Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs
vox.com
vox.com
I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Mostly, it seems like most workers in the building chit-chat and have meetings rather than do anything resembling actual work that's building product going in front of users. Country-club, cult-of-toxic-positivity lots of relaxing going on, in my view.
In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Also, the spend on R&D needs to be more focused on productization. Finally, I'm still wondering why there's no consultantish enterprise sales arm monetizing and discovering opportunities for lucrative SaaS products like Workplace.
I think it’s somewhat telling that you didn’t list “engineer” here.
Meta isn’t a quirky startup, and hasn’t been for a decade: it’s one of the largest corporations (by market value) on the planet. By all rights, there ought to be a lot of people performing boring, turn-the-crank work that doesn’t immediately surface to you.
Sometimes I need a wizard with multi-domain knowledge to whip up a POC system, but most of the time I need someone to ensure all of the pieces work, have specs that meet reqs, and won't cause an outage when we deploy them.
I've always found the term "hacker" pretty eye-rolly.
My cat can legally be a software engineer - no degrees required.
That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather.
That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects.
That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three.
And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!
We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers.
And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls.
I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants.
We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls.
Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable.
I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done.
I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job.
It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense.
I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems.
> We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into it
In 20 years zero issues? I don’t believe you.
I'm not sure what you mean. A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company. Take Amazon for instance, the oncall is brutal and getting several pagers per day is normal. Other companies may be better, but not one pager per few months better.
> A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company.
Except maybe it's a different beast entirely. At amazon, they're constantly pushing new features at most teams. A stable phone company may just be handling pages for when hardware fails. Presumably there's bugs in fast-moving new code more frequently than hardware failure of a tiny org.
Also, fwiw I've been at amazon and had on-call rotations where we didn't get paged monthly. Your manager/team isn't allowing you to allocate resources to fixing your alarms or bugs if you're getting paged that often and not a crazy critical service.
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them?
No! No one does this!
> Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta?
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?
And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.
And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.
The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition.
https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
Rumor.
Are you saying there aren't engineers working outside of MPK/FRE (which is wrong) or that they're lazy (which is also wrong)?
Edit: I guess you don't work at Meta because there's "the assume the innocent take" thing. ;) I merely had the audacity to state a fact that the building where I work demonstrably contains few engineers because I sampled titles in the seating app.
I’m not sure it’s a bad thing, though. I’ve never seen an engineering-first enterprise software group. The business is just so sales-and-relationship driven.
Look at Amazon: you can plot the enshittification of their retail business with the rise of AWS. That’s not coincidence, it’s culture.
0. Lack of an enterprise sales org (think how VMware started or EDS or Perot Systems). I know an ex-Oracle sales guy who's itching to be an enterprise sales manager at Meta.
1. Lack of thoroughness in solving bugs and polish. Workplace video conferencing is damn good. Workplace the web and mobile apps have inconsistent and troublesome comment formatting bugs. I've sent task after task but they never get fixed. Basic things that should work don't.
2. Impact creates a cult that rewards new features while punishing better engineering and fixing things.
(My neighbor works for AWS high up. They treat most of their employees with borderline abuse.)
Are there any specifics to DM me worth running up the flag pole?
Most serious advertisers and agencies use expensive third party tools that manage your ads using the advertising APIs.
I don’t think it’s worth “running up the flagpole”.
It was the perfect Slack replacement for companies with over ~1000 employees, and I wish my current company was using it.
FTEs generally require an FB account to start the tech device provisioning process.
The only thing that goes in from personal -> work is music or random home office photos.
The only things that go out from work -> personal are public résumé-level performance reviews, tax, and benefits information.
Exceptions on work devices include Github and streaming services, but otherwise not much else should be co-mingled. Everything else stays in its own domain.
(I don't use personal social media accounts so I'm the wrong target audience. Personal FB and Insta accounts are linked to work, and Github if you have one.)
Sometimes the people doing that kind of reasoning are hit next.
I’m not saying there’s no waste, but this is classic rationalizing.
I would love to hear details on a handful of instances of how this manifests. Toxic positivity, I don't know if I am to read that as like burying ones head in the sand, ears plugged singing la la la, ignorance is bliss or what not. What exact behavior would aggregate into a phrase like that? Very fascinating characterization of something interesting I'm sure.
Life is so short, so why not be legit?
To me, the problem with Meta is the constant focus on impact. There's little incentive to write robust software. Many tools are half-finished, fragile, poorly documented.
I hate all those real time chat apps anyways.
