Meta plans to cut thousands of jobs, after CEO predicted no more layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Meta plans to cut thousands of jobs, after CEO predicted no more layoffs

washingtonpost.com

234 pointsthm282 comments

Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership.

The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. Employees will be sitting around waiting for the next round of cuts to happen, and many people do not like operating in such an unstable environment and will seek more stable employment.

If layoffs are necessary, you tell the staff why and the correction you need to make, and then you set out to make the cuts big enough so that you can go at least a year without having to do another round. The way Meta is operating is if they don't know anything beyond two feet in front of them.

> multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership.

Not to be ultra cynical but why waste effort calling this out? What accountability is going to happen?

They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money.

Is that not more or less how this is playing out?

> don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever

I don’t think that follows. You want to overhire to make extra profits. Then just downsize when it’s over. Which is almost exactly what all tech companies are doing now.

so in that case, not a failure by leadership whatsoever, it’s actually them doing exactly what they should?

Exactly.

Layoffs aren't a bad thing.

> Layoffs aren't a bad thing.

This very much depends on whose perspective you're looking at them from. They are very much a bad thing for all the workers getting let go.

Probably not all of them. I know a few people happy to get a paid year off

Not in this bad econ timeframe

I guess if you run a warehouse that's true, but Facebook is a tech company. How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees? How much institutional knowledge left with them? How many decisions took longer to make because managers were focused on picking who got laid off instead of focusing on the work? How many managers became hyper-cautious with their planning because they don't know how many employees they will have? How many hours were lost to employees worrying about job security and prospecting for a new job instead of worrying about solving business problems? How many projects got started because there were ample resources that now have to be shut down abruptly?

Large scale hiring and firing in technology is incredibly expensive and not to be taken lightly. Facebook has wasted a huge amount of time, focus, and energy on this and their leadership should absolutely be accountable to shareholders.

It's not just hiring. It's also training and ramp-up.

> How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees?

Of course they are, the issue is that their side-effects aren't easy to track in pure quantitative terms and even less in the short/medium-term.

Layoffs affect morale, in R&D you see that directly on engineers' productivity and how product managers start to behave. PMs either get risk-averse (don't rock the boat, don't mess with profit-making schemes) which stifles innovation, or they get afraid on being on the next round of layoffs if they don't make an impact quickly, they start to push teams to deliver into their reactionary mode, catering more for short-term impact rather than long-term strategic value.

It's a complete mess that you won't see in pure financial terms, it will have long ripple effects into the company, some companies bounce back, others get crippled by those ripples. Employees that aren't engaged and don't trust their employers won't do their best work, employees motivated by anxiety and fear won't produce their best work. They will produce whatever they need to keep employed, that's not the best thing for a company.

> Layoffs affect morale

This is temporary in my experience. Especially in an organization that emerges from layoffs with better financial footing in an growing industry.

Morale doesn’t bounce back when the survivors feel that the industry or company is dying. I doubt Meta and social media is going away anytime soon.

The morale effect is temporary, the ripple effects of it, in my experience, linger for a very long time. That was my point, those are harder to visualise, quantify, but if you live the day-to-day in R&D/operations you see how people react to it over time.

The analogy used in some layoffs discussions of cutting off a limb is fitting here too, your body can still perform some functions but some skills are harder to perform, some movements aren't possible or are very impaired, etc. You are still alive but you aren't the same anymore, for a company it can create really weird side-effects like some examples I brought up on the previous comment.

The limb analogy is apt, but in my experience I’d change the analogy slightly and make the animal losing a limb a dog. There is a saying that “a dog is really a 3-legged animal born with a spare leg”. A three legged dog in a short time adapts and knowing a few tripod pooches in my life, my experience is they get along just fine, and to them, are not impaired compared to their 4 legged counterparts. I think companies are like that too. Layoffs can create definite temporary operational challenges. However, in organizations I have been in that have experienced layoffs, you just adapt and in time and eventually don’t notice the impairment the layoff caused. It’s just the new normal.

Yes. The figure of merit is profit, not how nice you are to your new hires.

You know, back in the golden ages, employers had actual relationships with their employees and the communities they served both as a provider of goods and a provider of employment.

That was the time when the economy actually worked for the people.

I don’t think this golden age ever existed exempt in your imagination. Have you seen working conditions in the 1800s?

Workers had little mobility or options, that's why they stuck around forever (that and pensions).

I'm not going to bother engaging with you from the perspective of morality and ethics, since it seems unlikely that would resonate with you. Instead, I will point out how wrong you are purely from a financial lens.

The goal of a CEO of any company is to generate long term shareholder value - eg. to make the company more valuable than they found it. Mark Zuckerberg has been the only CEO that Facebook has ever known, and obviously he has created a lot of shareholder value during his tenure. On the other hand, Facebook has also lost about half of its value in the last year or so. A dropping valuation is typically a lagging indicator of a major strategic blunder or disruption. The market is essentially saying that he has done a rather poor job for the past 2-3 years and the outlook of investors is diminished accordingly.

And yes, hiring a ton of people and then having to lay them off in a short time frame is a huge part of this. In a tech company, profits today are the result of long term execution of strategies and represent a return on capital investment. A designer or engineer hired today is not going to deliver much that will create revenue or profit this year. There is an old axiom in tech companies - if you want a little profit today, hire a sales exec. If you want a lot of profit in three years, hire an engineer.

Bulking up your technology team only to have to skinny it down later is a massive strategic and employee distraction and is absolutely a sign of mismanagement.

This is why they call people 'resources' rather than people.

Wouldn't you prefer to hire contractors to fill short-term demand and transition them to full employees if the demand ends up being more robust than expected?

Except that:

- I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor and

- I'm sure the layoffs are not purely LIFO anyway.

> I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor.

Speaking for myself, personally, if I were to join a role as a contractor basis rather than a full timer, I would expect extra compensation to justify the added risk of being laid off whenever. Hiring people by telling them they're full time, and then laying them off and treating them like contractors, is a breach of faith by management by hiding the risk factor of "demand after COVID will return to normal level" behind pretty promises. They made some extra profit by underpaying the nominally full time workers who were left carrying the extra risk of losing job, and it's showing now.

Coming to US from Europe - in US employees are contractors(hi at will employment), actual contractors are just people who are smart enough to know that.

Well, contractors don't get severance when their contract ends, whereas layoffs for employees are typically attended by some small payout. That's not much but it's not nothing. Contractors also have to deal with their own taxes and buy their own insurance (for worse rates).

Of course, if I were a contractor I could probably get double my current salary ... but I'd still rather be an employee, even in the face of at-will employment. Particularly given that my employer is doing great and didn't over-hire during COVID.

Employees only get severance depending on your home state laws. Its far from universal, too.

Employees are always entitled to unemployment insurance benefits (a pittance, but its still cash) which is not true for contractors.

In my experience contractors seldom go back to being employees.

My brother has a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, and contract work was his foot in the door to a full-time developer position at Amazon.

When I quit my contractor job, subcontracted out to a defense contractor over 20 years ago, the primary contractor offered to hire me directly. It was an open secret that my employer hired people strait out of college, billed them out at very high rates, and the client was allowed to poach a top performer now and then in exchange for paying such high hourly rates. I went from being a contractor to a regular employee at a startup.

Granted, this is a sample size of two.

Though, in neither case were the contractors in question independent contractors. I suppose you're getting at that few independent contractors are willing to go back once they taste the flexibility.

I mean, yeah. I was a contractor but not an independent contractor, and I was paid like shit. My take-home has gone up nearly three times since leaving that world and joining a company full-time in 2018. Independent contractors have it much better, as long as they're able to keep work in the pipeline.

Hum... How actually is it supposed to work?

