After layoffs, Meta rewards top executives with a substantial bonus increase
theregister.com
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At least in the US, we had some of the greatest strides in terms of increases in relative wages for the middle class as we've had in a generation. And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up so we need to vote the bums out and take a turn towards the party of the CEO class.
Not a lot of great lessons to take from that politically or economically in terms of giving people what they ask for end being punished for it.
This comment seems very out of touch. Grocery prices don't affect Meta engineers much, but they affect ordinary people a lot. I wouldn't even call Meta engineers "middle class". They're typically in the upper class.
I'm not saying the new administration is the solution, but it's perfectly understandable why people are hurt by inflation, unhappy about it, and wanted a change.
So while inflation hurts the bottom more than the top, because they spend a higher % of income, they were compensated for it.
The problem is that across the spectrum, when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart" and when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
Sort of like all the stimulus, payroll protection, unemployment benefit increases/extensions, rent/mortgage/student loan moratoriums during COVID that went on well past the point where economy was at risk, and people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC.
The amounts of money and different ways money was thrown at people by the government 2020-2021 was historically abnormal and we got more mass unrest than when huge swathes of country were losing their homes and out of a job for years during GFC.
It makes me wonder what a government can actually do that doesn't lead to backlash.
That's a very questionable assumption.
Many people have criticized the CPI and inflation rate as an inaccurate measure of the cost of living. Housing prices are crazy in many areas. I think you're exaggerating about the affect of egg prices specifically on voter behavior. And with any average or median, there are often vastly different outcomes for different people who are not exactly average.
> when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart"
This feels like a straw man.
> when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
This also feels like a straw man, and the phrasing is quite condescending.
> people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC
Did they? After all, the 2008 Presidential election during the financial crisis was kind of a blowout in favor of the opposition party against the incumbent party. Whereas 2020 and 2024 were closer elections.
Why did no one storm the capitol in 2008/2012?
Why didn't crime shoot up and stay up for 2-3 years then?
Etc.
> And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up so we need to vote the bums out and take a turn towards the party of the CEO class.
Whereas now you're talking about things that have nothing to do with egg prices or indeed any prices. So I'm not sure how it's relevant to the original discussion or to the linked article.
People get angry politically about things that have little to do with economics. You could name abortion too. But... how is that even relevant here?
If your question is, why were people more angry about the economy in 2024 than in 2008, I'm not sure that they were. If your question is, why were people more angry in general in 2024 than in 2008, the answer would depend on issues having nothing to do with the economy.
COVID was deep but brief, for most people in most places things were pretty good within 6-12 months. The 2021-2022 inflation, travel, spending, etc bubble tells us that things clearly weren't THAT bad. We did not have anything remotely close to that recovery from 2009-2013+...
Do you have any ‘real’ inflation measures that show that the middle and lower middle class didn’t improve more in that period than any time since pre-Reagan? I’ve looked and can’t find any but am definitely not an economist.
It’s well studied that grocery and gas prices have an outsized impact on consumer sentiment going back a very long time, what’s new is there seems to be a disconnect between economic outcomes, consumer sentiment and consumer behaviors.
I think it’s going to be a huge point of study to figure out why people thought they were doing worse than they were but continued to spend like things were rosy.
I wasn't disputing that specifically.
> I think it’s going to be a huge point of study to figure out why people thought they were doing worse than they were
Here's a recent article by a former US Comptroller who argues that people weren't wrong:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-...
> continued to spend like things were rosy.
I think that's a strange way of putting it.
In general, I wouldn't take election outcomes to be a reflection of some cultural zeitgeist. Elections happen in the US on a single day, and if the election were held again today, the outcome might be different. In any case, the elections are usually quite close, depending on small percentages in battleground states. Little movements can make a big difference. My own state of Wisconsin has had a margin of victory of under 1% for the past 3 Presidential elections.
Consumer sentiment used to be if not directly correlated to broader economic figures, directionally the same. That stopped being true.
And this has been beyond just single methodology reports. Commercial data and polls broadly said the same thing as the non-profit data and polls which broadly matched governmental numbers.
Some fundamental change has happened and if it doesn’t revert I think it’s going to be a big point of academic research for decades to come.
Prices rose sharply for everyone. We got roughly $2000 of individual stimulus payments over the course of ~2 years. Doesn't pay for a hell of a lot over that span.
