legal hell hole no company likes to be in by choice.
In America perhaps that is something you genuinely need to worry about I don't know.
You may find there's nowhere better to go, but switching to "looking externally" rather than "looking internally" for new jobs is definitely a good idea.
Yeah that's kinda the rub right now though. Everyone's frozen, tons are laying off. If the only information you have is "my company did a layoff", it's not clear you're better off looking externally vs. internally vs. staying on your current team.
One bad case is you leave your company that just did a layoff for one that has yet to do one (but will need to soon).
Do what you feel comfortable with at the end of the day. My original reply was meant as one possible answer that I have seen first hand to work well for both parties.
I will add as another personal opinion though that I very rarely see people that choose to stay at a company going though layoffs hanging around very long.
More often than not those people experience a 'depression' (for want of a better word that escapes me as I write this) seeing their friends leave, not having the freedom the had back in the "good old days", little if any progression, the constant "sorry not this quarter, we're still recovering from the layoffs", living in constant anxiety that they will be in the next round of layoffs, etc. So they often leave within a year or two anyway.
Over the years I have played this game and now I am a bit more proactive about exiting before that 'depression' hits me. Of course what is right for me is not right for all, only you can truly decide what you feel is best given your situation.
In other words that same company that in its heyday relied on the person pulling an all-nighter 'for the good of the company' yet failed to ever offer a reciprocal 'sure, take all the paid time off you need buddy' in return gets what it earned.
Although you may hear the 'rats from a sinking ship' and 'you're deserting the company and leaving your colleagues to pick up the slack' shrieked from on down high by management - Fuck 'em. They didn't actually give a shit about you on the way up and they don't give a shit about you on the way down.
Jump fast, jump early, beat the pack
It's possible some of these are unfounded/exaggerated fears, though?
If you're 100% set on leaving with or without severance, for sure ask. But if you think you might prefer to stay if severance isn't an option, asking feels risky.
I'm not suggesting issuing ultimatums, of course, I'm just suggesting that you mentally prepare for needing to quit first, otherwise it takes a real pro to have that conversation. I know I'm not good enough to do it unless I talk about things like that with my manager regularly already.
I do wonder if these are questions you can ask confidentially in a different way. Like I dunno how big your place is but you might find this information easily in a meeting with HR, but HR is there to help the company (not you) so it depends on their priorities a lot. It's a very reasonable thing to wonder about when tens of thousands of people just got laid off from similar positions... I'd think a reasonable manager or HR person would understand that. But I certainly can't argue that managers and HR people are all reasonable!
1. Review your finances. How long can you skip work without feeling financially stressed? This should include full expenses (medical insurance, family, etc.) and will determine the level of risk you can comfortably take with your job.
If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk. Even if the job market and your company both collapse you can downshift for a year or two and work on a new tech as a personal project. Droughts seldom last more than a couple of years. If you have less than 3 months of cushion, look for the lowest risk options (a strongest company you can work for) and try to build it up.
2. Decide whether you expect your current company to do well with the reduced headcount. If your company is publicly traded, read financial statements and analyst opinions try joining an investor call. Look at the outside information, not the HR infomercials.
If the company is expected to do well you can stay. Layoffs in strong companies often mean shakeouts beyond actual layoffs (teams merging and forming, etc.) and you might even be able to move to a better spot. If the company is in trouble, start looking for other options ASAP.
3. Learn what is the job market for your skills and if any adjacent areas have significantly better prospects (if so, buff up your skills). This can change quickly. Talk to your tech friends, especially those in hiring manager spots, to figure out if they are hiring/frozen/RIFfing.
In my own experience I think this is a dangerous attitude: anny other HNers out there that thought this and failed, maybe add a comment about your own experience?
I thought I had cushion. However that attitude led to me reseting my equity to zero when I was about 30, and it took more than a decade of my life before I felt like I was starting to recover.
Perhaps sometimes we had some luck, so we get some savings, and we then think “that was easy, I could do that again” and try something risky. But the environment or our circumstances have changed, and we can’t always replicate our past.
The other aspect is that I think we underestimate risk: for example when I was younger I would think creating a business worth a million dollars would be unbelievably great. Now I see that opportunity costs of a $X00,000 loss of income require a 10x return ($X million) to break even (to only just cover your risks). Also you need wayyyy more return than 10x to cover the fact that your time investment is not diversified: a 10x return on a game you can only play a few times is a massive gamble that you end up with nothing. You don’t want to end up with nothing after say 40, because the world starts to randomly switch into extremely-hard-mode sometime after ~40 (and everybody is unaware they were playing on easy-mode until after the switch changes).
I have seen people go from a good sized bank account to zero quickly by buying something expensive (a house, a boat, etc.) or by trying to start a business. One can always lose money on risky investments or outright gambling.
But I have never seen someone deplete a 5-year savings by downshifting for a period of time. I was talking about the second case: I do not have to worry about losing a job if I have 5+ years of living expenses. If I lose my job and have to cool heels for a year, so be it; there are still have 4+ years of cushion. My 2c.
My opinion is tempered by watching so many others flame out when trying to start businesses. Early flame out is often way better financially than many years of not quite succeeding (a friend just sold a business for peanuts after nearly a decade: costs and benefits but didn’t get the success they wanted).
Part of my comment is related to something I just read: a summary of Warren Buffett’s investing as:
RULE #1: don’t lose money.
RULE #2: don’t forget rule #1.
I”m not suggesting we shouldn’t chase rainbows - dreams are awesome even though they are usually social constructs driven by status. I guess my comment could be summarised as: don’t advise people to take risks. Either they are risk averse, in which case if they flame out due to your advice, that is bad. Or they are risk takers, in which case they need the opposite advice - try to be more sensible and less gambling.
The median return from people investing time into a business is probably nearer to zero than I would like to think. The average return is insanely skewed by the 1 in 1000 outliers. https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...
I mean, the world needs founders, but I strongly believe it is not a financially sensible risk for the vast majority of people that become founders. I am assuming your comment was aimed at potential founders.
Edit: I just noticed this relevant note in https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlig... about Sam Bankman-Fried:
Here, SBF realized, was the rub: When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he’d get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus the decision to stick with Jane was a risk-averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between $50 and 50 percent of $100, and saying, “Give me President Grant.” SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.It seems that you should take as much advantage as possible of your legal status.
Most of the VR advocates I know are no fan of Meta:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ThrillSeekerVR
What is missing from Zuck's vision is any of the understanding that can be had from or had about fiction. If he was willing to listen he should take a sabbatical and go watch Ready Player One and all of the Sword Art Online anime and then he should buy a Switch or a PS5 and get a serious gaming habit. At some point he might get some insight about virtual worlds that aren't just a pale shadow of the real world but rather a place you might really want to work or play in.
If you believe that Superbowl commercial for Horizon Worlds is representative of what they think the market is it for people who feel like they are over the hill, the best is behind them, and they can recapture what it was like to live back in the day? (Is that you Zuck?)
I am very interested in getting a VR headset to help with some 3D GFX development I do, I like the Oculus hardware but I nuked my Facebook account a long time ago so it's not for me. I game plenty too but I try only to play games that are fun. (I am a little vulnerable to grindy RPGs, my son will smack me if he catches me…)
Quest, no pun intended?
When he laid me off it was clear that he had to hit a hard headcount number, and I knew the project I was working on was “discretionary”. The HR meeting was “this is a headcount reduction and not a reflection on your work. Have a lawyer look over your severance and please accept or decline it within a week.” Really quite professional.
Employers themselves usually look into spreadsheets with a bunch of KPIs deciding who to lay off, without any regards for the effort you have actually placed into the job.
But the company itself couldn't care less about anyone working there.
If you're looking for income growth and are already in professional position making decent money it's almost never worth it to go back to school.
If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career.
Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.
If we’re talking about where the opportunities (jobs) are going to be, then you’re probably looking at tech roles within non-tech companies. These companies have been dying to modernize but haven’t been able to hire engineers due to the tech bubble.