Did those extra people jump into productivity immediately during the short term boom instead of taking time to learn the business and fit in, like developers always need? By what magic did all the large US companies manage to do that?

The boom itself lasted for about an year. It's enough time to get some of those people to contribute positively. It's not even close to enough time to compensate for the drag of increasing your headcount by 30%. And the most competitive period was the first few months, where new people were all drag.

Nope, I do conclude that they expected the boom to stay forever. They could have expected things to stop growing that quickly, but they clearly didn't expect a contraction.

To be fair, none of them are on the area of economical forecasting. And the crazy decisions of the US monetary policy isn't something that one could expect people to just guess. But the sheer amount of overreaction from those companies on both situations isn't something to take lightly. That's clear display of incompetency.

> They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money. Is that not more or less how this is playing out?

You forgot the part where right before he did all of that, he made Facebook, one of the biggest money printing machines on the planet of its time. Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective).

> Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective).

So were many of the employees who were and will be laid off. Isn't business more about "what have you done for me lately"?

Allow Facebook to stagnate while Zuck focuses on the Metaverse.

My read was that as long as the money printing machine is running, Zuck can do whatever random side project he wants. Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck.

>>Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck.

This might apply to other companies that don't have founder-majority ownership, but that's not the case with Meta because Zuck still retains control with over 50% voting power.[1]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...

>Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective).

Zuck didn't do anything, except maybe put the organization in place to succeed (though most would argue that was Sandberg)

I don't think that's fair. Sheryl definitely made the business/ops side work, but Zuck definitely made the product/infra side work.

Neither of them are perfect, but they had a really good division of responsibilities that worked for over a decade.

Well, they still do have to shed some crocodile tears and make a post claiming that they take "full responsibility".

Perhaps the latter could be outsourced to ChatGPT though.

I'd be surprised if most of those aren't drafted by assistants anyway.

Let's set aside that it's Meta for a moment. Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy. Think Chrysler in the 70's pre Iacocca. They face troubles that leadership is incapable of handling. Companies like that get sold and broken out for parts. Or, some have major shakeups with leadership and come back as something else.

Meta, of course, is different. Leadership made a few mistakes, sure, but they're more than ready to cope with changes to social media in the face of tools like ChatGPT available to everyone. Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers. And you can be sure they're innovating behind the scenes. Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.

Meta, of course, is different.

Is it, really? All the "tech innovation" and "too big to fail" talk was said about Chrysler, too.

Lots of people look at Meta through HN-tinted glasses. It's still just a company, like any other.

For the whole second paragraph citations are sorely needed. This reads like something you would read on a nervous META stockholder forum.

I agree with you but I'd imagine new tech like chatgpt won't interject in a user's interactions with facebook and instagram as it does with google where I ask my AI for something vs. search for it in google.

How will chatgpt make money if it doesn’t?

Subscriptions? Potentially the language model can give different answers and the highest bidder is the one that rises to prominence? Who knows... OpenAI was originally supposed to be a non-profit. The language model is essentially the sum total of the content of the internet which humanity up til now has contributed to so not sure we should be charged.

> Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.

That's a lot of wishful thinking for an enormous enterprise loaded up with red tape, regulatory entities breathing down their necks, a whole-company strategy going exactly nowhere, and now a bad reputation in this field for repeated layoffs.

> Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers.

This assumes Facebook and Instagram remain the communication and user content hubs they are. But this is not a given, any company asleep at the wheel (remember myspace) risks losing leadership, then users and then money needed to recover. And recent FB escapades suggest that it indeed has a sleeping driver. My 2c.

Their business relies on the whims of fickle consumers not changing, which seems to happen frequently.

Facebook hasn't been cool for a decade+ and usage has dropped a lot in the last few years[1], so all of their eggs are going into baskets that either a) face similar competitive battles (insta v tik tok et al) or b) are gambles (metaverse), other ventures.

Social media, and perhaps the internet at large, seems like it's shaping up to be a lot more ephemeral in nature than we were led to believe when the unicorns were growing up. Not sure how these companies navigate that other than via conglomerate/acquisition style growth.

[1] https://blog.chartbeat.com/2021/06/24/facebook-decline-regio...

I have yet to meet a good leader, coming out of Meta. I worked with several, and all of them share the. same trait - ignore the problem, till it disappears.

They're great to "work" for, but they're horrible at building a team to do work.

I, personally, attribute this to the coasting that Facebook/Meta has been doing for the last 5-7 years. Big product used to provide enough money to literally "rest and vest" for leaders. Leaders that hire people to do complete pointless work, and still have no negative impqact on the company. Now it's all catching up.

This is not the first or the last time we see this kind of situation. ATT, IBM, Microsoft - all have been there, where the money coming in from hit products covered all the ills.

> I have yet to meet a good leader, coming out of Meta. I worked with several, and all of them share the. same trait - ignore the problem, till it disappears.

That's because the good ones don't leave.

More generally, I think that the last few years have been way too easy for FB/Meta (since 2015) and that's why there's so much bloat.

I get why they want to flatten things, but I think they've left it very late and I'm not sure it's gonna work out for them.

> Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy

Isn't this too black and white of a statement? We just got out of a massive money printing/demand spike that was COVID

It's generally agreed upon as business 101 "scale up to capture growth opportunities"

Businesses did that.

Now it's scale down time. Businesses are doing that.

What part of that is unhealthy?

The multiple part is the most important part of the statement you're quoting. The general idea is to cut deeply once so that it never needs to happen again.

I think a huge portion of the balance between "hire / grow head count" and "layoff / shrink head count" is linked to the Federal Funds Rate and whether corporations are ready to get rid of X (where X is the number of people they need to adjust head count wise to account for the Federal Funds Rate going from 0.25% -> 5.25% in 12 months)

Maybe they don't believe the Fed and are hopeful for a pivot?

"Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years."

When was the last time FB/Meta released something that qualifies? As opposed to acquiring a company?

It's a one-trick pony, like Google.

> They got hired for leadership roles.

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Meta, and owns 55% of the voting shares.

If their compensations are linked to Meta results and stock prices, they are going to pay for that.

You can pass off one round of layoff as having to make a tough decision after overhiring when things looked different. Having to do a second one doesn't look good however. It's basically admitting that you either botched the first one or just realised things are significantly worse than you thought neither of which are particularly appealing to investors.

This is a forum that tends to attract entrepreneurs. People that hope to grow something small into something big and learn the lessons that can take them through that journey.

So it seems to me, it's a perfectly reasonable point out failures of business leadership that result in worse business performance, as they see it.

> What accountability is going to happen?

Women and blacks couldn’t vote back in the day. It’s in the realm of possibility that the society will change and demand leadership accountability.

Zuck wasn't hired, he founded the company and structured it such that he would always have a majority of voting rights and control over it. It is very, very difficult to remove him unwillingly. If he wants to bet the entire farm on metaverse and sink the company, ruin shareholder value, layoff everyone, etc. then he can and seemingly will do it.

At some point there will probably be moves from hedge funds and big share holders to sue him for breach of fiduciary responsibility. It will be interesting to see how he responds.

not to be cynical. But presumably many CEOs knew the COVID demands wouldn't last forever, and overhired anyway.

I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity? No, they took short-term gains deliberately, not caring about the future.

>I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity?

No. But there was probably a reasonable bet that a lot of people (at least those in comfortable houses) would decide that doing the virtual exercise thing at home really did beat going out to the gym.

One of the things we're seeing right now is that with some exceptions (there's generally more flexibility about going into the office every day than there used to be) the "new normal" looks a lot more like the "old normal" than a lot of people thought it would.

It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part. Thousands of people are losing their livelihoods and the image of Meta should reflect that. What do you mean calling this out has no effect?

> It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part.

