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Comment by albntomat0 | Hacker News Reader

For context:

"In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company’s history. In 2021, it added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the two biggest years of expansion in Facebook’s short history."

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...

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What an incredible amount of wasted effort in hiring that many people to then firing them 2-3 years later.

It is quite possible that the people they are firing aren't the ones they recently hired, but instead people who have been there for a long time but aren't meaningfully contributing anymore.

That is true, but I imagine that growing the company significantly must have had costs in itself.

Many managers get promotions for how much the people under them accomplish. There is some adjustment to headcount, but the more you can get hired under you, the higher you can get promoted.

This is the outcome of that.

Also for context.

FB stock in 2020: 234 Today: 190

FB revenue in 2020: $86 billion 2022: $117 billion

Revenue is nice but revenue-per-full-time-employee is a more meaningful metric.

Feel free to add that value, this is a public forum

Revenue in 2021: 33,671 M USD

Revenue in 2022: 32,165 M USD

FTEs in 2021: 71,970

FTEs in 2022: 86,482

Revenue-per-FTE in 2021: $467,847

Revenue-per-FTE in 2022: $371,927

That's 21% less revenue per FTE.

[1] 2022 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

[2] 2021 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

It's 21% less but also those are quarterly numbers that you are showing.

Yes and Facebook probably has about as many contractors as they do FTEs, but that number fluctuates without making the news…meaning total effective payroll at Facebook is extremely shadowy

meaningful for profitability, but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.

> but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.

that is how the Soviet Union worked...they just cut to the chase and had the state employ everyone directly

strange how an economy can fail with full employment...

I used to live in the Soviet Union so I am well aware of its failings. Rather I mean that if a one-man shop makes all the money in the world then that can be also problematic. Employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.

Society should get rid of computers and construction equipment then. Everyone can have a lot more employees.

No need to get rid of computers and backhoes. You don’t have to have work in order to have employees. At least that’s what the parent seems to be implying

I mean that employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.

As opposed to some dystopia where an exceptionally efficient and low employee organisation makes all the money and there is no/limited distribution of that wealth.

The tech companies such as Meta that pay good wages and have good working conditions are able to do so because they are exceptionally efficient and require a relatively low number of employees to generate the outsize profits they do.

So that “dystopia” can already be considered to be here.

sure, but I merely wish to mention it within the context of "having high profit to employee ratio is good".

Everything has trade-offs.

Construction is actually one of the few sectors that hasn't become more productive per employee over past decades. Buildings have become vastly more complicated but there's comparably little automation.

You might be interested in these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE

Not sure whether this is more common in the US these days. I know for a fact that a lot of buildings in China are constructed this way.

But did you notice how many construction workers are shown there? You can certainly build faster with prefab, but it's still a very manual process, both at the factory and on the construction site. And anything afterwards (wiring, HVAC, painting) is also nearly 100% manual labor.

It seems we've made amazing progress on the "software" side of AI, but are still very far behind on the "hardware" side, ie robots.

I'm aware it's still a very labor intensive process. But there seems to be great potential for improvement with Tesla-esque automation processes if the capital investments are worth it.

The main disadvantage about physical objects vs software is that physical objects are not as easily scalable and matter is generally more expensive than bits... so the economy of scale is harder to exploit. But give it some years once the marginal utility of software decreases to a point, I think people will divert more focus (and more importantly capital) on automating hardware stuff.

Maybe employment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the goal is to build automation to the point that the moral imperative to labor isn’t as imperative.

Oh, you optimist, I like you!

In real life the goal will be to build automation so that the few owners of the robots can buy more 200m long yachts.

No, they get the 200m yachts for building the capability first. There will come a time on our trajectory that artificial scarcity is such an obvious canard that we will move past it into a post scarcity world. I don’t know how it’ll be constructed, but the need to work being a moral imperative will necessarily fall away as it becomes obvious it’s not necessary nor imperative nor moral. I think this is unavoidable, sans some sort of plateau or limiting factor or regression, and the rate of change I see makes it look like we aren’t far away - although the realization of that the wizard is just a man behind the curtain may be.

You do realize that they managed to build artificial scarcity in virtual worlds through licenses, DMCA, NFTs? And morality or progress are not given under any circumstances.

And that’s why Zuck is wrong. The reality we exist in is not constrained by human constructs.

Yeah I realize progress or morality isn’t a given - I think I mentioned the offroads. But if things keep going in this direction we are heading now, I suspect we might actually get there.

If people are not working, they will have significantly more time to observe, evaluate and perish forbid, succeed in changing the state of their communities, fellow citizens and elected leadership.

Inflation adjusted revenue per employee even more so

Isn't that still missing a massive piece of context? What about costs?

The irony is that FB would probably be doing pretty well if not for spending $10B per year on the Metaverse.

And 2019 was the year when they announced the cryptocurrency and the "metaverse" projects...

as an aside, Instagram just announced that it's shutting down its NFT features.

Safe to say that the web3 hypetrain is over.

How is that "safe to say"? Purely a guess, like anyone's guess.

Looking at numbers, BTC went up 15.8% in the last 24h, up 16% in the last 7 days. Global marketcap of cryptocurrencies went from 804B USD in November 2022 to 1,121B USD today (~32% increase). If anything, it seems to slowly recover.

Although I agree that NFTs are trash and should be forgotten about. But the cryptocurrency market as a whole seems to be more resilient than many think.

Crypto might stay popular, but I also don't see any indication that web3 will live up to the hype. They still haven't found real use cases that need web3.

Crypto, however, will remain popular as long as governments don't ban it.

Reasoning about the usefulness of crypto currencies based on their quoted price on various fraudulent exchanges should not be a signal of anything. We should normalize on quoting non-spoofable adoption metrics to indicate if they’re going anywhere.

Long term probably 2 things will happen. Though obviously no one can predict the future.

1. Public cryptocurrencies will remain there as a sort of niche investment (betting?) vehicle. Something like "VWOB - Emerging Markets Government Bond ETF". Did you know about that one? Neither did I.

2. Private permissioned blockchains will be used in specific niches. Think Corda and some finance applications, whatever the commodities thing is called, I forgot its name.

But the long tail of Bladogelitecoin and the likes will go poof once line stops going up.

BTC !== Web3!

Neither are most other coins.

Perception is reality though. The average person doesn't care about the difference between BTC and ETH and ERC-20 tokens, it all looks like the same get-rich-quick scheme. People aren't reading whitepapers, every coin has one. They're evaluating Youtube thumbnails as their source of information.

Replaced neatly by the AI one...

At least the AI one isn't foiled by basic tenants of software devised in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_oracle

According to Gizmodo, Meta put $13.6 billion dollars into “Reality Labs” (VR) in 2022. Simply eye-watering. It’s almost half of Iceland’s GDP.

As impressive as that sounds, Iceland has less than 400k people, it's about the same size as Cluj, a city in Romania probably 0.1% of HN ever heard about :-)

Couple of years ago I happened to work with a dev from Cluj. Awesome guy and very talented.

The reason I took the example is because Iceland is a developed western country that most people have heard about that happened to match the number.

Sure, Iceland has a small population but their GDP per capita is almost 5x that of Romania.

and how much of that will "trickle down" to the workers?

I personally think this "we hired too many people" excuse doesn't hold water. This reminds me of the dot-com bubble where they jacked up interest rates and it caused companies to do layoffs.

Back then interest rates were low and money was cheap. It was growth over profit and when money is cheap you can afford to run in the red as long as you're getting bigger. The minute interest rates went up companies had to rethink how they're going to spend money. We haven't seen the type of corp consolidation yet that we saw back then but it's still early days.

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