It seems like an immensely profitable project that would take a relatively small amount of resources.
iPad users likely have a GDP bigger than France, I don't know a single millionaire who doesn't have one... yet their ability to click ads is very restricted by the mini/stretched screen.
How does the culture allow so many non-core projects to get priority over this?
I don't think Meta is well-configured to make consumer-facing products that "surprise and delight", and Workplace's slightly janky interface is a clear symptom.
There's jank that can be fixed.
The problem with Slack is it creates an instant, continuous distraction noise barrage worse than email groups. We at least have a cultural norm of not DMing individuals (unless it's a SEV) and seeking info in group posts or maybe group chat.
On the other hand, Slack is a simple communication tool where I can asynchronously coordinate with whatever team I need to get in touch with, it's exactly what I had asked for years at companies I worked for in decades prior to Slack: a well made IRC-like interface. It just works, with all its flaws and performance issues, it's still valuable. Workplace on the other hand is not valuable at all, it could disappear from the company stack of tools and I would never bat an eye. And I work for a global company, much smaller in size than Meta but definitely one that you either heard about or use our products.
Perhaps it’s just because I got used to it, but I do miss Workplace a lot - mostly for allowing me to easily stay on top of what’s interesting to me.
* Workplace made it really easy to be on top of what’s happening in the company, and in what it thinks you’ll be interested in. The algorithmic feed was super helpful.
* I was able to follow along with what’s happening overall in the company and all the interesting to me info just with a few minutes at beginning of each day scrolling my Workplace feed. Now, with Slack / gdocs / emails, I would need to read all updates in hundreds of different Slack channels and figure out myself what’s relevant.
* Google Docs - super hard to find anything, or even know if it exists since everyone applies restrictive sharing options. With Workplace, I would write a post in the relevant group - easily searchable by everyone (and discoverable by being ranked on Workplace).
I never feel like using Slack is stopping me from writing code, but when I'm waiting for a build or what-have-you I can look at channel updates asynchronously.
That's why I wrote localslackirc. To make having to be on slack bearable.
(My biggest gripe with Slack is how painful it makes replying to specific comments in the original channel. Neither Workplace chat nor Discord have this problem.)
> “This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Goler wrote.
> The company is expected to lay off what will likely be thousands of highly skilled employees — such as engineers and other technical staffers — who help build the company’s products, according to people familiar with the matter.
I wouldn't be so certain
Actually, you do!
* Supposedly not hiring freeze for senior ICs.
Normal attrition rates, which are about 3% per month† for our industry, should be enough to manage even the worst hiring imbalances in a matter of months. Perfectly reasonable for a healthy and growing company like Facebook.
Specifically, a 3% monthly attrition rate would take Facebook from ~85k to ~60k in under a year. Maybe a bit longer to replace positions which they couldn't afford to downsize. Voluntary layoffs would help speed that up if necessary.
There's little reason for a healthy company to do layoffs unless their goal is sudden spikes in stock prices.
Data:
It's not an enviable position to be in, but it's naive to believe you can build a functional organization around natural turnover. If you were told you had to lose 36% of your body mass in a year I bet you'd want to pick where it came from over a random 3% per month extraction.
Not at all. Voluntary quitting on your own terms is very different from involuntary firing. And it's a fact that people quit a company regularly. There are ebbs and flows, but using natural attrition to your advantage as a company is a lot more humane an action than axing people in waves of layoffs to the same effect.
> If you were told you had to lose 36% of your body mass in a year I bet you'd want to pick where it came from over a random 3% per month extraction.
This assumes they are making highly considered choices for what talent they let go. Everything points to "they're not". Regardless, we're talking about a healthy, growing company with a good profit margin and outlook. There's likely no need to set such explicit numbers or timeframes unless you're looking to manipulate your market value.
Anecdotal story, but the CEO of a company I worked for in the past told department managers to fire one person (exactly one, from each department) because they needed to reduce head count. That strategy sounds pretty random to me.
An employee (especially in the US) depends upon the employer for the money required for food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, etc. The employee depends on the employer to get health care. An average employee is 3-6 months of unemployment away from being homeless.
An employer does not, with very few exceptions, give a single fuck about any individual employee. They view those employees as expenses grudgingly accepted as necessary at the best of times, and expenses to be eliminated at the worst.
They are not equals. Contracts between them were not made with the consideration of equal parties.
Even lengthy interview processes are relatively cheap for me. Many companies have to pay recruiters 5 figure amounts to get someone. I can just reply to the dozen recruiters that hit me up on LinkedIn every month.