There are other comments here that say this is 100% wrong. It's not a failure at all. They did exactly what they should have/continue to do exactly what they should be doing.

In COVID, it was time to capitalize on growth.

In 5.25% Fed Funds rate time, it's time to shrink.

Leadership is executing/has executed both of those plans.

> What do you mean calling this out has no effect?

What's going to change? You and I and 10,000 people online calling out some random entity we summarize as "leadership" isn't going to change anything going forward. Why waste the energy being mad at random news online that we both sought out/choose to reply to? Miserable way to walk around life.

But did Meta capture anything additional under low interest rates or did they blow billions on Metaverse R&D that never panned out? I heard from someone hired at Google last year that they basically had no work to do. Google kept staffing up, but they didn’t have plans and programs for a lot of these new hires to work on.

What were they capturing exactly?

Zuck didn’t get hired. He owns a controlling interest in the company.

Agreed with just one comment:

> The way Meta is operating is if they don't know anything beyond two feet in front of them.

Have they had to up until now? Some of these social media companies have had money printer business models for their whole existence, and now they actually have to consider long-term consequences of their actions.

Zuck refused to sell at 1b because he planned to build a 100b company.

If that is not long term thinking, I don't know what is.

It's one thing to grow on the ride up, and now we're on the ride down. It takes a different kind of long-term thinking.

So, they do have long term thinking, just not the kind that you want it to be?

You should have clarified your comment that you want long-term thinking that makes the stock goes up while all of your peer stocks are going down i.e. market crash.

Cool, Zuck definitely isn't that good lmao.

I don't care what they do. I'm just observing that they and others over leveraged themselves and now need to lay people off because of market conditions.

It's also survivorship bias.

So?

The parent comment talked about how FB never have any kind of long term thinking. I refute that comment with one example.

To address your comment, everything at that level is a survivorship bias since there are only a handful of companies reaching 100b valuation, and each of them took a different path.

>>The parent comment talked about how FB never have any kind of long term thinking. I refute that comment with one example.

Having any amount of successful products is the past. Sure it will continue to give you profits. But that is the past. Making new products is the future.

You will never build a company, let alone a profitable successful one by penny pinching techniques like layoffs. The only real way to build a good company is to build good products. So far Mr Z, has shown he could build only one, and only one moat. Every other product has come from an acquisition. And those acquired companies themselves have been unable to build newer products.

This is a far bigger problem.

Compared this to companies that have survived decades the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Even car companies Tesla etc. In general what makes it rain is building products and selling them.

Microsoft has tons of layoffs and penny pinching tactics...

Other products like Instagram and WhatsApp are praised as the most successful acquisitions in the modern history... on par with YouTube and Excel acquisition. Not sure why we downplay it. Zuck was a genius for buying these 2 products where everyone thought they were hugely overpriced.

They didn’t just ‘have’ a money printer, they ‘made’ one. Many others tried and failed. Say what you want about Zuck, but this some happy accident.

I said business model: they had a money printer business model. I did not say that they had a money printer. Yes, they made a money printer with their money printer business model.

I'm not convinced that "Zuck" (are you friends with him or something?) did anything better than happen to be in the right time and place for the thing he did.

It's one of his online handles (In instagram no less), I'd say it's at least as guaranted as calling you p0pCult

He was at the right time, at the right place and had the correct skills to take advantage of the opportunity, What's your point?

>I'd say it's at least as guaranted [sic] as calling you p0pCult

You don't know me by any other name; you have no other option.

>What's your point?

That he did nothing special. He was a benefactor of circumstance. Further, that we should treat him as such--no one special, just a guy swept up in social media when the social media craze was sweeping people up. One might even say that his methods: bilking Saverin and the Winkelvosses, making what was essentially a hot-or-not clone, point out that he is little more than a slimy con artist. That certainly tracks with his approach to people's privacy.

Even if I did know you by any other name, as a public name that you've chosen, It's reasonable for me to call you p0pcult, on the same degree that it's for anyone to call him Zuck

Everyone is to some degree, even if what he did was nothing special, he was the one that did it. Let's put Neil Armstrong as an example, he just happened to be on the right moment at the right time to be the first human to walk on the moon, it could have been any other astronaut.

I'm not saying he isn't slimy or even a con artist, I'm saying his merit still stands

Regarding my mistake, would you care to tell me how it's supposed to be written? It serves me right for using words that I've only heard

> Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership.

In 2008, this was more understandable. The economy was in a quick decline, and it was hard to know where things would bottom. Right now, things don't look all that different from their first round in November.

You mentioned trust with employees, but for investors, they should look at this, combined with leadership churn, and know something's not right. There's a CEO who is/was distracted by his pet metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency, who wasn't paying attention to TikTok or thinking critically about post-pandemic scenarios.

I assume Sheryl Sandberg over leadership disagreements, but being the pro she is, she's kept her mouth shut about it.

Yes, so professional to have company staff plan your wedding

Did that ever reach a conclusion? All I can find are articles from last year (https://archive.ph/YaKxL). Also, planning a wedding would not be out of the job description of something like an executive assistant - their whole point is to do busywork and personal-life logistics so that the executive focuses more fully on their work.

> metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency

Crypto is of course 95% all a scam, but as crazy as it may look from the outside I think Zuckerberg was right on that one.

He didn't want to compete against the likes of all the crypto-bros and the other crypto scammers, there were no hundreds-of-billions to be made out of that, he wanted to compete against governments and central banks by actually instituting a "global" e-currency.

That's why a lot of central bankers and governments reacted immediately to Facebook's announcement, they knew what was at stake. If anyone could have technically accomplished that, on the private/non-government side, that was Facebook (or maybe Amazon, possibly Google). Of course many central banks and governments now want to implement the same "global" e-currency project that they were very quick to deny to Zuckerberg.

The failure of leadership in society continuing to conjure a fake world of finance and on rails career paths in alignment with the normalized production routines coming out of world wars.

A normalized post war economic society is what’s enabled the fiat currency sleight of hand and environment destabilizing consumerism.

The reality is “American society” has created this situation. It’s isn’t just on Zuckerberg, the Fed, Congress, etc.

Society as a whole has been a shit leader and steward of its own agency, deciding the future does not matter then finding itself in these “oh shit; we never saw that coming” moments.

Zuckerberg is a hostage to the pitchfork wielding billions that also exist just like you or I. What is his play? Stand at a mic and say “hey btw this is all gibberish and you’re all fucking dumb for buying it?”

He’s a product of society.

I would think that all of the middle managers have an incentive to balloon the company because it gives them more status.

So the top leaders are fed a bad hiring strategy from their lieutenants. It is ultimately the C-Suites responsibility to keep middle managers in line but it would be difficult to push back on the army of middle managers in a bull market when they could just leave if they don't get their "career growth".

The cynic in me wonders if the black pill is that these boom/bust cycles in employment are mostly unavoidable. Maybe it does make more sense to balloon during a boom, grow more than you need like a chipmunk hoarding acorns. Better to have the talent and not need it than to need it and not have it.

> The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones.

do you have a source for the second sentence?

>>But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones.

This is one is true. Routine never ending layoffs dent morale. People can never be sure if they are next, hence they don't start working on anything new. Everything goes into maintenance mode. Everybody is interviewing all the time. Eventual erosion of enthusiasm, morale and an overall doom+gloom situation means your already crappy situation gets more crappier.

If you have to absolutely do it, do it once and be done with it.

Research also shows that any layoffs negatively effect the performance of the company over the long term.

They bill it as “dropping the low performers” but in my experience, that’s rarely what actually happens.

Shocked pikachu face

A company that has been hemorrhaging money to push a failed VR and “web 3.0”-verse is laying off people. I never would have imagined this will happen in 1000 years.