And the increases in real wages were very uneven. If you happened to be one of the lucky ones whose wages were increased, then that's great—but many, many people's stayed the same at best. And, again, many people were fired, or quit because the alternative was putting themselves in constant physical danger plus being screamed at by people who value their own minor convenience over your life.
And as someone with a family member who was on unemployment after losing their job in the summer of 2020, if we had had to rely on it to pay the bills, regardless of how long it lasted, we would have been screwed. (And that's ignoring all the hoops they had to go through just to get and keep it.)
What could the government have done that wouldn't lead to (as much) backlash[0] from ordinary people? Well, how about
- Provide stimulus that actually keeps people afloat over a long period, rather than just tossing $2000 at them and declaring that should be enough
- Provide complete and effective PPE for everyone who has to be working during the lockdowns
- Put in place robust protections for the health and safety of both those workers (ie, protection against employers who want you to endanger yourself) and everyone else (ie, mandating masks in enclosed public spaces, mandating vaccines, strengthening requirements for good ventilation, etc)
In general, if the government were not hamstrung by having roughly half its legislators actively seeking to make government less effective to justify dismantling it and privatizing everything, it would be able to provide for its people in a more compassionate and comprehensive way.
[0] And yes; I'm aware there would be backlash against these things from right-wing science deniers. They were never a majority.
But either way Govt is not magic. It has to react to a very complex uncontrollable ever changing reality. There will be oscillations between periods of calm and chaos.
The perception was that the money was being thrown to business owners that instead bought multiple exotic European luxury cars.
You talk about minor wage increases or payroll protection as if this actually benefits the people receiving these benefits. It does on paper, sure, but governments haven't been paying for this through taxes. They've been paying for it by printing money, which devalues money (mostly held by normal people in the bottom X% of society) in favour of assets like houses and stock (mostly held by the top (100-X)% of society). This is a de facto transfer of wealth from normal people to rich and ultra-rich asset owners. Not to mention most of this money goes towards replacing money lost to asset owners anyway - if you make $X, you get fired and the government prints $X to cover that, your relative position is the same, but someone up the food chain from you has just made $X.
This kind of thing drives up asset prices. For the US specifically, house prices have gone up by over 50% since January 2020 (per every index I can find), the S&P 500 has gone up by around 125% (!), the price of gold by around 80%, etc.
Meanwhile, the SSA's National Average Wage Index has gone up 19% since 2020.
If you have a huge portfolio of stocks and REITs and gold, that's great news. If you're a normal person who maybe aspires to one day stop paying rent, this is terrible news. Of course people are upset!
He doesn't care about egg prices, he just wants to crown himself King and make himself even richer
Remember when Obama was relentlessly criticized for golfing when he golfed less than and recent presidents, and certainly less than Trump did?
Remember when Obama was criticized for running up the deficit when Bush added more to the national debt than he did? And then Trump came along and nearly doubled the national debt?
Remember when Al Franklin resigned over an inappropriate image with a woman, and Trump brags on tape about grabbing women by the genitals?
Remember when Hillary spent years being investigated for having a private email server, just like Bush had? And today DOGE does too.
Remember when Trump accused remote workers of "only playing golf" during the workday, while Trump was on the golf course during a workday?
There's a whole lot more examples but I'm tired of typing them and they make me angry thinking about them.
I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?
I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?
(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)
The EU is a patchwork for 27+ small countries. There is no unique digital market. There are 27 languages to cater to. 27 different cultures which are radically different compared to say, Texas versus Maine. General risk adverse culture after WW1 and WW2 where there are no VCs, even though for sure they could make money and Europe is full of tax loopholes they could use...
We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare. We even spend more public money on healthcare, by far. We're in worse health while we're alive. Our life expectancy is ~the same as it was in 2001, in an age of medical miracles. Our homicide rate is close to the global average, and trailing many poor countries. We have the fifth-highest incarceration rate on Earth, many times higher than countries we think of as having terrifyingly oppressive governments, and on par with several of the world's worst dictatorships. Our citizens don't feel secure: that's one of the few things almost everyone in America agrees on, and part of why we're reaching a level of instability that hasn't been seen in a rich country in a long time.