People have options. Even low wage employees. The people in these jobs jump around a lot and are notoriously unreliable or likely to not give notice when they leave. That's why you see the manager behind the counter so often. If you don't believe me ask anyone working a service job how long they've been there and how many jobs they've had over the last 5 years. People jump around a lot. And training is a huge cost. Most employees aren't productive immediately, meaning that the company spends a lot of time and money training them with the expectation that they'll get some of that money invested back and you won't jump ship for a better job once you've been trained.
Finally most firms (esp Meta) give generous severance. Imagine you'd have to work for free for 3 months if you wanted to do something else.
How disconnected from reality can one be?
Do you hang out with low wage employees? The ones that need to keep a salary to feed their families, to shelter them, and to keep a bare minimum of life quality?
If you had friends with families in any low wage job you'd know that reality isn't that simple, it's such an absurd reduction of what it is to be employed in fields that aren't sexy, or where promotions don't exist as we expect in tech.
> The people in these jobs jump around a lot and are notoriously unreliable or likely to not give notice when they leave.
Yeah, they jump a lot because low wage jobs are usually the most toxic ones, with low wage abusive managers, because low wage is not conducive to hiring the best and brightest. If you ever had a bad manager, imagine that 10x worse: no psychologically safe, no trust environments are not conducive to long tenure. People are people, we feel when something isn't right for us, deciding to leave is not because there is a much better option somewhere else but there's a chance of a less bad option than the toxic environment they find themselves in.
Coupled that a well performing low wage employee might have to work with disengaged ones, the toxicity of the environment can only increase...
Get out of your bubble, it might help you to have solidarity with other human beings.
But with businesses that rely on low wage jobs the edge of running the business is being an effective manager. Open a McDonald's franchise. They'll set you up such that it's basically turnkey. So what makes one McDonald's manager successful and another not? Managing low wage employees. That means not creating a toxic environment and treating them fairly so they don't leave so quickly. Managers spend hours training new employees. There's no benefit to being toxic or unreasonable because like you admitted, they'll leave. If someone leaves mid shift it means you're stuck working the register and their entire shift for the next few weeks till you find a train a replacement. It's also more paperwork to fill out to hire someone and get them setup in the system. You're delusional if you think managers don't care
People who think you can treat low wage workers poorly obv never been around low wage workers
Your argument is inconsistent. People don't leave because they need the job. But they leave jobs a lot because toxic managers. And managers are fine with being toxic because it costs them nothing to hire people and there's no distribution when people walk off.
I have solidarity with other people. The difference is I don't look down on them and remove their autonomy.
Congratulations, you're an outlier. I sincerely hope you enjoy your position while it lasts!
Then, around mid-December last year, it just stopped. I get an occasional recruiter every now and then but at this point I think I’m fucked.
Companies use humans to get profits. Humans are developed by society, at the expense of society, a company has social obligations to that society as it's exploiting a resource we all deem quite valuable: a life.
A company depends on the society it decided to build upon, for its market, for its human resources, if we completely extract a company from any social obligation what you have is an amoral corpus of people with no incentive at all to care for the people it exploits...
And there's no 2-way street in a massive power imbalance like that, a company might not depend on a single employee for its survival, an employee definitely depend on a company and job for its survival. Being aware and recognising this power imbalance is a pretty good step for you to learn about solidarity.
I'm not sure that only one has ethical obligations. But one party is a human being and the other is a legal fiction, and so I think most people would support the notion that the human being's needs are paramount.
They can clearly afford to take the time to downsize naturally.
But as far as I have seen, it's been meaningless pressure, since the shareholders did nothing to companies who did not do mass layoffs at their behest.
And do you know what the shareholders did?
Nothing.
How did you get the 3% from that link? If software falls under "information", then the the attrition rate indicated in the link is about 1.3%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of...
It allowed the company to meet regulatory obligations. However, overtime, customers would leave because of the poor service.
Meta can likely run effectively with even less Engineers. However, the lack of exciting projects will prevent them from attracting top talent. Overtime their product offering will become less interesting than their competitors.
Napster, Tumblr and Yahoo are still around, however, they are a shadow of what they once were.
I thought HN's refrain 2 years ago was how ridiculous it was that a simple product that didn't need to add features had a large headcount + how many businesses would be better off running stable instead of for growth.
Well, here we go.
It's mostly not for this year's revenue.
Related to this, the government now requires accounting Software Developer salaries to be amortized over 5 years, instead of all being booked in the year you pay them.