I have said this before and will say it again. I will never work for “Meta”/Facebook/Zuckerberg. The company itself is a prime source of division in the United States of America and has the worst business practices and culture.

I will however continue to interview, waste their time, drag my feet, and use their offers to increase my salary offerings at other companies.

> The company itself is a prime source of division in the United States of America

Devil's advocate but why don't you see Facebook as a blank canvas where people can post whatever they want, and it's the people posting the dividing content responsible?

Facebook is just the medium, no? Could be Reddit, could be Twitter. Why are you holding Facebook responsible in your mind?

Do you think that's what Facebook is? Are you not aware of their content sorting algorithms?

I was under the impression the content sorting algorithms pay attention to metrics like engagement (likes/reactions/comments) and how long people read it, and then since it's their motive to keep you scrolling for as long as possible (so that you view as many ads as possible), they lean on their user data to promote hot stories that cause good engagement.

Therefore, if the users consumer lots of "divisive" content and it causes good engagement, isn't it the user's fault for being such "fans" of the divisive content that it makes Facebook algorithms promote it?

If a dealer repeatedly puts a needle in front of an addict, and encourages them to take it, and they end up giving in, who's responsible?

The addict is of course not without blame, but at the very least I hope we can find a consensus that the dealer is behaving extremely immoral. This is essentially how I view facebook. It's abusing the human condition for profit with destructive effects.

I think a better analogy would be with the tobacco industry. Both are controlled by huge multinationals, heavily connected with the advertising industry, and have a lot of influence and power in developing countries.

You’re also forgetting the ability for ads to explicitly target people. So it’s more like finding the person who just lost their family and job and putting a needle in front of them. They weren’t an addict to begin with.

Facebook isn’t coming over to your house and forcing you to navigate to their website. This would be more like the addict going to meet the dealer and then being offered what they want.

Have you ever witnessed the struggle of addiction, either you or someone in your family?

Would you say it is a heroin addict’s fault for getting addicted to opioids after a doctor pushed them into opioids when the doctor was far more aware of the risks than the patient?

We all have the ability (and some might argue responsibility) to educate ourselves on what our actions cause, and that’s why a lot of people, myself included, minimize or avoid Facebook use. However, that doesn’t remove culpability from Facebook for pushing addicting, polarizing, or divisive content onto users.

They are just pursuing profit, yes. But we as a society should really be pushing for their profit to be diminished by the extent it negatively impacts society. For instance, imagine Facebook were in part liable for terrorist attacks because it pushed radicalizing content, or partially liable for suicides, because it pushed content that destabilized someone’s mental health. We shouldn’t be tolerating them pushing content because the user is “such a fan” of the content any more than we tolerate doctors pushing addictive drugs, gambling or cigarette companies pushing their products, etc.

Not all engagement is equal to Facebook. At one point they considered the angry reaction to be worth twice as much as the happy reaction when deciding if a story should be ranked up.

No. Hijacking emotional/biochemical triggers in our brains is not the same as giving us what we "want". It is the exact same problem as with clickbait/ragebait titles on content (which... often get shared to Facebook).

People ruin their lives doing things that feel "good" in the moment all the time. Facebook is a machine for that.

Because of algorithmic feeds, these platforms aren't just mediums. They actively shape what their users see.

But aren't the algorithms driven by what users engage with?

And you really believe that at face value? What drives the algorithm is profits. If it profits from pushing you into a bubble at the cost of shaping your world view, it will.

Sure, but if optimizing algorithms for engagement has negative societal effects, I still think these platforms can be partly held responsible for it. It's their decision what to optimize for right?

At the end of the day they're a business. In America, I can't think of many things that have priority over capitalism (profit over all).

Does Facebook have a right to exist and try their best to earn profit? Yes.

In doing so, they become a middle man for trying to push ads. Does this have measurable negative societal effects? Arguably. I would say "depends on who you ask" but it's pretty hard to look at it subjectively instead of objectively when there is so much data showing it's true.

But what's the alternative? Asking them to stop entirely? Unrealistic. Asking them to make less money not pushing certain content because it's divisive? That's the same content that got optimized to the top based on engagement statistics and is netting them "the most money" from advertisement views, right?

I get what you are saying about the negative effects, I just don't know how realistic it is to hold Facebook accountable when their primary motive is profit. If society tears itself apart in the process because Facebook gave society the platform to do that, at what point does the government intervene and ask them "hey, help us police moral/ethics to control the effects"?

> At the end of the day they're a business. In America, I can't think of many things that have priority over capitalism (profit over all).

Huh? They could be better, but we have anti-corruption laws because fairness has priority over some degree of profit, we have worker protection laws because worker rights take priority over some degree of profit, we have occupational safety laws and health benefit laws because health takes priority over some degree of profit, we have a zillion laws that plainly demonstrate that social priorities often take some degree of priority over profit.

Social media is a new industry and we're working out the rules. Engagement optimization turns out to be detrimental to society's well-being, so yeah... we're probably going to figure out a way to assert that through law and regulation, and some participants might see their business model impacted along the way.

It's hard not believe that you're just trolling at this point.

Facebook the entity does not have a right to exist. It is allowed to exist by society.

This kind of glazes over the fact that the platform we're criticizing (the one that uses engagement algorithms to display ads on divisive content or whatever we've summarized it to) makes them billions a month/quarter/year/whatever.

"allowed to exist by society" is putting it lightly. It's in demand. High demand.

> In America, I can't think of many things that have priority over capitalism (profit over all).

You're right. The profit mechanism should be abolished/replaced. But in the meantime Facebook is still morally culpible for their shenanigans, even if market forces agree with them.

> The profit mechanism should be abolished/replaced.

I just can't help but feel this view is wildly unpopular/radical almost anywhere other than an online social media forum for people who like to spend their free time in the comment section (like a Reddit or a HackerNews)

I won't say that the profit mechanism is responsible for all or our problems, but in modern society it can surely account for at least 80% of them.

I believe it's possible to retain autonomous production (ie, to not have a command economy) while using different mechanisms than profit to organize production.

That said, if you're saying "Facebook does evil things because the system incentivizes them to" then maybe the conclusion should be that we change the system, no? And whether the idea is popular or not seems irrelevant, given your admission that it's the root cause. Popularity also might be subject to change given the overall circumstances.

Are you making some kind of Hobbesian moral argument about what people are willing to promote via their own, idealized-as-individualistic habits?

Notice how your responses continue the conversation in a specific direction, and not in another direction. This is something you have choice over. Now imagine you automate this process with an algorithm that adaptively promotes certain replies to your comments and demotes certain other replies in a systematic fashion. Do you not then think that that algorithm has some bearing on how the conversation unfolds?

Facebook cancels, not posters.

Not been on facebook fore some years now, but it is not "just" a medium. It is optimized to keep you on the site as much as possible, to show you as many ads as possible. This comes with the hard price of showing you what is divisive, as it keeps you engaged. So they do are responsible for prioritizing divisive posts and allowing ads that are so well targeted that they can make you tilt.

> It is optimized to keep you on the site as much as possible

true or false: it pushes content to the top that users choose to engage in/with?

Without users and their behavior, the Facebook platform would be empty/neutral.

It's the users driving the divisiveness, etc.

No, as usual, don’t hate the player, hate the game. Facebook benefits from a huge network effect that locks people in if they want to keep in touch with their close ones. There is no alternative as you can't built a concurrent because facebook do not allow any interaction from the outside world. So people come to facebook to keep in touch, and stay because the content is addictive. Note that moste people are not posting, so they are not even contributing to the content. Note also that social networks are using our brain biase to keep us addicted.

Personally, I think their optimization of engagement will by default bring out the most extreme viewpoints, and the worst of people. They’d rather show you 10 extreme things in a row to make you outraged, than to show you 2 extreme and 8 normal.