That doesn't sound like a thriving country to me - certainly not given that we started as a superpower, have had 150 years of relative internal stability, are the beneficiaries of a global brain-drain in our favor for the entire postwar era, enjoy some of the world's richest natural resources, have tons of space to spread out, have friendly neighbors who haven't made war on us in a century, invented the stuff half the world runs on, operate the world's reserve currency, and have both literal and figurative mountains of capital.
We should be a shining utopia, the envy of planet Earth. But we aren't. How can that be if we're doing everything right, or even if we're closer to right than our contemporaries?
Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.
This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on. I'm not saying that these things you list aren't legitimate, but they are hardly pan-American.
The Deep South is a third world country that happens to be part of the United States, and there's not much the rest of us can or will do to fix problems that Southerners themselves have no desire to fix.
It's less true, but it's still mostly true.
Even the highest life-expectancy state in the US (California, at 80.9 years) isn't very good by rich-nation standards. It ranks below - deep breath - Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, French Polynesia, Andorra, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Malta, Sweden, Macau, the UAE, Iceland, Canada, Martinique, Israel, Ireland, Qatar, Portugal, Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Germany, the UK, Bahrain, Chile, and the Maldives, coming in just above Costa Rica.
> This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on.
Rhode Island is the US' safest state at 1.5 homicides per 100k per year. That's seven times Japan's, triple China, South Korea, or Italy's, double Malaysia, Norway, or the UAE, and 50% higher than Denmark, Iceland, or Belgium.
Colorado is the US' least obese state at 22.6%. That's triple South Korea, double France, and 50% more than Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands. (I'm including only high-income countries in this list, since many poor countries have low obesity because food insecurity is a problem.)
Even the most cherry-picked favorable stats are still awful. Does the South drag most US averages down? Yeah, but not by that much.
Just because market failures exist, doesn’t mean a non-market approach will work better. Our markets have a lot of issues, but so do our public policies. For me, the perfect example is land use and housing regulation. With the best of intentions, government policies have made housing costs sky rocket. Meanwhile in places like Tokyo where I used to live, limited zoning laws and straightforward building codes has led to dirt cheap apartments, wonderful, walkable neighborhoods, and clean air. Where I live in California, we’re drowning in parking requirements and environmental reviews. Nothing gets built. Air is dirty, traffic is horrible, and you have to go everywhere by car.
Like you, I’m not at all opposed to government regulation or intervention. But the devil is in the details. Would a government enforced pay cap be better than the current system? I think the only honest answer is we don’t know. We need to be humble when approaching public policy, acknowledging that how we intend our policies to function is often quite different from their actual effects.
So the fact that CEOs think it’s acceptable to make their salary $20M is a big factor in why their salary is $20M
At this rate it's likely those "market forces" will come from the pitchfork, torch, etc markets.
Lest we forget that little giveaway to the boss-class.
So sure, they used it to pay employees, but they also pocketed what they would have used to pay employees.
But also huge fraud which was by design.
A suboptimal but net positive program. What more could you expect from orange man.
> Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
> They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.
> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-...
As much as you claim it had to be used on salaries, it mostly wasn't. That's why it's called fraud.
I was thinking today about Conservative fascination with trans folks. They certainly aren't segregating their bathrooms at home, but have some weird hangup with doing so in public.
I think some % of the population are "low trust" (most people won't do the right thing, therefore it's OK if I do not do the right thing/I need to protect myself) and some are "high trust" (most people will do the right thing, so I should do the right thing/I'm safe).
The US has been teetering towards a "low trust" cultural and political landscape and the way to drive this even further is to take away safety nets and create general economic chaos, effectively destroying social trust. Even the whole RTO debate is really a question of high/low trust; executives have low trust in the workers they hire so they want them in office, even if it's less productive, yields higher turnover, and leads to lower morale.
The reason Taiwan and New Zealand did so well during the pandemic is perhaps partially because they are both "high trust" societies; your fellow citizens generally did the right thing and followed the rules.
Aside: Mr. Beast claims to have lost tens of millions on the (Amazon) show Beast Games.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/01/0...
We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades. You should also research the concept of subminimum wages and I think you'll be shocked.
If you already knew about all of the above and still think there was anything close to a leveling of the playing field, you're choosing to ignore facts.