After that, tooling that enables non-technical companies to build software - whatever that looks like.
What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face.
(No snark intended, my background is in science...)
The fields that would benefit society the most are not typically the fields where the most money is to be made.
Spent two years in school and got to sit out the worst of the recession. However, (in the US) tuition increased a ton from when I first went to school and has only gotten more ridiculous since I graduated.
Personally I'm glad I did it, it just took a while to pay it all off.
It was like 15% of the businesses just evaporated.
It was a Cisco building in particular that I remember.
I was over on that street recently and everything is occupied again, though many of the names have changed.
If we're lucky
Europe will probably get its energy sorted in the medium term with LNG, and they're going to need to build a lot of damn nukes, but I don't think it'll be 10 years.
If memory serves, Meta is cutting a lot of non tech jobs. Engineers might lose their jobs if entire projects are scrapped, but maybe a different position will be offered to them.
I hope that everyone is looking at Twitter and learning what not do: no company wants to beg some engineers to come back after being too quick to pull the trigger.
What country are you referring to? I'm in the US-- the market here seems quite strong according to the BLS:
US Bureau of Labor Statistics-- Here are two examples, followed by the general IT occupation growth description:
- Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers
--> Job Outlook, 2021-31 25% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- Information Security Analysts
--> Job Outlook, 2021-31 35% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
"Overall employment in computer and information technology occupations is
--> projected to grow 15 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations"
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Long Covid alone is going to hamper any economic recovery. It's a mass disabling event. The sooner we recognize this and start tackling it, the better : https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-workforce-absenteeism-pro...
We have several fundamental inflation factors - The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year. - Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare. - This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception. - The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs. - Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up. - During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe. - Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.
On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors: - Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything. - Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well. - Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.
All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.
As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems. - Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation. - Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more. - In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy. - People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US. - Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs. - Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts) - These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.
In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).
Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.
In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.
Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.
Under what circumstance do you believe the current landscape would be comparable to the 2000's era? Certainly, I would hope that the same kind of foolish behavior wouldn't reoccur, outside of a very specific set of circumstances, but do you see any sort of comparison between the historical foolishness of the market, and the wastes of money that have been devoted to things like, Stadia, Zillow AI pricing, Quibi, WeWork, etc.?
When I see the amount of money spent vs brought in by the various big names out there (social networks, in particular) I can't help but see a thing essentially worth little outside of name recognition. I naturally assume it to be a house of cards ready to collapse at some point, I just can't really determine when or why that might be. Perhaps not anytime soon, or to the extent that it would have were it 2000, but certainly companies that has such a noticeably poor ability to create profit, that it seems assured to fail.
I've certainly been wrong about such things in the past. Twitter, for example, was a thing that I assumed around 2008 or 2009, would never catch on, and that whatever traction it had would fade within a few months. I had similar assumptions with Netflix being "doomed to failure" after they tried to split the steaming/DVD rental services. I've been laughably wrong on each of those things, so it's entirely possible that I'm just not appreciating that maybe the world itself works has changed in a way that I haven't grasped. I just don't see how tech companies which can't manage to turn a profit, let alone offer predictable income, are able to sustain longterm value investment. It just seems like a hopeful anemic.
Crypto though I think is where we will see an 00 style collapse. Many of the companies are scams or lightly disguised gambling platforms. The technology is poorly implemented in many cases, leading to theft. There are also a large amount of drifters just taking people's money. Maybe crypto has protected the broader market by being a honeypot for all the exuberant behavior? IDK.
I think you should be careful discounting social networks. Meta, as one analyst I read said, is a cash volcano. IMO, ATT effects for Meta and Google are overblown because they have so many properties to gather data from. Ads on both platforms work and are valuable. Though they are not immune from general economic slowdowns.
Even though TikTok is private, the little that has leaked shows them doing extremely well. Twitter has been mismanaged for years. Musk is right that Twitter should be a decent business, but it remains to be seen if he can get it there.
While I'm pontificating, and since you also mentioned Netflix :) another spot I see about to implode is content spend. Look at how much Netflix, Disney, Prime, etc... have spent creating content the last 5ish years, and then look at how much they charge a family for the access. There is no way that level of spend continues. We have been living in a golden age for content with the variety and amount, and I think that is about to end. With the increase in rates and the market pullback overall, content spend is going to have to get cut.
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.
now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different
> if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.
For the past 10+ years, in this forum, the advice is to stop trying to build something, go work at Faang
I think the advice given, when requested, has much more nuance that takes into account the context provided in the request. Do you honestly think HN is just a bunch of FAANG fanboys?
Based on what is being upvoted, and what is not being downvoted, yes
There’s no comparison to Facebook.
Maps I'm pretty sure is a loss leader or used for data for ads
Gmail as well
Android is platform to hit you with ads
Chrome/Chromeboooks also
GCP is actually a viable business, albeit in a very competitive market
self driving cars, research, quantum computers, none of those make money.
There is a perfect comparison to Facebook, and for that matter, MTV and the New York Times. They all make money by selling ads.
It probably depends on one’s perspective. Their Q3’22 financials show that $54b of their $69b revenue for the quarter is advertising income. It is also listed first in their financials.
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q3_alphabet_earnings...
Yes, have you seen the salaries recently? an E6 can make nearly half a million a year in total compensation.
We both have jobs because we need to pay our bills.
Best of luck with the side project, hope it entices you/your cofounder to leave Facebook.
>now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different
The culture in google isn't any better. Smart people who want to do things haven't gone there since 2012.
I have no idea if Metaverse is a game you download and run or it's supposed to be some tokens you take from game to game. I just have no idea. I've seen the creepy/shitty Zuck avatars, so I assume there is some chat-game involved somewhere.
Notice there are no questions in this post. I don't care to learn. Just re-stating how poor the messaging of what it is they apparently want me to care about is.
It may not be realistic or desirable, but I don't get how someone couldn't possibly wrap their head around what it is.
What I'm poking fun at is that i haven't seen a single piece of news explaining Zuck's plan. Did he even have one?
Where are you hearing that?
If these smart people spend their brain energy to address these needs, which the world actually needs, they'll find success again, and the world will be changed in the way it needs to be... and frankly that's the way capitalism is supposed to work. Changing the world is only rewarded when people want it.
And I disagree that solving climate change etc. is a "need" for most people. I think we all pretty much accept that climate change is going to happen unless some major coups or revolutions take place, and there's nothing we can do about it. Seems like the plan for the individual is just to ride it out for our 80 years, or until there's some food shortage or water crisis that kills us.
This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...
The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."
"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."
"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."
"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."
"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."
etc.
The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
Of course it has been done for millennia.
How does a CEO with enough class B shares to control shareholder voting take accountability?
Self flagellation perhaps?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
What you said, but in a Second Life clone.
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it. It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners" (tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute impunity for a day?
Which is actually average practice... and in most distributions that's definitionally not the best.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
The rest is implementation details.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I've been priveledged enough to see the insides of hundreds of companies. The problem is ALWAYS the leadership! (or lack thereof)
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I guess GPT-3 has never played Numberwang
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
Who predicted this?
The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.
But my memory may be playing tricks on me.
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid.
>Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter.
The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.
Then, I checked Google. Yep, you are right: https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-production-by-country/
In my mind, I was mixed up with world's largest exporters. Last I knew, it was a race between Qatar and Australia. But wrong again! It is Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
Heck, it’s only four powerballs from last weekend.
¹2011 figure
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
Also, most forms of non-screen entertainment (bars, restaurants, sports, theaters, etc.)
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?) think doing nothing would have been much worse.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
Anyways you're changing the topic now. Glad I could help you understand how the ukraine war affected the US economy. Good day.
No, I'm not from the US, so the colloquial usage of "gas" as "fuel for cars" slipped my mind.
The US is also a net exporter of crude oil, so all I've said so far still applies.
