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Comment by setgree | Hacker News Reader

I know that working in tech can warp your sense of reality, but it's really, really hard to imagine starting an email in which I announce that I'm laying off 10,000 people -- the entire population of my hometown and then some -- with "Meta is building the future of human connection."

I just can't tell a story in which I would end up being a person who does that. It's too alien.

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Despite the claimed intended audience, that letter isn't written for employees. It is written for shareholders. And judging by the stock price, it had the intended effect.

GOOG is up 3%, MSFT, AMZN, APPL are up 2%. Snap is up 4%. FB is "only" up 4.5%.

If you need to fire 13% of staff to get a 1.5-2.5% bump in price - that doesn't look great to me.

Almost seems like the market is signaling that they don't see any growth potential for FB outside of canceling the Metaverse.

Don't you have to subtract the fact that the entire market is up today?

They did, they estabilished that the tech average is 3% today, and subtracted this from meta's 4.5%

up 6.5% now

Given all the leaks it seems reasonable that these layoffs have mostly been priced in already.

My one hope in all this is that some tech workers who drank a lot of corporate kool-aid over the years, i.e. the “we’re a family” managerial nonsense, will finally see the reality of the industry we work in and the real aim of quarterly capitalism which is profit and growth at all costs every single quarter. Your well being, since you likely attach it to work, is not part of that formula. You are expendable and will be sacrificed on the altar of profit at a moments notice.

You don't write that email by yourself. There are lots of cooks in the pot when it comes to writing this kind of message to a large corporation.

And yet thay all apparently lack basic human empathy?

Some of them probably do, and I'd also bet that when responsibility for writing the message is diffused throughout a group, people don't feel the need to make it as nice as they would otherwise.

Why would they have any more compared to any other industry?

There's nothing better at diluting empathy and care for humans, not to mention creating evil, than diluting responsibility.

Somebody else will make it sound empathetic /s

Legal is one of the main cooks producing the pot.

I'm really having trouble connecting the dots between potential liability and leading with "building the future of human connection"

There's a reason why we're called "resources".

You assume this email is for the people who will be affected by the layoffs. It is not - it's for the investors and leaders who stay around. Empathy isn't part of this decision or the way it's carried out, unfortunately.

You're on the money. Like literally, empathy here would convey some sadness, or just "negative feelings", which would affect how the money feels. We can't have the money feeling bad now can we? Plus who cares anyway, we all know software monkeys don't feel. They just want to sit around all day drinking coffees and mashing little plastic chiclets! And the money is perfectly happy with this arrangement. /s

Just in case you or another onlooker comes by and assumes I agree with the morality of what I said, I don't. I think it's awful letting 10K people go for money, like they don't have bills too. But I don't live in delusion or the dark about these things. Zuckerberg posts this letter to inspire those who stay, not mourn those who go. Empathy, in this case, negatively impacts the message, which is Facebook is important and is moving to be a more financially sound company. Again, I don't like it, but my likes don't matter here.

Damned if you do damned if you don't.

We've seen the entire gambit of layoff messages in the past year. No matter how empathic they're written, people complain.

Good people remember though and hold a grudge if you insult them on the way out the door. People you want to hire in the future are watching as well. There's incentive to be classy (ex: Microsoft's https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/18/subject-focusing...) unless the whole ship is going down.

Edit:

That being said, after actually reading it, the Meta letter is relatively classy. The HN comments made it seem worse than it was.

Perhaps their attorneys advised them not to use "making the world a better place".

Someone was probably coached to "start with something positive, say the bad thing, end with something positive."

I don’t understand the alienness can you elaborate. Maybe I’m alien.

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