Edit: oops, the R&D portion of SWE salaries.
Edit2: Related to ensuring competition, this means that if your competitors slow down then you can too. If your competitors lay off, then you probably can to.
This is being discussed in another thread [1].
2021 was an abnormally high jump in revenue from 2020 for Meta. 2022 was a drop in revenue, but roughly a return to trend (there's a quite linear line from 2016 to 2022 revenue-wise).
It looks like they hired based on a wrong guess about Covid revenue growth acceleration being a longer-lasting thing than it was, and now that their revenue growth path is back to their old trend, they can't justify all of that.
There’s probably some Elon effect happening here too (“if he can do it, I should be able to do it too!”)
"If you're not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization and you don't care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, turns out," -- Elon Musk..
"I think we will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year," in a podcast interview. "Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year." -- Elon Musk, 2019
He says a lot of self-serving shit, there's no reason to cite him like an Oracle of Delphi.
Not many companies have eternal R&D.
At some point they move to exploit over explore.
Maybe they were really hiring too much?
I work for a telco that runs a national physical phone network, a high-speed home Internet fibre network in about a third of the country, retail stores across the country, call centers, a full sales & marketing team, plus a huge IT operation, and we are less than a third of that headcount.
To be fair, Meta is a global business with billions of users, so I'm sure it takes people to run all that, but it's still hard to rationalize.
Folks who haven't worked on products that cross jurisdiction (and for a company that has a LOT of attention on it, due to being so much in the press) - it's just a completely different scale. Heuristics for headcount in a single country just don't really work.
No one outside of twitter was predicting it would just suddenly collapse, but instead a slow degradation of quality (ironic given that twitter is being marketed as the "#1 most accurate source of information on the internet")
The top tweet under every "More Tweets" section is always a childish Musk tweet with a 420 or 69 reference in it
I find that very ironic. For years I have seen people complain about "target ads" and companies like twitter spying on everyone.
Now if they are not targeted some how that is also bad...
Amazing....
Though I will say I have seen a dozen HPE GreenLake ads on twitter and still have no idea what they are trying to sell me...
>> instead a slow degradation of quality (ironic given that twitter is being marketed as the "#1 most accurate source of information on the internet") The top tweet under every "More Tweets" section is always a childish Musk tweet with a 420 or 69 reference in it
These are not mutually exclusive... I find new twitter to be very informative and entertaining
“We” like relevant ads and to be specific context-specific ads.
This isn't true: according to sources I've read, attempting to slowly boil a frog will result in the frog jumping out of the pot. Frogs aren't that stupid, though humans apparently are.
This analogy is insulting to frogs. We should just change it to "When you boil the human slowly it tends to stay in the pot."
Care to expand? Not a heavy twitter user, but somehow I saw more bugs pre-Musk(specially with changing network/VPN) than post-Musk.
And what accounts are those?
We can use the accounts from advertisers and firms that have shared they no longer work with Twitter too.
At this point Twitter is likely way out of compliance with anything like GDPR. Users are finding that they are not actually able to fully delete their accounts. They remain there forever, but inactive. This by itself is a massive financial risk for the company. They are also being sued in at least one country for violating laws around speech.
Stability is maybe a little better than a few weeks ago, but we'll see. A car can go for a long time without doing any maintenance, but if you don't change the oil eventually even the best designed and engineered one is going to have a seized engine.
Nobody thought to themselves "maybe this zero-rate interest environment will end", or "maybe our business model is losing steam"?
No, instead they went full-on increasing headcount, leaving software engineers scratching their heads on exactly what they were supposed to be doing.
When discussions started about companies "poaching" talent so that others couldn't get them, I saw the writing on the wall. Possibly no role even lined up, but let's just get them onboard and we'll figure that out later.
I'm over 20 years into this career but am not FAANG. I like my boring, predictable companies for some reason, and they like me.
It makes a lot of sense when you consider the incentives of all the individuals involved. Individual line managers think "I need more headcount so I can increase my scope of responsibility and get promoted," and go to their directors with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had headcount." Directors think "If I don't provide career-advancement opportunities for my best managers, they'll leave for a competitor and the best engineers will follow them, and my carefully-constructed org will collapse", then go to finance with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had budget." Finance people look at the negative real interest rates that were present in 2020-2022, think "Just about any project that has any chance of generating additional usage or revenue beats the 2% nominal and -6% real returns we can get from the market, so these project ideas look pretty good" and tells the CEO "Our best bet is to invest in the company itself, so we are going to greenlight all the headcount requests."