How has the Ukraine war affected gasoline prices? Are you just talking about the state you live in, or US-wide?
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.
The laptop class genuinely believed we'd never do anything in-person again.
I mean, they probably believed what they wanted to believe, but that’s a very human failing.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
Stripe and Twitter took a lot of heat off of Meta; if they had done this in March it’d be a whole different story.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
For them that risk was much greater.
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
Input:
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
Results in:
"When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
That many unreads makes it sound like everyone is using emails except you!
I'd set up filters to clean up the inbox, but it just so happens that when something of significance happens, it's usually on Workchat or Workplace, so I don't bother with e-mail.
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.
The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.
Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
Why would there be any issue from an FTC standpoint? As far as I can tell, they're in completely separate businesses. I do agree it is a brilliant idea to Microsoft-ize the SMB relationships they already have to sell software services.
Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
I agree that it would have been a good strategy, but that's (presumably) why they never did it.
That food looks good, imagine if they partnered with Uber or Grab so you can add to cart right below the picture.
Peer to Peer payments could have also been great, especially if you could check-out at a store by scanning a QR code to pay (think WeChat Pay, FairPrice in Singapore, or even Paypal's version of that).
Or even buying event tickets. They already have events on the platform, and they let you put targeted ads, but what about an integrated experience to purchase tickets right on the platform instead of there being an external link?
They could have done so much but the only major change/addition in recent years was Dating (a huge hit in countries that perceive Tinder as only for hookups) and those avatars that people use everywhere instead of text posts.
He also started SpaceX with Falcon 1, not Falcon 9, and certainly not Starship.
I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.
>Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.
That's an interesting idea.
That's a crazy idea, if original. What do Facebook know about building and selling general cloud services?
Besides, Google is trying 50 different things but it didn't go full throttle on any idea like FB did for Metaverse. Huge difference.
You can't possibly know that. Try not to get caught up in your own speculation and speculation from pundits.
They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.
They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.
Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse.
Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.
This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.
The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.
> company’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the quarter.
> Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022.
The effects from the Apple changes are mostly in the rear view mirror at this point. You could attributed a 4% revenue hit to them, but those can also be attributed to a general slowing economy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/26/meta-plans-to-lose-even-more...
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
> "We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,"
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-foreca...
Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
Right, and not Apple's actions.
There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere.
Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe).
There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served".
Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back.
Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.
November 7th: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589784134691741696
The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.
Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.
87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous.
These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same.
Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to "do good" after.
Many interviews casually ask you to implement a chatting app. By yourself.
But I agree that Facebook is significantly larger in scope.
For example, they didn't store contacts/images/messages server-side as you see in Telegram, Google ChatAppOfTheWeek, FB messenger, Twitter, IG, etc. All the infrastructure and the folks required to develop and maintain it, simply didn't exist. Similar with the limited amount of data collection they did at the time -- if you don't log it you there is no reason to have a team of people to analyze it. If you don't have ads you don't need an ad sales team. Etc.
To continue to grow they needed to buy Facebook and Instagram. They scaled up their infrastructure - lots of system administrators. They needed more sales people and corporate campaign managers to get advertising in. More moderation, because governments started passing internet content laws. Spam detection. Customer support. Automated content blocking. More legal teams, because they are constantly under legal attack. Don't forget all these laws and what is acceptable or not changes by country - so they need a team in every country to handle that. Then there's VR, Meta AI, the 'Metaverse', and their whole R&D division.
It was always a struggle to hire enough engineers to accomplish my team's goals, and it only got worse as time went on. We didn't have a terrible on-call or terrible team morale, we just tended to lose out to teams working on more visible projects. We could have doubled our headcount and still had a backlog of impactful work we couldn't get to.
Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?
Marketplace is there, Messenger, but I haven't used FB for anything else in years.
He took the job because of the money, after our parents had to declare a medical bankruptcy. The increase in salary allowed him to pay for their housing which they cannot afford on SS benefits.
Even under those circumstances he still would not take the job until he got my super-anti-Zuck butt on-board with the idea.
I hope people realize that reasons for working at Meta may be more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
</rant>
UPDATE: he still has a job, whew
I'm not that familiar with the US legalities and practices, what's considered a "good" and "very good" severance package over there, if 16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance (for the employees and their families btw) is only "decent"? Is it common to get way better? From abroad we think that the severance packages in the US are at the will of the employers and so are usually very bad.
_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.
Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy.
Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it.
A few fallacies:
- Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive.
- Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus.
- Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt.
... and many more.
If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
I think you and those truckloads of people you're referencing may be overestimating your technical prowess. If you were truly capable of the feats you claimed, someone would find an operator and CEO to handle all the messy parts for you and wait for their 10000x returns in 5 years.
> It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
... ah yes, if only they trust everyone who claimed this and gave them the money. Truckloads of trillion dollar companies.
Edit:
> When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
There are hard technical problems. Autonomous self-driving cars, for example. Waymo would love to hire you to deliver this in 5 years with a handful of friends.
VR headsets that are lightweight, wireless, and can drive high fidelity experiences is another example. Meta would love to get in touch.
Drones that can safely deliver packages at scale while following US regulations is interesting. Amazon would love to hire you or buy your startup.
I don't discount how hard operating is. I know though the long leash you have if you're truly exceptional.
I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well.
What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures.
And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity.
You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard.
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.
It just so happens no one in any org gets that time and keeping those unicorn devs focused is very hard. Very small annoyances can cause them to leave and that's what they do.
I have seen people single handily build amazing stuff but it never lasts. Eventually someone gets left with the half built system and then a team needs to take over and bloat and ...
Rrrriiight...sure you will...they've only thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades should be easy to beat...
Indeed, in most cases, when people are aligned around a common vision, you don't need to pay them very much. People seem to do best when they're paid enough in order to not have financial stress so they can focus on work (with the caveat that the pay ought to be stable), but where the financial motivation doesn't replace intrinsic motivation. That's a rare scenario you only see in a few settings (e.g. sixties-era academia).
If throwing money at people worked to keep them aligned, FAANG would have hyper-aligned work forces. You can look at any of them.
Saying that Google has "thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades" visualizes this very nicely. Throwing people at problems and having people solve problems working together productively are two very different things. If I (or anyone else) could solve the latter problem -- making large numbers of people work together, aligned, and productively, I'd be richer than any tech mogul.
Throwing people at problems results in a lot of very fun play, though!
Is this unique to you, or can others do the same with the same 10 people?
If not unique to you, how come 7 billion people on the planet have not been able to do this over the past 25 years? Certainly this many people of that caliber get together often enough to do this, right?
If unique to you, then you really need to just find one person in that 7 billion to fund you so we can see another trillion dollar company get built in 5 years by 10 people.
Or, third option, this isn't reality, and you're missing some understanding of the issues involved.
Or the fourth option is that my post exactly outlined the issues involved, and you somehow missed that part.
Hint: They're human, not technical.
We can all do that, so I agree. If I had enough magic to make a better google, then I can make a better google.
If 1=0, I can make unlimited money.
If I had 2 supermans and 0.75 batmans, I can stop all crime.
Yep. Checks out.
Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.
Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.
Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.
Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.
They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.
In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
FYI twitter seems to be moving to a low manager high employee count. Musk himself said that a ratio of 1 manager per 10 coders is way too high. I suspect he wants it at 10x that amounts.
My current manager has 31 direct reports.
Sorry if this is confusing it's a hard subject to describe over text and I think there is a lot of nuisance lost over text here.
should/do they consider other metrics: revenue, active users, etc under management?
On one hand, those are astronomically high revenues. Great! On the other hand, I'm losing $100M per year. Suck! But I was brought in to fix things up after some idiot who ran things into the ground. I'm doing great! But it's a growth market; maybe it's because of that? Suck! But in fact, I'm bleeding money for growth. Great!
... and so on.
So all those other things can be spun. It's nearly impossible to objectively evaluate executive performance.