Very few people make minimum wage. It’s basically impossible to find a minimum wage job in my city because even the post office and fast food restaurants are paying $19/hr or more, and they advertise it on signs out front. I don’t even live in a HCOL city.
The focus on federal minimum wage has become a red herring.
This page has a table of the many states that have a shockingly low tipped minimum wage:
I have researched the facts. The percentage of people working minimum wage jobs is around 1% as of 2023. Likely under 1% now if the trend holds: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/
> When I was young…
We’re talking about wages in 2025, not when you were young.
The point is that the wage landscape has changed a lot from what you’re remembering.
> This is the reality folks. Not the tech company that gives you free catered lunch.
No, I’m not talking about salaried jobs. I’m specifically talking about hourly wage jobs
As for tipped jobs: Many efforts to eliminate tipped jobs have floundered specifically because the people in tipped jobs prefer their earnings with tips included. This is partially due to the way that tip earnings are underreported significantly on taxes when people pay in cash (untracked by computer systems) so actual tipped earnings are higher.
Regardless, looking at tipped minimum wages is very dishonest because the entire definition is that these people are also getting tips. Employers are obligated to make up any difference if their tips do not bring them up to the minimum wage.
Tipped minimum wage doesn’t literally mean someone can earn $3/hour. It’s right there in the first paragraph of that Wikipedia page you linked.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
As for states with a tipped minimum wage, let me ask you a math problem. Imagine you work at a restaurant and people tip 15-20% per table regardless of the state you work in. Would you make more money each day if your base wage was $3/hr like the tipped minimum wage in Pennsylvania or $16/hr like in California?
Yes, tipped workers would probably make less money with a higher minimum wage under this system. The "probably" is actually irrelevant - people working tipped jobs very clearly don't want to lose tips and will resist attempts to straighten out the system.
I also cannot help but notice that your article is from the very start of 2020, and the vast majority of inequality reduction has happened after COVID. Perhaps your take would make more sense if you relied on more recent data.
Also your article is about long term trends, and has data that ends in 2022 it looks like. In point of fact real wages since the pandemic have gone up, and by a historically notable amount.
If wages kept up with inflation since the 70s, the minimum wage would be around $23/hr, not even accounting for increases in worker productivity.
I remain frustrated at the extent to which fake info gets distributed in discussions like this. You can look this stuff up! And in fact US workers[1] are wealthier today than they ever have been.
[1] There's a distasteful caveat though: white, male US workers in 1974 were doing much better relative to their peers than the same demographic is today. But minorities and women have done really well. A lot of the concern among the very male HN set over "workers" actually turns out to be an expression of frustration over social change and not economics at all.
What a word! That’s so Newspeak-y.
We are seeing the results now with white collar work being outsourced to countries in LATAM. If people aren’t gonna be physically collocated why pay more for someone to work from the U.S. when you can pay a fraction for someone to work in the same time zone in central and South America.
I strongly suspect we will Look back at this period similarly to how we look back at the 80s when blue collar workers voted to have their jobs outsource to China, except this time it’s white collar workers pushing to essentially make their jobs easier to outsource to the rest of the world.
Sorry who crushed the railroad strike? Do you see the campaign contributions for every candidate and politician in the DNC? You think they don’t represent Wall Street? This characterization has been dead at least since Bill Clinton.
I don't think you can simply hand-wave the differences between your two parties. There do seem to be substantially different outcomes for the people affected by these issues.
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.
> Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same”
Those aren't the same claims.
Rather, the claim is that the party differences, to the extent that they are different, reflect differences among the wealthy political donor class who control the politicians and the policies. There are differences of opinion and approaches among the donor class.
That doesn't mean you don't have lots of people in high cost of living areas that lost purchasing power due to cost of housing or whatever. It just means that the aggregate effect is likely enough to have been an increase.
CEOs weren’t furious about “social progress”. That’s a projection of class warfare mentality.
It was, however, frustrating to see a blatantly obvious economic bubble driven by out of control government spending, which unsurprisingly has now popped. There were points in 2021 when we had junior applicants who could barely talk through the simplest interview questions but demanded senior/staff level comp because that was the going rate in the temporarily distorted market.
Many companies hired at those exaggerated rates anyway, then started cutting deeply when the market changed and they realized they were holding the bag on a lot of overpaid, under qualified hires. Other companies just sat on the sidelines and waited it out. It was the only time I remember having multiple candidates turn us down for better offers, only to message me months later begging for a job because their company overhired followed by layoffs.