No one in management cares. The hiring and then firing is a feature, not a bug.
Look at what the business of these companies was. None of them needed this many non-customer-service personnel. But that many people needed jobs.
To be frank, that was my opinion of Facebook before you were hired.
Also, the stock price literally never decreased between when I accepted my offer and when I finished, so clearly I was holding it all together \s.
One of the lessons that companies learned, is that you should do it all in one wave and be done with it (until the next recession), rather than hoping that a small one is all you will need, and realizing a few months later that you were wrong and need to do it again.
The reason the big layoffs are newsworthy is that they impact most or all of the company at once. The big layoffs are usually associated with company-wide hiring slowdowns. The individual org/department layoffs are often not really noteworthy in the context of the entire company.
Whats with HN and sealioning in every freaking comment lately?
Also, not trusting everything you're told without evidence of some kind isn't sealioning, and nobody is required to trust randoms when they make sourceless claims.
Maybe keep your outrage to yourself because you becoming toxic when people don't accept sourceless claims doesn't do anything but show the world you're having trouble being civil in response to...a request for some kind of evidence of a claim by anonymous people. Just relax and move on instead of being outraged.
There's also a big risk of cutting too deep. If you try to downsize the company to hit some gloomy economic outlook that turns out to be too pessimistic, you might have to rapidly rehire. It can be better to make a few incremental changes to the company with some time to reassess in between.
So yes: One, single, perfect layoff is ideal. But the real world isn't ideal. The real ideal would have been to not overhire in the first place, but everyone is trying to hit a moving target with the economy and the job market.
Rolling layoffs are terrible, though. My last company would do seemingly random layoffs every other week for months on end. Orgs would change, spend a few weeks trying to get things back on track with whoever was left, then layoffs would rearrange the company again. Meta is at least being precise about implementations and timing.
This sounds like my current company. Only a few truly announced layoffs, but every few weeks we quietly lose another round of people, usually entire teams. The rest of us are split between hoping to be in the next round, and just jumping ship.
When I was last laid off, the meeting was concurrent with my friend on another team.
I was not laid off by my manager but my 2x skip; other members of my team were laid off, presumably at the same time, by someone else in our CoC.
So based on these observations, I think for security etc reasons you need to lay people off all at once in batches. Too easy for lag to create ‘insider/outsider threat’ situations.
Obviously my points are redundant if you just do it over email.
My take is that it will be a negative response. They've already shed a lot of workforce -- at this point they are still facing revenue growth loss more than they'll save in costs from reduced headcount -- and I think it's unlikely they'll be able to fire folks into a convincing story about future profit growth ...
To me it's clear they are no longer a machine able to turn ever expanding quantities of engineering talent into ever ever expanding monetary growth ...
so what's left to value in their overall organizational brand?
Personally I think they have an enormous amount of technical and organizational talent still in their ranks -- but ... why? Why will they stay and try hard to chase after whatever the next gravy fad train might be? Seems like it won't be the meta verse ... and if the next fad is really going to be "ai" -- could there really be enough talent that can really stomache the thought of allowing instagram to be the one to control the worlds first super intelligent agi ...?
"but ... why?" they have a ton of talent because they pay top of band and they staff their workforce with great employees. Great talent wants to be paid well and wants to work with great talent, meta has both.
For what its worth, meta has more employees now than they had in Q1 2022, and these next rounds of layoffs put them at staffing levels of like Q3 2021. The reality is that Meta and other huge companies grew headcount faster than revenue, and need to unwind some decisions they made.
In addition, there are other dynamics here. Meta is torching through cash building this Metaverse, and there is no clear horizon or plan. It's going to give a lot of investors pause before jumping in.
I suppose the markets have already reacted to this. This has been announced a couple of months ago.
They have the worlds greatest dataset of everyone - their posts, their photos, their social graph. Now train generative AI on this.
They can build personal and unique AI products that no one else can at their scale because they’ve sent the last 20 years getting to know everything about everyone.
Short answer is the first layoffs (seemingly) were rather random as far as who was affected. This new round is a lot more deliberate by
1. Cutting projects/efforts that don't make the cutline
2. Letting go the surplus of people previously needed to execute on those projects
> Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.
> It's tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. That project team needs space, and maybe it tips its overall product group into splitting across multiple floors or multiple time zones, which now makes communication harder for everyone. That project team needs laptops and HR benefits and may want to recruit more engineers, so that leads us to hire even more IT, HR and recruiting people, and now those orgs grow and become less efficient and responsive to higher priority teams as well. Maybe the project has overlap with work on another team or maybe it built a bespoke technical system when it should have used general infrastructure we'd already built, so now it will take leadership focus to deduplicate that effort. Indirect costs compound and it's easy to underestimate them.