They definitely show up on OKRs and similar, which can be managed by setting low objectives.
Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.
Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.
Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.
Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.
That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
> In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdon...
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
Realistically this cut was probably done in time to offer a decent severance without hurting things on the corporate side -- to compare this to Twitter's post-Elon crash-plan is disingenuous, and i'm not even a Musk fan.
I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).
It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)
Also, rockets.
Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.
"I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected."
So, keep him to downsize the company and replace him when it's time to start growing again?
I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?
(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)
Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.
Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.
To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?
Yeah it sounds tough but if he'd hired a guy who oversaw what's just happened, he would have fired him.
It doesn't mean "this will have negative consequences on me personally".
It means "I don't blame anyone else for this".
The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
Zuck's net worth dropping from one unfathomable level of wealth, to another unfathomable level of wealth, isn't really a consequence here.
Would this not create an atmosphere of fear and drive society towards a fixed mindset where everyone would in case of mistake try to hide their mistake?
AFAIK the biggest upgrade to global aviation safety happened when mistakes were de-penalized, and all stakeholders could honestly discuss what went wrong and how to improve things in the future.
IMO, the biggest issues is not punishment, but understanding that a mistake was made, and an honest attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
If a perpetrator fails to honestly see the harm in their actions, and perpetuate the same mistake repeatedly, then yes, they should probably face secondary consequences to make it understandable to every stakeholder that such behaviour is not acceptable. The reasoning here, however, is not some sense of global justice, but to simply de-normalize the pathological behaviour (if you repeat something without consequences it becomes 'accepted way of working').
If suddenly, 11,000 people died today in airplane crashes in a single company's air fleet, you're be sure that their CEO would be under question. I'm not saying this is a fair analogy - but just as similar, your one wasn't either.
I could imagine Facebook doing things that would indeed merit the sacking of CEO. For instance, doing something that leads to the death of 11k people would warrant severe consequences. I have no idea how Facebook could do that, but on the same par. They have all the data to do tons of nasty things.
I would view accidentally hiring 11k people from the point of view of the above interested parties indeed on the level of an engineer wiping db via accident (not negligence).
I imagine the mistake would be something like, you look at the market, you see it skyrocketing, you feed the numbers to your trusty excel sheet that has served you years and say, hey, we need more people. Only when market conditions normalize you realize the mistake.
Honestly, I really can't see the harm done here. People lose their jobs all the time. Corporation hire and fire. Why would this be any worse than standard practice in corporate america? (Of course it sucks to be laid off)
I don't think that's a bad thing. Its always worthwhile to apologize even if there is nothing else to be done.
> and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected
Apple decisions + EU regulations?
What is the link between Apple introducing new rules to nerf tracking and Meta making less money?
I guess less tracking means less relevant ads. Are Meta's customers able to somehow evaluate this and are they now unwilling to spend as much money on advertising with them? Or is it that Meta now has lower click-through rates on iOS? Is there something else?
This means the quality of the analytics coming back are much poorer. so its harder to optimise for a market segment.
“How many people that clicked the ad made a purchase?”
It’s how you determine the cost of advertising and measure its effectiveness.
Due to the iOS privacy consent form, FB can’t provide these kinds of reports anymore. There hasn’t been a decent replacement which drives companies to spend money with Facebook. That’s why revenues are down.
This is also why VR is such an important investment. If Meta will own the VR platform, other companies such as Google and Apple wont be able to block Meta’s attribution.
https://daringfireball.net/2022/08/ft_effects_of_app_trackin...
> What I think makes ATT a tempting scapegoat is that it creates a great story. Apple enacted a change in the name of privacy and that change has adversely affected both Facebook and small businesses that relied on Facebook. That’s a dramatic, captivating storyline, with two rivals, both corporate behemoths, on opposing sides.
(The footnote on this blog is a great explanation as to why FB's adTech was considered so bananas and why its no longer as much.)
Our org went through something similar some 6 year ago, and it was a stark contrast with previous frequent firing rounds when nobody would be secure, sometimes even best within given team were let go (ie due to current allocation issues).
But this can replace small firing ie up to 10%, not when you are doing stuff musk-style.
Also one thing that shouldn't be missed: Google controls Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world (except US maybe) so it wasn't affected as strongly by Apple's clampdown.
The lesson to Zuck is clear: he absolutely needs to own the next digital platform, and in his mind its the metaverse so he's going all in. I question the decisions he makes but the reasoning seems pretty solid at least (unlike a certain Electric Car maker)
Poor HR management plays a big role too. I believe that capitalism requires ongoing "culling of the herd" - like 5% every year. This happens in many other businesses. Perhaps tech will now follow suit.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
They do not need to mean punishment, they can just mean "clear, concrete intent for remediation and improvement".
The remediation part is implemented by the severance package. The intent for improvement, is nowhere to be seen.
When somebody makes a mistake, punishing on its own is meaningless. The point is to remedy the mistake (eg pay money if the mistake incurred a financial loss) and prevent further future mistakes. No, the CEO should not resign, they should just identify why things went SO wrong and show a clear plan on how to prevent such mistakes from the future.
If someone deletes a database, I don't expect them to resign, I expect them to restore it from a backup, and find a way to prevent such mistakes from the future (eg run migrations in a reversible transaction)
1: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...
more like 6 years, unless you're a new grad with no savings, or unless you somehow managed to burn through your 200K/yr salary every year. Probably decades if you migrate to an LCOL.
Edit: oh, you meant 6 months on the severance alone. Yep
Are they mostly getting rid of programmers?
> While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
It's not all engineers let go.
Though the US is ~3.3e8 people. Don't expect layoffs of ~1.1e4 to have a substantial national effect.
[Edit - 's/1e3/1e4/' correction.]
(Assuming there's a few thousand laid off in CA)
So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.
Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.
I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.
This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).
If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to 'get away' with anything like that? They could 'get away' with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn't. Maybe they don't want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn't also apply in other national jurisdictions.
The fact that we are talking about such an enormous number just shows how many people are part of the hive but probably not really contributing much to the company overall.
The worst part is that some people who are really effective will get caught up in the layoffs paying for the inefficiency of corporate structures.
I think that's a major inefficiency in modern corporations. Executives are the last to face consequences when they make a bad decision.
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I was wrong here. I read it as 16 weeks per each year of service.
In my book that is 6 month's pay
Edit: Lol - OP posted less than 3 minutes ago & there were no replies. Before I finished my comment there are now a dozen others with the same.
So spending a few billion less on the metaverse was not an option?
Why didn’t I reply? Several reasons, but importantly because if you can’t say anything nice sometimes it’s best not to say anything at all.
I honestly consider it better to work for Raytheon; at least the weapons they make are regulated and subject to stronger scrutiny.
I initially passed on the offer because I couldn't work remotely from my country of choice. They later contacted me when that'd changed, but I'd found another job by then that I was happy with. (Plus, the whole "do I want to work for them?" thing.)
Probably would've been let go, because less tenure + nonstandard working arrangement + mass firings is not a good combo.
It's phrased as if those 11,000 were itching to go away all this time. Then Mark, in his infinite benevolence, "let" them finally "go." He hath freed the birds from their golden cages.
(My heart goes out to all who lost their job. I'm wishing everyone well during these tough times.)
Change their vote from what to what? Just curious.
As an aside, it result appear largely unchanged on seats.
Even if it statistically would have no effect, it avoids being blamed for it.
It's a tantrum, it doesn't really make much sense, but people do it.
Or step back and a "shit I got laid off today, fuck waiting in the rain to cast a useless vote".
There was similar wording to this in the recent Shopify announcement. I must admit, I was frustrated by it then, and I'm frustrated by it now.
"Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration?" Yeah, sure, many people who don't understand the concept of regression to the mean predicted a permanent acceleration. But here's the thing: if you thought that after months of being cooped up most people were just going to carry on sitting round their houses playing Runescape and jacking off, or never visit the shops again, you are an idiot. Now, I will grant you, there were some silver linings to the pandemic, and some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a lot of people crawling the walls who couldn't wait to be let off the leash again. Just look at what's happened with the travel industry and holiday chaos this past summer, at least here in the UK.
I saw Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan recently. I've got quite a lot of hostility for Meta, due to the societal damage, and personal cost to individuals, for which it's responsible, but Mark Zuckerberg is an intelligent and interesting guy. Definitely worth listening to, not least of which because he actually comes across as a human being in this podcast episode rather than some sort of odd robot.
I'm incredibly disappointed that he got taken in by this idea of a permanent off trend shift to online and beyond him - and beyond Shopify - this kind of, "hurr durr, we got it wrong, wut you gunna do <<shrugs>>," justification for layoffs is going to get really old really quickly.
There's something really wrong with corporate governance that can look at an unprecedented situation like COVID and then jump to the conclusion that it's going to permanently change human behaviour in the round, disregarding all previous trends: humans are, after all, still human.
And what did people turn to? Social media.... VR...
Sorry, Zuck, not buying it.
Most labor numbers are dominated by blue collar or service jobs. They are not fungible with tech labor.
That's... Wrong ? Who predicted that the growth would continue ? To me and from a lot of reading I did, it was obvious by the end of 2020 that a lot of those tech companies took several years of growth in advance, not that it would continue...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/10/faceb...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/stripe-lays...
It seems to me that there are a lot of software jobs out there, and companies can’t seem to find enough people. But that said, I’m sure the story is probably different in Silicon Valley
I suppose I knew that the cushy absurd-salary-days of software engineering had to come to a close at some point, but I guess I was just hoping it would happening after I retired.
Conviction for Metaverse is unwavering. Hope some good comes out of it in future.
Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long?
Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That's quite something.
Unrelated but that's some nice severance.
He's not taking responsibility.
Taking responsibility would look like him saying "And I'm going to personally give 1% of my shares to those who are leaving spread equally". Responsibility means being willing to sacrifice something personal to make it right (or less wrong).
Zuck owns 13.6% of 2.687B shares, at a $104 a piece that 1% share would be about $30k per exiting employee. And basically no skin off his back.
That's true responsibility and ownership.
Just curious. Or you want the severance package to be 30k more?
If we assume that during the last 20 to 30 years that there has been no gain in actual real production efficiency increases(real reason for inequality is non-investments in actual production efficiencies by VCs and hedge funds); where is the call to re-align in VCs and hedge funds to investing in production efficiencies directly (I say directly as investing in climate green energy is an indirect production efficiency play)?
If there are no consequences of significance for him, what’s the meaning of those words? What do the people who aren’t laid off to trust anymore?
- Hiring spree during Covid
- Economic slowdown, eg lower ad spends
E-mail address still working for the day? Is this the standard way to layoff employees in the US?
Let’s hope that this isn’t going to impact Buck [0] too much. It’s one of the best things Facebook has ever made.
I wonder what this means in practice? Nothing? Ok, great.
Interesting, so the cust cuttings aren't about being sustainable or avoiding loss, but to meet future growth expectations?
Couldn't they just have like sustained a break even point until economy recovers?
PS: I have only worked with startups including a YC startup.
What's "ads signal loss"? Is that iPhone asking for permission to track activity across apps, causing less accurate ad placement?
...but I'm going to stay and keep all the cards on the Metaverse as my personal fortune sinks with it. For 11% of you, good luck.
Dramatic news but company holds stronger than last week.
I would be surprised to see layoffs there.
How can I view timeline of my companies headcount growth? Does LinkedIn have this info?
Edit: LinkedIn premium is required for this info
It’s not over yet.
Does anyone under 40 still use Facebook/Meta anymore?
=)
When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower
This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn't think Elon's mini submarine idea wouldn't work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.
Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.
But not sure about your comments about Dorsey. See https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competi...
All I know is we now have a guy in control of Twitter who:
- is calling his 100m or so followers to vote for GOP
- is repeating Putin's talking points
- Seems to be quite the vindictive narcissist, who doesn't really care about people or the environment quite frankly (e.g. trying to cancel a high speed rail project
Someone with that kind of power and ideology is not good for democracy - esp now that we have more people in the GOP that are actively trying to limit people's freedom.
Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don't think he's less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.
I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he's nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he's not superior in anyway... Etc.
"I take responsibility"?
Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you're no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.
From what I understand the people where the WARN act is active they have to give atleast 60 day notice in case of mass layoffs(this is different from the 60 day grace period for H1bs to transfer status).
I assume it's for the shareholders. A plain "we're laying people off" letter without the asterisk of how good they're doing is just asking for people to cash out.
My thought is, the reason is most of them lack of logical thinking skills, that's why they're HR in first place ?
fuck mark and his 1000 acres he stole on Kauai. karma is a bitch.
Link pls
A/B testing isn't a new thing - I'm sure the inventor of the wheel experimented with different shapes, and the buyer of the hexagonal wheel probably didn't have the best user experience.
Multiply that by the number of people in the world and the number of products people use, and A/B testing is really up there as possibly one of the most beneficial ideas ever.
I really don't understand those who claim it should be banned - I see no way that testing two different versions of a website with people who desire to use that website can bring sufficient harm to outweigh those massive benefits.
I was in the "B" group, and felt so humiliated at how many times I tried to reset my password to get into Facebook.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
It's a great tool, and its impact all depends on how you use it.
The major issue with A/B testing in the workplace is it causes confusion and slows people down when you change things. Which makes these tests really expensive even if they are seemingly easy to preform. So, I would call it useful but flawed.
If you're building a tool to make life easier for the user, something that gives them a better experience is your optimal outcome. This seems like a scenario where A/B can produce a good outcome.
The challenge is when you throw in an ad-based revenue model, and the A/B testing is then optimized for the opposite (eyeball-hours, linear metres scrolled per session, ad spots passed, ads clicked) - engagement-based business models end up (I'd argue) A/B optimizing for the opposite of what their users want, to get them to spend longer doing a task they could have done quicker.
The funny thing is - the ad-based revenue model is not the only possible variant. Last time I’ve checked Facebook’s profits per user were $7 per quarter, that is $28 a year. At the same time I am paying LiveJournal $25 a year for the ad-free version. Just taking my money looks like a much better model in many respects:
- less overhead: a lot of people doing these studies how to force me to look at something I do not want to look at will be free to do something more useful to the society;
- streamlined relationship between me and my publisher: in this model there is no advertiser who can say “I do not like these texts, no revenue for you”.
That’s why I prefer to pay for some Substack authors, like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald, than to try to fish their texts for free amid some sea of “clever” advertising (hey AI testers, I bought this thing already, what’s the point of forcing it on me again and again?).
I kinda wish that Brave model (my money distributed between sites I visited) got more traction. It looks much more healthy.
I bet by at least 4 orders of magnitude and likely 5 or 6.
Perhaps you should just agree that, "not all a/b testing is the same".
Quote - "Speaking from work experience: A/B testing doesn't look into the nuances of usability or productivity, it looks at easy-to-quantify metrics like conversion rates and money spent"
There's also a neat sleight of hand here. Your inventor of the wheel surely tested multiple variants to optimize for the utility of his invention to the user. The A/B testing that's problematic is about optimizing taking advantage of the user. That doesn't lead to better experience, but the opposite. This is what's increasingly popular, and this is what people complain about or want to see banned.
Related: attention economy is predicated on bad user experience, because it makes money from friction.
The primary goal of A/B testing is to see what's more profitable.
If that happens to result in better UI that's a side effect.
In fact, it could result in less usability (relevant to this conversation, it probably resulted in the frustrating "algorithm-based" timeline at FB/Twitter/etc).