I've never really heard a convincing argument why class warfare doesn't exist.
CEOs are sheep. They all do the same thing and run in the same direction. Your competitors are hiring, you're hiring. You can't be left behind. Your competitors are firing, you're firing. You won't be the odd man out who has to explain to the board and shareholders why you're not cleaning house when others do.
Rinse and repeat
I am saying they are rabidly resentful of the hiring they did. You can see it in leaked comments like JPM's Dimon at a local town hall where he said something to the effect of "we hired 50k people during COVID because people aren't doing their jobs and what's why none of you can WFH anymore" lol.
The way CEOs talk about now vs then is like some Old Testament fire & brimstone stuff. Like its everyones fault that he over-hired and now they should all get back to the office or face eternal damnation.
However, anecdotes are how the keep justifying their salaries
Can we finally stop humoring their BS about becoming “more agile” or “behaving like a startup”, now? They’re just another GE in practice.
As a consequence, we need to backfill these roles, it'll take months to find replacements and ramp up the new persons. This is without a doubt a net negative for our team. Maybe the goal is to kick every remaining employee in the butt so they work harder, not sure if it'll work.
All of this happened when the company makes huge profit and is hiring a lot. I'm still not able to make sense of this. And it's not only the layoffs, there's more and more hostility towards employees.
I don't know if Zuck is forced to appear tough to please Trump and Musk and perhaps save his company, or if he drank the kool aid, or if he's just trying to save cost to build new AI infrastructure, or taking advantage from bad market conditions for SWE. Probably a bit of everything...
Won't be long until working for Meta will have the same bad rep as Amazon.
Being too heavy handed with this ends up with employees acting greedy to protect themselves, creating more friction and reducing cooperation. If you depend on another team you have to spend your time and political capital escalating and fighting to get your requirements onto their roadmap.
You end up needing to have the skillset to play politics and get senior leadership on your side, which is very different than the skills needed to complete good work (they aren't exclusive, but you'll lose good people who have one and not the other). There are situations where adversarial processes are good, but too much kills progress.
I think about Office Space a lot lately (specifically Peter having tons of bosses and the whole TPS report cover bit).
I think the pendulum has swung too far into low trust management.
I've worked at Meta. It sucks they laid off people (I have a friend who was impacted), but that's the companies job - make hiring/firing decisions. And I couldn't care less what they pay the exec team - what are they paying employees relative to other companies? Is it good? Ok, maybe I'll choose to go there for a little bit.
The idea that billionaire returns are required for motivation is laughable. 99% of people are similarly motivated by a $10M return as a $1B return. The point is not necessarily to rid ourselves of capitalism entirely (though that’s logically the optimal outcome in the long run, since by definition capitalism’s optimization function is independent from socially or even individually desired outcomes), but rather to bring compensation disparity down to a reasonable level. I’d recommend targeting a GINI of .3 to start, if you want to put a number on things.
Your view promotes passive participation. Make the optimal decision for yourself in the short-term and ignore any broader implicaition. No disrespect, but this exact behavior is how individuals cede agency and enables corporations to exert more and more influence on society.
If rewarding executives after gross mismanagement of hiring makes someone angry, let them be angry! Then, look into how you can direct that anger somewhere besides the HN comment section. Chances are that others are angry about it as well, and with enough vocal support maybe we can get some semblance of worker protections and corporate oversight in this country [1].
[1] https://inequality.org/article/a-fresh-approach-to-limiting-...
For us ordinary people, I wish you be financially free ASAP so that you can give middle fingers to the companies you worked in. I'll surely do that and tag names when I retire.
What % of management is just asking your reports the same 5 questions over and over in different ways and tracking the results?
And then theres the cargo cult of senior management doing whatever they think competitors are doing and/or what consultants say..
I've worked at shops with all the agile, scrum, OKRs, OGSMs, metrics metrics metrics at the IC level where there were no clear OKRs at the org level. Accountability sometimes only goes one way.
Rinse and repeat every couple of years.
Does anyone have a rough country-breakdown of the numbers they can share? Any particular business areas?
Fuck him, and fuck anyone who made their money at this dogshit 21st century nicotine dealership