Facebook wasn’t always like this — it used to just be a place where you could see what your friends are up to.

Because Facebook’s presentation isn’t content neutral. It optimizes for content with high engagement, and users quickly learn to tune their posts towards that so that their posts are seen.

It becomes hard to get the photo of your pleasant day in front of your friends and family, but easy to bait Uncle Roger into a debate about politics or derisively rag on some easy target.

Engaging posts are a specific kind of content and not all platforms optimize for them. Facebook isn’t the only one that does, but it’s looking like it was a pretty socially toxic experiment and Facebook is one of several companies now stuck on the wrong side of the story.

> It optimizes for content with high engagement, and users quickly learn to tune their posts towards that so that their posts are seen.

Why is that Facebook's fault if they are just the middle man for their users (both on the content creation side and the content consuming/engagement side)?

Why is it Facebook’s fault that they chose to operate their platform a certain way?

Probably because we generally associate responsibility with choice.

Are users also responsible for their own choice to create and respond to engagement-optimized posts? Sure, but that’s an orthogonal concern to Facebook’s own choice and the responsibility they bear for it.

I just don't get the line of thought that goes:

"I don't like the content that ends up on + promoted through algorithms on Facebook, therefore, they should be responsible"

It's not their content, and they aren't the ones engaging with it.

They are pushing it because users post it and then engage in it.

Say we got rid of Facebook tomorrow. This exact same problem would happen at another company/platform unless there was heavy intervention/moderation (which to my understand, Facebook absolutely already does some level of moderation?). What's that equivalent to? I'm not a "free speech advocate" or anything like that but what you're asking for is censorship instead of asking users to bear the responsibility of the content they consume.

I wouldn’t consider only the content/feed selection algorithm - I would take a holistic look at how people interact with Facebook (like button only initially, then expanded to a few more choices; real identity, not many comments shown at a time), then also compare it to other sites and their outcomes like Reddit (up and down votes, anonymous if you wish, lots of comments shown at a time).

Regarding users bearing responsibility for what they consume - I have seen others report running into this and I have as well - no amount of feed grooming keeps the controversial content off my feed for a meaningful amount of time. I actively unfollow / snooze content I don’t want to see, but Facebook has countered this by adding “suggested for you” items to my feed. It’s impossible to only see my friends’ updates. I must be exposed to content selected by Facebook as a cost of using Facebook.

> what you're asking for is censorship

Most people use the word censorship to refer to banning some specific kind of content: banning what. Meanwhile, the discussion around Facebook is usually around how they measure and reward content, not what the content is.

If you're actually being sincere in this discussion, I think you may not see how engagement is just one particular kind of how and it's not a given that social media sites optimize for it. It was an innovation that some sites introduced because it benefited their business model and it caught on for a while. But it wasn't universally adopted, needn't be used at all, and is becoming less fashionable among both sites and users. Facebook's a bit behind the game on restructuring away from it though, possibly because of over-investment and momentum, or possibly because of being a closely-held company that can be philosophically stubborn.

> If you're actually being sincere in this discussion

I am.

> Meanwhile, the discussion around Facebook is usually around how they measure and reward content, not what the content is.

I thought the original point was "divisive content gets promoted and Facebook doesn't stop it/encourages it".

FYI, "gets promoted" is the key phrase there, at least to the many people disagreeing with and downvoting you here.

Promoting that content is the "how" that Facebook has chosen to do and continues to do, and something that isn't a given for operating a social media company. That's what they're being held responsible for.

I'm not trying to sound naive here when I say:

their content delivery/ranking algorithms prioritize (from my understanding as just a general person in the public who has never seen what's probably millions of lines of code across many different internal private systems at Meta) user engagement over all

If the algorithm is spitting out content that we're all critical of (because it's divisive, bad for mental health, etc.), why are we not acknowledging that it's just a side effect of

1. user input + 2. user engagement to that input = 3. ranked content delivery algorithm

If Facebook went away tomorrow, another platform would fill its place. Humans have shown that they like to doom-scroll on their phone and are ok being fed ads in the mean time because social media scrolling is basically the equivalent of an electronic cigarette for the brain in terms of dopamine delivery.

Because humans have chosen to prioritize the shittier meanier grossier nastier content, Facebook's "models" have been trained on that. Why are we criticizing Facebook's models that we basically played our own individual role in building?

> Why are we criticizing Facebook's models that we basically played our own individual role in building?

Practicality and precedent. We can effectively regulate the algorithms a countable number of companies use in their products, but can't effectively make people not susceptible to doom-scrolling (nicotine, heroin, gambling, whatever).

> If Facebook went away tomorrow, another platform would fill its place.

Not if the troubling practices were illegal or too expensive to operate. It would be a pretty dumb investment to bother. Instead, new platforms would pursue different techniques for content presentation and profitability, just like existing competitors already do.

> We can effectively regulate the algorithms a countable number of companies use in their products, but can't effectively make people not susceptible to doom-scrolling (nicotine, heroin, gambling, whatever).

What does regulation of Facebook's algorithm look like to you? Promote specifically which types of content less/not at all? Obviously "politically divisive/disinformation" but who gets to be in charge of that/classifying what is/isn't disinformation/divisive?

You keep missing that the problem is engagement optimization, not political divisive/disinformation per se.

A site that optimizes for content that people heavily interact with (engagement) is different than a site that prioritizes the relationship type between users (friends original content > public figure OC > shares > etc) or positive response (upvotes), etc

None of these many other systems rely on discerning the specific nature of content or making sure it’s of some certain arbitrary moral character. But they each lead the network as a whole to favor different kinds of content and so the experience for users ends up different. And it’s already known that social media sites can be successful using these other techniques.

> A site that optimizes for content that people heavily interact with (engagement) is different than a site that prioritizes the relationship type between users

I think that's hit the nail on the head. In a neutral environment, a user would be shown a feed of friends posts with ads mixed in for their demographic.

In an optimised for engagement environment, a user is shown posts that are known to increase engagement and quite often those posts are inflammatory.

This engagement environment is much more likely to expose people to extreme views

Because that middle man is pushing outrage. They purposely changed how it works from your friends pics of their kids to “child molester loose in your community, as what your opposite political party wanted.” That change is well documented, because it drove engagement.

That middle man is a blank canvas. Users submit friend pictures and child molester links. Other users vote the child molester links to the top. Why aren't you sharing any of the accountability on consumption/promotion on the users?

But it’s not just voting. They bias what gets put in front of people, and what doesn’t.

It’s a bit like saying a drug dealer has no accountability because it’s the user who buys the drugs. In this case FB is well aware of the consequences of their actions, and even worse, their total inability to do anything when it’s not in a dominant language. This has had profound consequences in places like Myanmar and India where disinformation spreads like wildfire and leads to the killing of people. You’d think they’d step back and go “whoa, this isn’t what we intended for FB to be” and do something about it. The opposite has happened.

> They bias what gets put in front of people, and what doesn’t.

What came first though, the chicken or the egg?

What came first, the content in an unbiased fashion and then the algorithms were trained on which content generated best engagement and it got promoted

did Facebook just behind the scenes start pushing bad content on a whim with no backing information? I don't think that happened

Because Facebook does internal studies to figure out that this is harmful for society, and it continues to do these things regardless. It's a form of tragedy of the commons.

Mind you this is not a question of "just doing fiduciary duty". It could very well be argued that not fomenting fear and extremism in its userbase is good for business and the brand. Yet it chooses to be evil.

And it's obvious why. Facebook is dying. There are almost no "regular" posts and people on there anymore. They're desperate to maintain some sort of engagement even if it means making the platform a gathering spot for the KKK.