Well, I think I'll provide a disagreeing opinion. :)
I assume this opinion probably comes from your past experiences, and I believe it is true in many cases. Since I'm not American and have never worked in an American corporate environment, I can't say what is true over there... but my experience in EU and Canada with A/A/B, A/B/C and typical A/B testing (as well as building such testing tools for others) was not like that.
For example, when building tutorials for users, profitability is far from being the primary objective. Same goes for building documentation, programming languages, open-source software, internal tooling and other such things.
Of course, I get that in the end, profitability is the primary goal of the company (with some exceptions). But I maintain that not all A/B tests have profitability as their primary goal, which makes the previous statement an incorrect generalization IMO.
A/B testing lead to the development of effective "dark patterns" in UI that trick users into doing things they don't want or don't understand, and then making it difficult to undo.
Totally the same as A/B testing button placement. Totally.
Consider yourself that inventor, would you A/B test hexagonal vs round?
As for the other aspects they sound like great targets for testing within different use-cases, but I'm not sure why that'd be an A/B test as we think of them now.
Worse for whom? I feel like a lot of the A/B testing results in more revenue, a more addictive app, and less user satisfaction, because they're not testing for anything beneficial to the user, because at least with FB, you're not the customer, their advertisers are the customer.
For example, I have used A/B testing to see find ways to help users get a task done with fewer clicks, saving them time.
I have not experienced a product become better for the user as a result of involuntary A/B testing in my entire adult life.
Producers and consumer have both an adversarial relationship and a mutually beneficial relationship, and the distinction between these two is essentially the split between voluntary A/B tests and involuntary ones. In the adversarial component, the producer is trying to figure out how to extract more money from the consumer, without improving the product. Alternatively, (and equivalently), how to make the product cheaper, but also worse, in a way that yhe customer doesnt notice (with their wallet). A proactive version of the "market for lemons".
For instance, if you A/B test your cancellation process to minimize the number of people who cancel their subscriptions, you will almost certainly do something that makes you some additional money, and is also unambiguously evil.
Any A/B testing that is mutual benefit to consumers and producers can be done with consent, by volunteers. And the miniscule amount of scientific rigor you would lose by doing so is not worth the tremendous sacrifice we have seen in quality of consumables in the past 2 decades (probably longer, but i do not have the personal experience to go longer)
You might be compelled to describe involuntary A/B testing as a strategy for maximizing evil subject to the constraint that it be legal, but it often dips its toes into seeing what is illegal but still profitable, and is capable of fundamentally undermining our legal system and even our political system.
The technology has grown more powerful. The addition of computers that can optimize essentially arbitrary objective functions has serious existential implications for humanity.
A blanket ban on the practice, incurring the total dissolution of any corporate entity found guilty of the practice of involuntary A/B testing, would be a start.
If you did, how would you know?
When craigslist added the map that shows you where all of the people are offering the thing you are interested in. That was a very good change, but thats pretty far from how craigslist operates.
When dominos stopped serving hot glue on cardboard, its pretty easy to see how that didnt come about by furtive A/B testing. They were pretty confident people would like the new pizza more than the old pizza. So they told them about it. Boy did that work for dominos.
That actually speaks more generally to my point. If you're making a change that you think people will like, you tell them about it, because even if it turns out that they dont like it more, the fact that they thought they would and you did it generates quite a lot of good will for them.
Do we live in the same universe? As far as I can tell, software keeps trending worse. Usability is terrible, options and settings keep getting moved around and hidden, software is less responsive than it used to be...
But the majority of people choose to use a modern computer, presumably because they find it overall more useful than their old MS DOS computer and software.
Sure - there are gripes, but they must be outweighed by something pretty big for 99.99% of people to choose a new computer over a 30 year old one.
Imagine thinking that seriously.
To me the latter view is the one that’s hard to take seriously.
Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:
A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or
B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse
It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.
> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
One man’s ponens is another’s tollens. See: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
My qualms are not so much with the method as the morals that guide it. It's agnostic but when operationalized in a faulty moral framework can definitely lead to bad results.
Read the whistle blower report, witness the evolution from seeing content from your friends posted in less addictive chronological feed to addictive content your friends like in the internet sorted by addictive news. Hell, the site started as a PHP hack to creep on pretty women. They sold a bunch of data to foreign adversaries. For years, they let people sell ads to Nazis. They don’t give the people faced with the psychologically brutal jobs of moderation get benefits. They have been a platform for genocide and government surveillance.
I might be missing some examples of them missing some money to do the right thing, but nothing comes to mind.
Absolutely, go bananas A/B testing different colors for a “Sign Up” button or testing different pricing models.
But let’s not go bananas optimizing algorithms that are damaging to users mental health at a massive scale.
In research, these types of experiments typically require consent..
obviously "A/B testing" is not "hiring psychologists", because one is in the category of experimental methods the other one is about human resources
yet there are obvious connections. A/B testing is used to increase "conversion", which is profitability. which is the same fuckin' thing as addictiveness in case of a site where you pay with your eyeballs
That is untrue.
A/B testing is not the same thing as seeing how bad your users' mental state becomes if you muck with what they read.
A/B testing is a tool. It can be used for good or evil. That was Facebook's choice how to use it.
They did it to make sure they could keep people's attention, despite the psychological damage.
(This is not an attack on you or your otherwise valid point. Just a reminder that people should be mindful of their ethical obligations to get informed consent and not cause harm to others with their experiments).
Now if you had said “fuck meta because my feed is filled with an unintelligible mix of baby photos and political screeds,” I’d totally follow.
"On 6 December 2021, approximately a hundred Rohingya refugees launched a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it did not do enough to prevent the proliferation of anti-Rohingya hate speech because it was interested in prioritizing engagement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
I think maybe your beef is with the nature of technology today and/or our current culture that enables/glorifies it's mass use. What's the solution?
I have seen many people brainwashed by highly targeted ads and conspiracies that found them on facebook. Those people vote, break into congress, etc.
deleting your individual account doesn't change that
It shows, that a life without FB is possible. The more people do it, the easier it gets.
Until the network effect is overcome.
I feel engaging in commerce in any way at all is impossible without being "evil" under this definition.
Aren't advertisements at their core unconsented psychological manipulation? What about retail store design? Is providing customer service altogether just manipulation?
I think I take issue with the word "evil." It seems to imply a certain malice or intent to harm, which just isn't logical, given the context.
And no, I can't give you a clear brightline test right now to determine this. It takes homework.
But.
If you want to A/B test whether people prefer blue chewing-gum to green, be my guest.
If you want to A/B test for literal depression and sell stuff to people based on that, you're probably evil.
The line's somewhere in between there. Now we know where Meta has chosen to go on some of this; and again, this is from WHAT IS KNOWN TO BE PUBLIC.
The safest thing is to assume the worst, then. May they rot.
"They" is unnecessarily vague I guess. It's not fair to write off the entire population of Facebook staff... There are surely a substantial chunk of employees who were entirely unaware of these tactics.
It's easy to claim an organization is evil. Less so for individuals, and with good reason. There's something to be said for remembering to humanize people, even those most "undeserving."
There is no harm in me saying out loud "Facebook is an evil company" even if I'm completely wrong, because they are so powerful. It would valuable for everyone to scream at Facebook at being evil because that would force them to show and prove that they are not.
We shouldn't get stuck on being "accurate." Throwing rocks is not just okay, it's a good idea if it forces the powerful party to act/respond.
As for the individuals -- it's their job to defend the company. If that hurts their feelings or whatever, too bad. I don't care and neither should you (presuming that Facebook is potentially very harmful.)
Yes. 100% yes.
> What about retail store design?
Also yes.
Advertising exists to try and make you purchase product “x”, regardless of whether you need it, or it meets your requirements. Even “harmless” display advertising exists to gently push to mind into forming the desired emotional association with a product.
Store layouts are well documented for being deliberately anti-efficient: they make you walk past everything else to find the things you need, with the goal of exposing you to more advertising and product placement. Combine that with strategies like putting sweets and other “low friction” products at the checkout, where you’re more likely to make a spur of the moment emotional decision under pressure, or be hassled by your children for sweets, and you have something that is inherently exploitative and morally questionable at a minimum.
