Meta reportedly plans more job cuts

I have no idea what will happen, but it sort of sounded like (from the limited reporting that's been done) they'll focus a bit more on managers / non-ICs this time -- if it happens at all.

It is kind of nasty to think about the timing though. If true, they kept those managers around to do the very undesirable and time-consuming performance cycle (yearly review) work and will be letting them go now that the process has concluded.

The people leave, but the culture of failure stays. Its a long way down, until in some run down office park, the last flickering neon light goes dark.

Whats more interesting though is how the let go workers venture within there cultural spheres. Meta workers are more likely to go to places, that have adapted similar cultures, with AB Tests.

I think a big factor in these layoffs is to signal the market that the companies are "cutting fat". The market gets the signal, stock price goes up and the board of directors eases the pressure on the CEO. After this the company can resume business as usual, which will require quietly hiring to fill the needed positions.

Sounds like your company had no idea why they were doing the lay offs so just go rid of workers lower down the chain while keeping their friends.

I've seen the same thing happen in a large corp I've worked for directed by the advice of McKinsey.

The funny thing in this case though was that it was Accenture which advised them to hire the engineering department two years prior to help with innovation. Then after a couple of years of building out the team they advised them fire the whole department and outsource it to cut costs. The only people who remained were managers.

Just out of curiosity: who is deciding where the cuts need to be made? I mean does the consulting firm prepare a detailed proposal or is it all decided by management in-house?

"Deeply breath out and then breathe in" It's hard to breathe in vacuum and I doubt that current layoffs will fill it (unless we are in a long recession). Next breath in can be very expensive.

Topical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34778954.

And yet if we as individuals prioritize ourselves over our companies, we are called "disloyal".

Where is this VC money going though? There’s more money on the markets than ever, billionaires are richer than ever etc.

With all these layoffs though, it's perverse because the people being laid off are practically never the people responsible for the problems. Laying aside Mark Zuckerberg's personal responsibility for lighting billions of dollars on fire for nothing, the reason there's a massive swathe of middle management in Meta is because that's what Meta's management team decided to reward. If you were a good IC, you got made a manager. Now they've got tonnes of managers doing nothing and instead of saying "Ok, let's take a look at senior leadership and figure out where the weak leadership is that led to this situation", the answer is to fire a load of top performers (that's why they got made managers!) and let the people who made the mistakes continue to coast. The exact same problems are going to happen again, because whilst they'll do a detailed post-mortem for 5 minutes of downtime, no one is interested in a post-morterm for 5,000 fired engineers.

blank did not immediately respond to blank's request for comments is so common as to mean nothing.

The employees must have seen the writing on the wall when the company was hiring en masse.

Hiring standards must have fallen if they added people so rapidly.

Logic checks out. They can keep doing layoffs until Zuck is the only employee left and the stock is worth infinite dollars.

> I wonder who might benefit?

The shareholders, for whose purpose the business exists, are the ones who will benefit, and they deserve to.

Don't forget that most of the employees are also shareholders and most of them make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the stock.

It sucks that people get laid off, but a large portion of the employees were lucky to be hired in the first place, because of the crazy growth that was enabled and rewarded by the market in the last few years. They made a lot of money and now they have to look for work again. It's not like laying off factory workers.

shareholders benefit when a company streamlines its operations. seeing as most meta employees are shareholders, they would benefit. a company cannot grow infinitely. any temporary bump in share price will only matter and sustain if the cuts actually help the company. getting laid off is hard, no doubt, but as long as the severance packages are fair I don't see any ethical issue here.

Stock goes up when costs are reduced. If there's a major outage due to structural weakness (as a result of layoffs), then the stock crashes down.

This is quite a cynical take. The logic probably isn't as simple as, "if we fire people, our stock will go up".

A lower stock price for a company like Facebook actually impacts its ability to operate. For one, Facebook as a technology company depends on being able to compensate their employees competitively with other tech companies and part of that involves stock based comp. If their stock price is constantly falling and trading at compressed levels then they have to give away increasingly larger percentages of the company to attract top talent. This obviously isn't sustainable.

The second problem is that a lower stock price impacts Facebook's ability to offer its stock in acquisitions. This means that they will either have to pay cash or take on debt as an alternative. And that's hard to do when you're pushing a large chunk of your free cashflow into projects like Reality Labs and investors are already concerned about cashflows.

there are reports that $META stock ticker will revert back to $FB soon

Yes.

It’s a good question but my sense is that database engineering is pretty damn critical for Meta.

the firings will continue until morale improves

> send a message [..] to improve morale or get out

The saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves" is supposed to be a joke, not a guide for management.

If I was working at Meta and that's how they chose to improve morale, I would be getting out.

> Instagram is slowly dying

Is it?

I thought it was still the premiere place for virtually all segments of product and lifestyle influencing.

Rough thesis:

The kids on TikTok don’t have money to buy $fancy thing.

But the adults on Instagram do.

2.96 billion people remember that the company exists on a daily basis. Meta did more than three times TikTok's reported total 2022 revenue in Q4 alone.

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q4...

> Facebook will be gone as soon as the boomer generation will fall like dominoes.

Mr. Soapbox, freaking Yahoo isn't dead and you think Facebook will be gone :-) Heck, Borland IDEs are still around.

Facebook (the social media network) will be around in some form or another long after my kids are gone.

You don't go from having several billion users to 0 in anything less than a lifetime, because you know what, that network is probably profitable even with 10-50 million people and if Meta doesn't want it, someone will ask them to spin it off and sell it to them.

Successful software rarely dies, successful networked dies even harder and slower.