Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breatheoften | Hacker News Reader

Anybody want to predict how the market will react to this?

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 ...?

I think the markets have already priced this in, so there will be basically no reaction. Zuck has more or less announced the cuts already.

"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.

You seem to be totally correct. Meta ticker is flat today.

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.

> Anybody want to predict how the market will react to this?

I suppose the markets have already reacted to this. This has been announced a couple of months ago.

> so what's left to value in their overall organizational brand?

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.

In theory true. In practice, I'm not convinced that the company Meta actually can do this.

Maybe not in their current state but they have the resources to hire the people that can.

The market already reacted this is old news

No, the brokers have to drive into work tomorrow and sell their pieces of paper that say Meta on them, based on information they have read in the print version of this article.

To me, it seems that nearly every layoff (especially recently) in tech results in a small spike in the stock price due to 'cost savings' and 'willing to make hard choices'

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