Evil is probably too high-modality, but unethical and exploitative are definitely suitable.
I only took issue with the choice of "evil" because I am working on curbing my own hyperbole and sweeping generalizations.
Nothing wrong with calling "Facebook" evil. It's not a person, it's an artificial entity. It can take it. (I too would be more reluctant when it comes to people)
If a store owner puts two different candy bars at the register to see which one sells more, is that an evil thing?
When someone tries out a different way of greeting strangers at a party, are they being evil? What if they write down the results?
This is a really malicious way to describe showing two users the same button but in different locations
Consider how this may have helped you to develop your opinion.
The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections. Facebook was dumb to allow partner apps access to so much data and rely on those partners to follow Facebook's policies, but they recognized the mistake and probably overcorrected.
All the other coverage probably serves to reinforce and amplify negative sentiments about Facebook, and a ton of it wasn't deserved. People cite the Rohingya, I remember also a news cycle about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
Those things happened, but Facebook had also built probably the most expensive and effective hate speech filtering operation in the world. That it be 100% effective is not a reasonable goal. With billions of pieces of content even 99.999% effectiveness will result in examples that the press can point to reinforce a narrative about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
I doubt there ever was any profit in serving hate speech. The ad revenue from filter misses would not have been big enough to pay for the filtering operation itself.
That's a pretty big claim to make without evidence. At the very least I think we can agree that political parties wouldn't be investing so much money into social media campaigns (analytics, marketing, etc.) if they didn't think it was impactful.
https://towardsdatascience.com/effect-of-cambridge-analytica...
> Sumpter analyzed the accuracy of Cambridge Analytica’s regression models in his book ‘Outnumbered.’ He used a publicly available dataset created by Michal Kosinski and his colleagues, a psychologist, who created an anonymized database of 20,000 Facebook users. Of the 20,000 Facebook users 19,742 were US-based, and of that amount 4,744 had registered their preferred political party Democratic or Republican, and had also liked over 50 Facebook pages. Sumpter first aimed to test the accuracy of regression models in general, and so created a model which predicted political party allegiance based on Facebook page likes. He concluded that the regression model worked “very well for hardcore Democrats and Republicans” but “does not reveal anything about the 76 percent of users who did not put their political allegiance on Facebook” (Sumpter, pg. 52–53). He also describes how just because the model may have revealed, for instance, that Democrats tend to like Harry Potter, it does not necessarily mean that other Harry Potter fans like Democrats. Therefore, a strategy employed by Democrats to aim to get Harry Potter fans to vote, may not necessarily benefit them.
You'd probably have better spent your money by using party-owned voter databases to create custom audiences based on email addresses. Everything I've seen points to Cambridge Analytica being mainly an operation to grift campaign dollars. From the same article:
> CEO Alexander Nix himself corroborates these results. He claimed in his testimony to members of the British parliament’s ‘Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee,’. He contended that Kogan’s dataset wasn’t very useful and that made up a tiny part of their overall strategy for the 2016 United States presidential election. How do we resonate this admission, with his presentation at the Concordia summit, in which Nix openly bragged about the ability to wield Facebook data to tune an incredibly powerful instrument that significantly impacts elections? The answer to that came from Nix himself in his testimony, claiming that he has in the past used hyperbole when pitching his company to potential clients. This view is corroborated by Kogan who mentions how “Nix is trying to promote (the personality algorithm) because he has a strong financial incentive to tell a story about how Cambridge Analytica have a secret weapon” (Sumpter, pg. 54).
There is plenty to lay at the feet of Meta, but I've always thought the CA scandal was an overreaction.
With that in mind, I'd like to point out root merely expressed an anecdote about above and beyond humane treatment of employees from the CEO. Parent described the hacker-friendly culture. Those appear to be first hand accounts.
How does your comment relate contribute to that discussion?
Further, how does over the top and genericized outrage and harm wishing on a cohort of innocent people advance society in any meaningful ways?
All I'm saying is that the harm they inflict on billions of people outside the company outweighs the good they do for thousands inside. Just because there's both good and bad doesn't mean the degree of each cannot be weighed at all.
I asked a question, no conclusions drawn. If I had a point, it's that the comment was off topic with regard to the comment it replied to, and warrants its own tree of discussion. It was a rant; There wasn't even an attempt at a segue or good faith effort to provide contrast.
What "gives me the right to decide how the discussion is framed" are the hn guidelines (which you violated yourself by presenting a strawman).
But humans are complex beings, and it's just realistic to view us all with some nuance rather than casually tossing everyone into good/evil baskets. The gp outlined an example of decent behaviour, and it remains just that regardless of our attitudes on other grounds towards Zuckersnuffles and/or Meta. Even murderers can be kind and decent people given in some contexts (witnessed at first hand).
A lot of people here agree with you about Meta's faults, even me. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the good they've done. Even if it isn't much and even if it is vastly outweighed by the bad. We should still use positive reinforcement to pressure companies to do the right thing.
But you are totally right. We must celebrate with he good in others and life or our critical observations lose all merit.
What's frustrating is that they currently have a near-monopoly on friend-to-friend publishing, yet unlike about 5 years ago, they now gatekeep a lot of those communications -- many times I post something on my Facebook or Instagram that I want friends to see, and Meta doesn't show that content to my friends, just because it isn't a "Reel". Friends in my age range (+/-10) who grew up in North America tend to use only Meta's products, so I basically feel like I'm talking to a wall most of the time.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo... 2. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-... 3. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-services-are-used-to-s... 4. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985143101/stop-lying-muslim-r... 5. https://theintercept.com/2019/12/07/facebook-mark-zuckerberg...
Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.
What are you working on that’s more fascinating than VR?
Edit: why did you use a throwaway to reply to my comment?
How can you call it a disintegrating corpse when it's been in the public eye for what, a few months? I don't get it.
So you get "Horizon" and its assortment of low-quality games that feel more like a tech demo than an actual world that you could lose yourself in.
Also, the initial launch of iPhone didn’t support apps or Flash (i.e. no porno videos on the web!), and the App Store has never supported deviant communities. Apple’s policies probably precipitated Tumblr’s no nudity moderation.
If Facebook had quietly (and they were for the longest time!) continued to work on Oculus and done some internal skunkworks projects, instead of a big PR push and a company rename, maybe they could pull an iPhone.
Personally, I think they drank the meta verse koolaid to get everyone to stop talking about election interference and other things that were being blamed on them, and I think it mostly worked.
What examples are you thinking of? Did this happen with the PC or smartphone?
- The "public" Internet, although since I used the word "deviant" people might not like me giving it as an example.
- Social media in general, which again not necessarily deviant, but before it reached critical mass a lot of people just found it weird and privacy invasive. I distinctly remember my family making fun of people posting their thoughts on early Twitter.
- eCommerce, was considered strange as you would put your CC information on some random website.
- Video games were for nerds and losers, now most people have an Xbox/Playstation.
- Drone/RC plane community was much more weird before the likes of DJI which lowered the bar significantly.
- More recently remote work was usually for a small portion of workers and people commonly said you had to be a certain type of person for it to work at all. Fast forward a pandemic and remote meetings are common and even requested by would-be employees.
I feel like there a fallacy somewhere in my arguments for sure, but there definitely seems to be a trend where things are weird, dumb and strange until they just aren't by reaching critical mass. Strapping a screen to your face to play video games and chat with people is definitely one of those until it isn't and I'd bet that within 10 years it will be already much more common.
They are really desperate to own the next big thing. Whether that'll be VR, who knows.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/heres-why-the-facebook-phon...
Also, same thing happened when Amazon tried releasing the Fire Phone. I think a combination of being carrier exclusive and using sub-optimal hardware was a big contributing factor to both their demise.
