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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.

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.

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He's lost a lot but it's not like he's having to ask his wife to stop going out to lunch with her friends. There's a level of wealth where the numbers just stop having any real meaning. $1B is still multiple lifetimes of the most decadent luxury currently possible.

> He's lost a lot but it's not like he's having to ask his wife to stop going out to lunch with her friends

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.

They do have to be concerned about where the money is going to come from to pay their mortgages when severance runs out. They got laid off into an environment where layoffs at companies they might have worked at before are reducing headcount.

Not saying they shouldn't have saved for a rainy day. This is a scary time to be laid off.

$20 lunch. Must be nice. I don't spend that on myself --- ever. My target for lunch (if I don't pack it myself) is $5. That used to be pretty easy but getting harder these days.

Unless they just got burnt on their RSUs. I'm sure a good portion paid the tax already and are now getting hosed.

> the most decadent luxury currently possible.

Hey now, if he only has $38B that means he can't afford to buy Twitter until Elon finishes destroying it.

His wife is a pediatrician. She can pay her own way.

This isn't hard for Zuck - he just directs his subordinates to layoff a bunch of people, and then goes back to swimming in his vault of cash. Losing x billion of essentially infinity money is the same as losing no money. Once you reach Zuck's level of wealth you can't really even conceive of non-billionairs as the being same species as you, much less empathize with them.

Have you ever managed or led people?

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?

> 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 not arguing that laying people off is nearly as hard as getting laid off.

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.

Billionaires are that because they have exploited the surplus value of their underlings. To say that they “care” about them is clearly a contradiction.

Zuckerberg has complete voting control of Facebook. Nobody can remove him as CEO.

If this sort of thing bothered Zuck, he would not lay people off.

Is he doing this to prop up his stock price for himself?

To be sure, laying off employees would be not be easy. Imagine if these were people you had lunch with, chatted with in the office every day, knew their husbands, wives....

Do you think Zuck was that close with any of the 11,000 people who were laid 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.

Laying off one or five or ten good people is a tragedy.

Laying off 13,000 is a statistic.

(Based on a badly misquoted Stalin.)

> I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.

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.

You're mixing up responsibility and restitution. "It's my fault" is exactly taking responsibility.

Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough

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.

Also, like Musk's Tesla holdings, he couldn't sell a significant portion of those without reducing the value of what he retained.

And unlike any of his employees, he is a billionaire. I'm sure he'll find a way to sleep.

I'm pretty sure that there's some multi millionaires left at FB. Chris Cox is still there, he's likely a billionaire. There's potentially one or two others left...

Everyone: The hero of their own story.

I can't imagine these sort of layoffs, which are baked into the lifecycle and business plans of the company, were not something he wasn't anticipating years and years ago when hiring was being ramped up. In fact some notable fraction of these 11,000 were hired in the first place only to be fired, by design.

Sweet dreams.

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