> Because Facebook does internal studies to figure out that this is harmful for society, and it continues to do these things regardless.

from a business perspective, if Facebook decided to shut its doors tomorrow from a moral/ethical standpoint, wouldn't somebody else just fill the gap?

There's clearly a "need" for this kind of platform in society from a capitalism standpoint.

This is like saying a journalist is "just a middle man for information". But we all know how propaganda works: it is a careful curation and presentation of certain kinds of information at the behest of others, which ends up creating a narrative that may or may not reflect reality. It is the obligation of the journalist to represent the facts in a way that reflects a common notion of "truth" which includes avoiding deception and misdirection.

Not calling Meta a news company, just making a comparison re: curation and how it can transform the inputs into something else.

The same reason our society held the cigarette companies partially responsible for lung cancer deaths.

Meta is not breaking any legal law circa 2023, but history will bucket it along with asbestos/cigarette businesses

Facebook isn't a neutral arbiter, they make active choices in what their users see. And they frequently choose things that maximize engagement in order to maximize profit. Things that are inflammatory and divisive drive engagement, so that tends to bubble to the top.

This isn't just a problem with Facebook and Twitter either, its an issue in modern journalism as well. Basically anything that is funded by advertisement will fall into this trap.

They aren’t a simple middle man though - they are actively choosing the rules for what content gets amplified on the platform.

They’ve done a search over the space of things that drive engagement with the site and have written a feed/content sort algorithm that optimizes for those things. They could just as easily choose to optimize for something else - like number of heart reactions only - but they choose not to because that would presumably result in lower engagement and thus less eyeball time and thus less profit.

How on earth are they just the “middle man” where they are the ones prioritizing certain content through the feed and their algorithms? Do you feel they should bear no responsibility for anything?

Why are they prioritizing the content? They run a platform they created with algorithms they created that react to user engagement metrics. It's the users engaging. Are we saying the user needs to be protected from themselves? It sounds like it.

They didn't post/create the content, and they prioritize what users engage with the most.

Why do they deserve blame?

> They didn't post/create the content

They just incentivized it. Your argument is akin to "Yes your honor, I paid the assassin, but I didn't murder that man. The assassin did!"

> Why do they deserve blame?

Because the algorithms aren't neutral.

If Facebook let you follow who you wanted and showed only that content in chronological order, you'd have a leg to stand on. But they are tampering with the flow of information in ways that increase engagement artificially using psychological manipulation.

It's fine if you're content to let them hide behind their algorithms, but you're wrong both in a moral sense and likely soon in a legal sense.

Facebook optimizes for engagement, and maximizing engagement means making people scared, sad, or mad. Facebook emotionally manipulates its users to stay on Facebook as long as possible so they can show the user as many ads as possible. It was not like this 15 years ago.

It’s not just the medium.

Facebook applies some magic to decide which posts show up in your feed and which comments show up at the top of those posts.

When a metric like “engagement” is optimized for, this seems to result in controversial/divisive content making its way to the top. So yes, Facebook is a medium, but it is a medium that encourages certain content by rewarding it with more eyeballs and interaction than other content.

As a contrast, Reddit’s default sort is “best” which tends to put higher scored comments towards the top. Users have the choice of sorting by controversial, but that is transparent to the user that that’s what they’re getting. Reddit’s downvote lets users effectively shun content in a way that Facebook doesn’t - this has its trade offs, as it seems to encourage groupthink and echo chambers.

My texting app is neutral. WhatsApp is basically neutral (and, hey, Facebook owns it).

Facebook (and Youtube, and Twitter, and...) chooses which content to promote, for their own interests, which often correlate with generating outrage based on made-up bullshit. They're far from a "blank canvas".

> which often correlate with generating outrage based on made-up bullshit

That's not what my YouTube feed is like whatsoever. I've "curated" it that way though. A lot of "not interested" or "don't recommend this channel" clicks.

FWIW I hold them all responsible

Wow, you’re so cool.

| The company itself is a prime source of division in the United States of America and has the worst business practices and culture.

Well said. And they are actively promoting products (FB & IG) that induce social disorders/mental illnesses and blatantly turn a blind eye to it. It's just plain wrong.

> A company that has been hemorrhaging money

This reads like the company is losing money. It's not; it's still profitable, even with the metacurse.

No different than Google in those respects, Apple basically works for the CCP, Amazon doesn’t let people pee, the list goes on. They’re all trash ethically.

> The company itself is a prime source of division in the United States of America

I think it's actually an even worse source of division in many countries outside the US, we (Americans) just don't hear about it as much. There are plenty of horrific examples from around the world like https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

The hyperbole is a little much. Meta is pouring a ton of money into the Metaverse and facing some headwinds with regulatory and Apple's ATT concerns but they aren't even close to hemorrhaging money. Last year (one of the worst years for tech in recent history) they still walked away with 40billion in net profit. The money printing continues at a slightly slower pace.

That doesn't sound right.

"Facebook reported $23.1 billion net profit in 2022, a decline on the $39.3 billion made in 2021. Meta has invested heavily into the metaverse, which is cutting into its profits."

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/facebook-statistics/

That means they are still making tons of money, just less than they did a year ago.

If profits keep going down at similar rates, we'll see how long "tons" lasts.

I know I've already heard they were investing a lot of money, but _tens of billions of dollars_ in the metaverse? Holy fuck. Where is it all going?

headcount

Is it really worse than traditional media, which glorifies violence and mass shootings? Or Twitter and it’s propensity for mass outrage? Or the Reddit echo chamber?

Of course all can be bad, I’m just not sure you’ve accurately identified the biggest offender.

They're all shit. My particular ire towards Facebook has more to do with scandals like Cambridge Analytica. I think the platform is uniquely positioned to act as a loudspeaker for politically motivated and dangerous misinformation in a way the other platforms aren't.

We live in a world where actual vaccine skeptics are being given high positions of power in state-level health organizations, and I place the blame for that squarely on social media.

> I place the blame for that squarely on social media.

So clearly you don't believe in free will?

There's definitely an element of echo chambers in most Internet media (echo chambers like HN, for example), and it's definitely possible that this is driving increased polarisation, but it's not a slamdunk argument.

tl;dr not just social media, there's a lot of other stuff going on too (like, for instance, the outsourcing of manual labour out of the US).

My OG Oculus Quest works pretty well and the first time I played Superhot is probably the most recent tech experience I've had that felt magical. What makes the newer headsets failures in your view? HW itself or the SW ecosystem?

He stole one good idea 20 years ago and now he’s trying to recreate that success by throwing billions at it.

The problem is he is talentless.

I'm not sure why anyone takes any statement from management at face value. Of course every layoff is the last one..until it isn't.

The same goes for M&A - "Nothing will change"..until it does and "We're a family"..until you're not.

Once you've been around the block a few times, you learn that taking these statements at face value is a recipe for disappointment and being proven wrong. Just nod, give a "sure buddy," and hold your cards close. Min-max your plays and understand the difference between words and actions.

You have to have a more guarded faith in management than that, but yes, if there are layoffs 3 months after not foreseeing more layoffs management was either lying or incompetent, and it's time to GTFO.

Um no he is right. This is just the start. I have been around the block to know that layoffs rarely are only one rounders. Word of advice, if a company is doing voluntary layoff, and you have decent porosity of finding anther job, jump on it. The first round guys get the best offer. It only gets worse from there

This is now the third layoff round for Meta in a very short time span. Hopefully this improves the morale of those left and no more layoffs will be necessary.

Layoffs will continue until morale improves...

If morale never improves, then I guess the number of staff will reach zero sometime.

Well no, lol, you can't lay off management. That would be insane.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

layoffs aren't about punishing employees.

But they do.

But they are about squeezing more hours for less money out of those who remain. The fact that this is punishing is just a bonus.