If they rolled their own OS they'd have to spend a lot of effort building and maintaining that platform. If Microsoft and Amazon can't will a third phone platform into existence Facebook definitely can't.
Their $10B metaverse spend is a waste but I think it would have been a waste on a phone as well.
The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!
Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?
He could ride the facebook ship into the sunset and have it die 20 years from now.
But no, he's betting big and going for broke. I hope he succeeds just for the sheer stones he's displaying. Really inspiring to see a man aim so high.
Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two
additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.
PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.
RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November
15, 2022 vesting.
Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for
people and their families for six months.
Career services. We’ll provide three months of career
support with an external vendor, including early access to
unpublished job leads.
Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult
if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before
termination and some visa grace periods, which means
everyone will have time to make plans and work through
their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration
specialists to help guide you based on what you and your
family need.Also not sure if the Meta severance applies to contractors as well, but many engineers work as contractors by which they of course opt out of worker protections.
Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).
I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.
Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.
Rent should not take more than 25% of your income, 33% worst case. In some countries/jurisdictions that's even part of legibility requirements.
If rent/utilities are in the range of 75% or more as you seem to imply, there would be literally no point at all to work in Big Tech.
9K is exaggeration of course, that would be quite irresponsible but it would be also the only way to put you in a lifestyle of a person who makes 5K a month.
Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.
But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.
Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.
The overall tone and high-level business decisions are much more interesting.
This was true during the .com bust, 2008 dip, and it will be true now.
Disagree, a lot of businesses do use GSuite and also a lot of people in the world do definitely use youtube/gmail/gmaps. Samething with apple, people will still use iPhones and a lot of people in the first world at least will still use macs. Only companies your comments apply to are Facebook and Netflix, and even then Whatsapp is basically an essential app to have if you're not form North America
Same for Google search.
But if VISA disappeared, there'd be hell to pay.
In reality none of these companies will disappear overnight, but they could get remaindered pretty quickly, because they're not that "important" per se.
That's not to say the companies don't do things and people don't find value, but Facebook disappearing is an entire different class of thing from Exxon-Mobil shuttering.
Primary source of new customers, maybe, but a small business should be built around acquiring customers and keeping them for a longtime.
A small example: a ton of delivery companies depend on Google maps API for localization and route planning - think Doordash, Uber, etc. Not just that, lots of transit agencies and freight companies use Google API for planning and optimization. Half of the work force probably can't reach their destination without Google maps.
I'm pretty sure many critical components of Exxon-Mobil depend on some tools provided by Google.
Would it, though?
I'll just get a mastercard. 5$, a trip to the bank, ezpz. Or pay for stuff via Revolut. Or cash.
There'd be a bit of chaos, for like 2 weeks. Invoices will still get paid, ATMs would still work.
Free money hasn't run out, it's simply stopped growing as quickly. Then again it grew massively during COVID so FAANG is still ahead of where they'd have been if not for COVID. Meta revenue is DOUBLE what it was 3 years ago.
To the extent that the world runs on energy and industrials, you're right.
To the extent that tech soaks up human attention, directs spending and emotions, and now serves as the basis for communication and once manual mental tasks, I think you're wrong.
We're seeing that this is cyclical and that access to cheap debt has perturbed the sentiment.
Also I expect video streaming (of some format, whether it's "traditional living room content" like Netflix/Disney or mobile-first like Youtube or TikTok) to maintain its entertainment dominance during a recession. People like their cheap escapes from the real world. It's been shown time and again that during recessions cheap entertainment like cinema (or these days, video streaming) doesn't die off.
> HR
The "post news articles on a feed" is probably not essential to too many people, but the messaging and communication features are in a lot of cases.
If I had to guess, what I think you're doing is you're letting your opinion about the morality of FAANG-like software (ads, tracking, mal-influencing, etc.) be a judge on it's utility.
FAANG-like software is like fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, like much of FAANG-software, have many immoral aspects, yet they have utility to the point of "the world runs on it".
Google, DDG etc. connected the internet. Facebook, twitter etc. connected people on the internet. I'de say that's something of a big deal.
But your point stands.
Haha.
It’s more like twice this, with another ~50% in overhead costs like healthcare, payroll taxes, real estate, etc.
* this is a cost cutting measure and not primarily driven by the need to cull "low performing" employees.
* point of the company is not to guarantee employment or even keep the lights on; its to maximize the stock price (at least according to the prevailing worldview, which I disagree with). Investors use the stock price as a proxy for their belief in a company's future. If the stock price is high, company invests and expands, if its low, it contracts until the investors/markets believe it can generate value.
* layoffs scare the employees that remain into working harder. The sad truth is that unless you're really exceptional, this doesn't really matter. But they will likely see a productivity boost for a little while. Again, this is pretty short term.
Oh well. It's FB, I'm okay with it if they sink the ship.
Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope that things will be fine for those laid off.
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear.
They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan.
There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.
I think these layoffs are more an example of just how crazy short-term we are thinking in the world. Everyone thought coal was going to go away, remote work was the future, tech jobs were the future!
In reality we need more productivity, less labor demand, and for our smartest people to be out working on those problems, not on delivering people advertisements.
All of these lay off people may end up out more distributed in the country working no boring jobs that ultimately free up butts and seats so that those butts can go take other seats for they are more necessary and important and productive.
TikTok is a Chinese company and is major competition for Facebook
They absolutely dominate among Gen-Z, and is catching on mainstream appeal pretty quickly as well.
Microsoft, apple, amazon, and so on are critical infrastructure. They go away, the lights go out.
> (...)the United States government will clamp down on them hard.
In the same sentence, nice one. :)
American companies today don't need the protection. They are better companies.
With China now using state imbalances to fund their tech sector, restrictions will be needed. You can't compete with free stuff backed by a foreign state.
Larger world market share. More internal diversity and understanding of other cultures.
Facebook? Sure, people can live without that. But Microsoft, Google, i'd argue even Amazon are integral parts of the economy. Trying building a modern business without the business software Microsoft maintains. Try doing work without Google. Amazon is a part of our modern shopping habits.
Do they need to be as big as they were? Probably some room to go down, but they're an essential part of the economy now.
The world needs a search engine, but the moment a new, competent, one pops up all you need to do is switch a URL and you are done with google. All other services google provides are replaceable.
Amazon is a cool marketplace, infested by scams and low quality products, an alibaba of the west. It is an integral part of the economy by I manage to do just fine without it. AWS is a wake up call away from trending out of fashion.
Turns out Elon doesn't either lol. Also, he's not a conservative.
Yeah he's a regular old leftie
From the looks of it, Zuckerberg handled this better than what anyone was expecting. Talk about under promising and over delivering
This is the general 'Tech Crash' I was talking about before all of this happened in advance. [0] [1]
We'll see what happens after the news. No company is safe. Not even FAAMNG companies that HN has been screaming about for years was ever untouchable.
Anyone can predict that things will be bad at some point in the future.
Who will pay these house prices?
By what metric? Metas profits the first 3Qs of the year totaled ~$17B. They would have been higher if not for Zuck's insane spending on the metaverse.
As the letter says, Meta clearly over hired around covid to the tune of 30k+ people. It's normal to pull back some.
Engineers at these companies generate so much economic value, I would argue they are still underpaid at 180k.
I sense a deeply cynical and dismissive tone from many commenters and I sincerely wonder how many of you have given any honest thought to Facebook’s mission- or the many great products and features that support that mission. Given the importance of the mission, I find it hard to believe that cutting the workforce by 13% will have anything but dire consequences . Akin to the Middle Ages, or AI winter, humans will almost certainly suffer from being less connected. But what I haven’t heard is calls governments or ngos stepping in to provide funding to lighten the shockwaves of this disruption to connectivity. Surely, this must be considered. When comparing Meta’s mission to that of- say- automakers, or financial lending institutions- isn’t it clear that creating a more connected world should take priority?
So, yes.