> A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That's why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible.
[0]: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid024Q9h2gvnYGmU6czAH...
This coupled with lack of hiring really really sucks right now but I am sure the wheel will turn.
It’s probably hard on him.
As long as the stock goes up after buying at $88, then keep it going to save money.
Meta will survive. It just needs to unload more unnecessary hires and adjust to save more money in the long term.
All caused by the over hiring mania followed by the unsustainable zero interest rate phenomenon and a decade long quantitative easing bubble that had to end.
And now AI company will hoover up the talent, maybe the monetary and fiscal policies will slow that bubble down a bit.
Businesses of all sorts get loans when the rate is good. It’s a business cash flow thing.
Look at the SEC filings for all big tech companies. They discuss their billions in debt.
At least in the case of Facebook and Google, they were getting revenue from the rest of the startups that were dumping cheap money into marketing for growth. When that cheap money dries up for the startups it dries up for GOOG and FB as well.
Adding workforce is not useful != removing workforce is
https://darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-probl...
I don't see how it says anything either way.
Assuming you're in the US (as HN is biased in that way, and you're using HN as a source), the unemployment rate seems to hover around ~3.5% for the last year, and it was ~6% two years ago. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
It took me years and a lot of luck to claw my way into developer roles. And you know what? It wasn't me. I didn't suck. Life had just dealt me a bad hand (one of several).
Not to say everything is great now. I missed out on years' worth of promotions, investments, and retirement savings. I'll probably never achieve fu money or so much as retire early. But I'm hardly hurting financially nowadays.
Which is all to say, hey, I hear ya. Hang in there.
Friends, family, family friends, old professors, old professors' friends, online game clan members, etc
You will have it way harder, but stay positive and keep at it. Keep iterating on your resume and personal website. Apply to large numbers of jobs and if you find a position you really like then hunt down someone you can email or figure out how to get a referral. You will embarrass yourself, look foolish and have to feel needy.
This sucks but it is also an opportunity to get super desperate. That desperation will result in some skills that we wouldn't normally gain.
As someone who's pretty good at the interview games and have been trying to help some fresh grads and laid off juniors get hired. It is rough right now.
One job I interviewed for, they told me they had to turn off the listing because they got too many applicants.
There might be jobs if your totally desperate. Some bottom of the barrel jobs are out there. But accepting total comp decreases between 150k to 60k,along with return to office and limited vacation days again doesn't feel strong.
Chipotle, Mcd's, Target, Walmart
etc
The "I don't foresee more layoffs" line in November was bad. I understand that circumstances change, but other than SVB (which was contained and didn't really impact Meta), there wasn't much between November and March. This shows a lack of foresight beyond around a month, not to mention how haphazard the layoffs were.
NYT reported that execs are phoning it in. I have no first-hand knowledge of it, but I believe it.
Zuck missed TikTok. He wasn't ready for Apple's privacy changes. Rather than paying attention to competitors, he was busy building a failed cryptocurrency and the metaverse. Unless letting TikTok take hold was a big brain plan to get lawmakers to stop looking at Meta.
The rebrand was poorly timed. It was almost exactly at the stock peak before reality started setting in.
Sheryl left.
Then there's the overhiring, but at least everyone else in the industry did it, so that's merely average performance.
I don't like it as an investment, and I'm having a hard timing making the case for it being somewhere I want to work.
AI generated content is the real core of metaverses, not VR goggles. Hence Nvidia is actually making the right bet on its 'omniverse' infrastructure.
Nvidia has made no layoffs, and I don't expect any within the next 5 years.
They are running giant A100 clusters and employ dozens of ML researchers
They’ve learned the hard way the cost of not owning the hardware layer.
When smaller AI startups start, say, showing more relevant search results than Google does, and more personally relevant posts than Meta - and IMO this is highly likely, since FAANG have much more brand reputation to protect than those startups and will necessarily move cautiously - perceptions will start to rise that they are no longer the superpowers. But their valuation multiples are based on them being the only superpowers in their respective spaces. So if they want to preserve shareholder value, and they can't depend on hype, they'll have to cut aggressively so they can at least show strong earnings per share.
1. Announcement
2. Identifying who is affected
3. Start of the actual action
4. Morale is affect this or that way
So we hear each action in painful detail. Not as painful detail as the folks getting laid off of course. But each story hits the front page.