> Hopefully this improves the morale of those left and no more layoffs will be necessary.

Well, the dynamic they've introduced most strongly incentivizes competent [read: employable] employees to leave so certainly that will improve overall team performance and they won't need to continue layoffs /s. To call it a death spiral would be excessive, but negative-divergence quality spiral just lacks that special something...

It won't kill them, but it will slow down Meta for a while, during a critical period where it needs to outrun innovation that will be nipping at its heels through the 2020s. It could be one of those "causes of the IBM-ification of Meta" in an article you read in the 2030s, but it will probably be more like, "the pandemic caused Meta to overstretch, at a critical point in its history and the history of technology, and [along with other companies] suffered as a result in multiple ways."

On the other hand, in the current environment, I can also see a lot of people figuring that they're not going to improve their prospects elsewhere in the near future so, since they're apparently at least somewhat valued given they're still there, they might as well just keep their head down for a year or two.

Oh absolutely, some of the mediocre employees will stay because of that. The exceptional ones are still going to head out for greener pastures though.

Eh. It's at least a more challenging environment for being hired in tech right now. Assuming they like their work and are getting well-paid, why should they move?

Because the local environment is going to get more and more cuthroat and backstabby as people feel pressured.

And this is different where exactly? If Meta does another round so will Google. If it’s layoffs or ChatGPT the only thing Sundar knows how to do is copy/paste. Amazon and Microsoft are already PIP culture.

It's different in sectors which aren't going to go through some things, places which are expanding rather than freaking out about dropping ad revenue and the end of zero interest rates. OpenAI / Microsoft, various energy sectors, and Palantir / miltech come to mind.

Life in a contracting industry sucks as a general rule, Meta has presumably decided that shedding weight is worth the nth-order effects. It's a strong signal to move on or start cultivating new skills now IMO.

It actually produces the exact opposite, my observation from experience is:

Some people will now work the system and want to be made redundant, by doing the minimum possible.

Good people will leave for other opportunities.

This takes months/years to fix/heal. The fixing process is reset every time you do a new round of lay offs.

Third? The article says this is the second, no?

Maybe he is thinking about "the flattening", but that hasn't happened yet (if it is happening at all). Or maybe this is the flattening. We don't know!

As near as I can tell the article is talking about the flattening (which does not seem to have happened yet).

"flattening" is in the byline of the article.

yes I understand that, but I was referring to the grandparent comment's "second layoff".

As far as the article, I know it is referencing the "flattening" but my point is none of us (besides Mark Z) really know for sure.

The secret to a happy workforce is laying off employees in the lowest decile of morale. Repeat as necessary.

Which was the second round of layoffs? The two layoffs (arguably): the first round in November, and then the flattening (which I agree will likely see managers quitting rather than becoming ICs).

Nothing improves morale more than the uncertainty of being randomly fired!

Third? What was the second?

The first time I ever heard "the layoffs will continue until morale improves" was at my startup in 2000, not long before the dot com crash thing.

Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

It will be ~7% layoffs every quarter at every public company until the stock is attractive to investors again. Lowering interest rates will also help a lot but that doesn’t look likely with the last inflation report.

> It will be ~7% layoffs every quarter at every public company until the stock is attractive to investors again.

This was one of the biggest things I felt wasn't being talked about in all of the layoff comment threads here on HN (or Reddit or Twitter or traditional media news sites or wherever)

It wasn't a 1 and done "cut the bottom 5-10% off and move on"

I mean, I/we don't really know for sure if that's how it plays out but...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-16/fed-s-mes...

https://tickertape.tdameritrade.com/market-news/ppi-data-com...

Not only does it seem that we aren't out of anything recessionary yet, it's as if we are only just at the very beginning/it hasn't started yet.

Thoughts?

Yeah tech stocks need to compete. These companies sell ads. They don’t need teams working on bullshit like optimizing talent acquisition pipelines or whatever.

I am in the same camp as you. But I think the approach of "cut x% over and over" to keep the stock afloat at some point is not going to work forever, since a company is not very competitive at 0% of its original engineering / get things done work force. Heck if the markets were truly free markets and stock price was based on fundamentals, we may even start to see highly paid senior leadership cuts over lower level employees. Call me crazy.

> Heck if the markets were truly free markets and stock price was based on fundamentals, we may even start to see highly paid senior leadership cuts over lower level employees.

GOOG did this. Lots of Directors and VP got cut.

META "flattening" will impact highly paid senior leadership as well.

> But I think the approach of "cut x% over and over" to keep the stock afloat at some point is not going to work forever, since a company is not very competitive at 0% of its original engineering / get things done work force.

Let me ask you this.

If we can correlate (which I think we can) "a tech company should have X headcount when the Federal Funds Rate is 0.25%" and "a tech company should have Y headcount when the Federal Funds Rate is 5.25%, where X is less than Y", I'm going to guess most tech companies just play it by ear/quarter by quarter (like the rest of the economic/financial markets based on all sorts of reports/data that come out incrementally over the year)

Right now, maybe companies haven't done enough layoffs to get their headcount to where it needs to be if the Federal Funds Rate is the full blown "doomsday" terminal 5.25%. Maybe companies are doing it incrementally and waiting to see if the Fed will pivot, because they have to keep in mind how expensive re-hiring people to chase growth will be?

Not sure I can correlate these things. We just have 1 little data point, a recent surge of articles about layoffs in the news. The real labour stats are showing record employment levels.

Would it make sense to hire as many people as possible right now, to lock their salaries in at a much lower price than it will be in the future, due to inflation (if they think the pivot is coming)? Just throwing random ideas out but I do know one thing, I know very little :P

> we may even start to see highly paid senior leadership cuts over lower level employees

Thanks. I needed a good laugh this morning

Eh. You can't layoff your way to business growth. At most it can move some ratios that Wall St cares about and induce model-driven stock movements. Sustained revenue growth at tech companies comes from making investments that grow the business.

There is a difference between cutting costs because you've discovered efficiency improvements, and cutting costs because you've decided to decrease your output. Tech layoffs are more of the latter.

It looks like he's running the Musk - Twitter playbook. One notable difference seems to be that instead of cutting hard, he's doing multiple small cuts. I think that's not the best strategy. If I were a Meta employee I'd be looking for other pastures.

It is a good strategy for business continuity and they probably evaluate as they move people around internally. Employee morale doesn't matter when the market is full of hireable workforce (when/if they hire).

Employee morale absolutely affects productivity. The impact of repeated cuts is a toxic drain on morale that can last years.

Yeah, repeated layoffs really kill the "loyalty", "family" thing that companies try to create. And it tends to make the remaining workforce risk-averse, which is not what Meta has ever stood for. It's a real contradiction.

This is true only if people work just as well out of fear as they do love. That is a common belief of people who like to manage via fear, but it certainly doesn't match my experience.

> Employee morale doesn't matter when the market is full of hireable workforce (when/if they hire).

I'd take the bet that it takes just as much time on average for Meta to hire a new engineer as it did before 2021, across all levels, including junior engineers.

A large population of engineers let go from other companies does not equal 1) those engineers wanting to work for Meta 2) the engineers who want to work for Meta can pass Meta's interview process or have the qualifications.

I know Elon Musk invented many things, including batteries, electric toothbrush and tiramisu, but he didn’t invent layoffs.

Exactly. Parent comment is ridiculous. "It's exactly like what Elon is doing, except in a totally different way"

I didn't say he invented them, I said he's running the playbook. Aggresively downsizing and introducing subscription tier. Presumably to achieve the same kind of goals.

I assumed the (minimal) appeal of working at Facebook was the presumably very high compensation package. What greener pastures are there?

Assuming they continue to pay a generous severance, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea to stay.

Meta comms https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1628424399362658305

The “debunking” is just that Mark Zuckerberg never claimed that the layoffs would stop

Seems like he just debunked the 'after CEO predicted no more layoffs' part, but confirmed layoffs are coming.

RTFA. Nothing was debunked. WaPo say very clearly:

At the time, Zuckerberg told remaining employees the company had made a substantial cut to “minimize the chance of having to do broad layoffs like this for the foreseeable future,” according to a recording of the companywide meeting reviewed by The Washington Post.

WaPo also says very clearly he delivered a different message to investors.

The tweet from that meta functionary weasels around this.

How long until WaPo is categorized as relevant as the grocery store checkout isle tabloids?

It's like they made up some drama out of thin air without even caring that it contradicts their own "journalism". How does a once professional news outlet turn into this? Is this really what people want?

> How long until WaPo is categorized as relevant as the grocery store checkout isle tabloids?

This is why it helps to also own a grocery store.

Facebook is a dead company. Anybody who works there deserve what they are getting. It is time employees take responsibility for working in shitty companies.

I have FB app installed on my phone for one reason only - occasional search on the Marketplace. And the button that brings up Marketplace is being moved around every time I open the app. Maybe it’s so that I have to look for it every time, and thus forced to see what else is there? I don’t know. But it does feel to me that the company that engages in such cheap tricks can’t be doing that well.

They get more from you, in terms of data worth collecting and selling, merely because you have that app installed on your phone, than they get from the couple moments you have it open.

Marketplace works fine on the browser too, and with the browser it is much easier to lock down malicious tracking behaviors.

I just posted an item on Marketplace for the first time and in the past day I’ve received messages from over 10 spam accounts. I

They all say the same thing and offer to pay for them item before even seeing it, saying their brother or manager will come later in the day

Somehow I’ve never received this much spam posting on CL

Settings & Privacy -> Shortcuts -> Shortcuts bar -> Marketplace -> Pin

I gave this a go in ios app and couldn’t find it. Not saying that your info is wrong, there’s a ton of settings and i am not very familiar with the app - but maybe this this info is not for ios app?

And obviously i think, it weird that one would even need a setting to disable a deliberate anti-consumer feature.

Safari

https://archive.is/SajD9

i'm just wondering how Meta will fair IF the metaverse doesn't take off the way they expect. I mean it's such a big bet. Google has made many bets in the past and some worked but most did not.

I've been thinking a lot about Meta's investment in the metaverse, and while I'm intrigued by the possibilities, I can't help but see some potential problems.

The biggest issue I see is the need for an expensive VR headset to fully experience the metaverse. While many people are willing to invest in a new phone every few years, I'm not sure that the metaverse holds the same appeal.

Even though phones started out as a mediocre experience, the iPhone form factor made them indispensable. I don't see how the metaverse will follow a similar trajectory, especially since it requires such a significant investment.

In hindsight, I wonder if Meta should have focused more on their AI learning, as I imagine they're using AI heavily to moderate the world's chatter. While it's not the kind of AI that's getting all the buzz right now, I think it has huge potential, and could be the valuable asset for Meta going forward.

Correct. They should have invested more in their AI. They have is pytorch right. They had the early lead in the AI. They could have been at the leading edge of LLMs. Instead they focused on VR

Almost certainly the play is going to be to invest more in instagram to steal features from other social media apps. Thats Meta’s strategy. The Metaverse is not gonna work.

I think the Metaverse will fail, but I think Meta can maintain a product in VR and a VR marketplace. Like the game console model that has proven succesful previously.

A metaverse like community platform will probably gain major popularity one day, when headsets are seamlessly blended into a casual consumer product that people feel cool wearing in a room of people. Until then, social VR platforms are niche because the target market is niche too. The network effect is diminished as well because the barrier for entry is so high.

I really think the problem for mass adoption is coolness and seamlessless. By seamless I mean, not removing you from present company and not requiring more than a simple pair of fashionable goggles or glasses.

The median Oculus that was sold was used one time. That is not the mark of a sucessful product.

Is this a real statistic or hyperbole?

From that perspective Meta is already dead. The metaverse is an utterly dead on arrival concept.

There's no plausible VR technology that can make it practical in the pipeline at all: it's an idea in the realm of "implanted cyberdecks are cheap and accessible" before it becomes the sort of thing anyone would need.

If they cut the Metaverse spending tomorrow, there's still a huge legacy ads business throwing off a ton of revenue. The company will do fine. It probably will not grow to Apple size.

Also note that from an accounting standpoint, the metaverse spend is not being treated and amortized as an investment. Instead, it's a cash expense. This means when Zuck decides he no longer needs to spend 10B+/year on it, that money will mostly drop right to the bottom line. The existing business is a cash volcano.

Cut early, cut big, and cut once then move forwards with new operating plan.

And cut when other companies are cutting. My company did fairly small layoffs about a year before everyone else started. I imagine the hire ups wish they had waited to do deeper cuts when everyone else was cutting.

Somewhat related from "The Prince" by Machiavelli:

    in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily

Also:

    men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1232

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/57037

that is pretty much what Musk did with twitter - and he was vilified for it.

Musk started with three big cuts and has been doing near weekly cuts since then. I'm not sure that counts as "Cut early, cut big, and cut once".

(I'm a former Twitter employee)

I should have added that this advice came to me from one John T. Chambers.

Are there any new facts being reported on here or is this solely a regurgitation of the "we would like to flatten management" from the employee all-hands a few weeks ago? It sounds like they have a source, but I don't really see any concrete claims that thousands of job cuts are "planned" (the headline).

It's not over for big tech. I can tell you right now. Nearly all firms are planning more rounds of layoffs.

Many in management, have been tasked with identifying core services, critical teams, and high performers.

It has been clear for some time that this is largely aimed at middle management and not rank-and-file. The company has been pretty transparent about this.

While I cannot speak to the specific motivations behind these decisions, there is a broader effort at work that is likely influencing these and near future similar actions:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/job-cuts-alert:-why-more-com...

The most important rule when doing layoffs: cut once, cut deep.

If you don’t cut deep, you won’t cut once.

> “I obviously can’t sit here and promise you that nothing will happen in the future because it’s a very volatile environment,

is the the problem for Meta cuts in advertising and privacy implementation triggered by Apple?

To think of the self loathing I felt when I screwed up a final stage Meta interview a while back.

Looks like I would of likely gotten fired anyway. The grass isn't always greener I guess.

Zuckerberg and his team of cronies are and have always been pure slime. This isn't surprising news. I'm thrilled that his endeavor with Meta has been miserable. Long past due to dethrone him.

Feels like people have been saying this for years yet nothing has materialized.

Everyone wants to work for a FAANG and be a cog in the machine. Now that tech is shedding people left and right perhaps the picture is starting to become clearer.

What of his endeavor has been miserable? He's still a billionaire who exercises his power as he wishes

Uhm did you miss the legs situation? lmao

Billions at his disposal and can't even create remotely decent content? Laughable. All his products are soulless, like himself.

https://www.pymnts.com/meta/2022/meta-metaverse-weekly-in-ho...

I wonder if they're the new Hyves?

five words: wall street stock price targets

Carmack, a 'hardcore' programmer, left due to frustration with how much political clout you need to get things done at facebook scale.

Elon Musk is seemingly focused on bringing 'hardcore' engineering to Twitter, and is willing to stomach chaos in the immediate term to achieve this.

Maybe Zuckerberg the programmer, rather than Zuckerberg the executive is paying attention

Scary that the path Elon Musk showed is being followed almost to the T.

- Efficiency by cutting staff as much as possible (even after promising 'no more')

- Subscription service for verified accounts.

Next - Bankruptcy declaration?

Elon Musk didn’t invent layoffs.

Bankruptcy? Their profit was $23B last year.

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