Meta slashes staff stock awards as group embarks on AI spending drive
ft.com
ft.com
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-introduces-200-exec-bonus-sc...
End-to-end execution matters (Apple's vertical integration helps with this) and it's a big part of the difference between invention and innovation.
I thought the reduction would be much bigger given the headline.
Every time they email me, I'm tempted to ask why would I join Meta where I'll have to pour all of my energy and emotions 50-60hrs per week only to be laid off... for absolutely no reason. And Meta/Zuck have recently been going around saying the "layoffs are based on performance". So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
> The company had raised its quarterly dividend by 5 per cent last week to just over 52 cents, in another boost for investors.
Meta doesn't HAVE TO make this 10% employee pay cut for its infra buildout. Zuck is just trying to "establish dominance" in the age old battle of Capital vs Labor.
Edit:
This might seem conspiratorial, but we know practically all tech CEOs are in multiple group chats with each other. They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries. It's not like they haven't been caught doing this in the past.
Helps avoid potentially uncomfortable situations on both sides and increase the signal/noise ratio.
Cisco management - truly horrible people.
We see a lot of applicants from Red Hat who “drank the kool aid” there for way too long.
I've helped hire/onboard a couple of really great former Meta engineers, and currently collaborate with a bunch of great engineers at Meta.
But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.
Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/facebook-instagram-dangerou...
At this point in my life, I've seen enough people desperate for work that I'm not going to fault someone for working for an "evil" company. Maybe they really needed that money. Maybe they really needed that insurance for a loved one. I really don't know their situation and I'm not going to judge them just for that.
If, after talking to them, they talk about how excited they were abound working on code that helped exploit addiction in young girls, then I'll reject them. But if they were just there because they really wanted to work on react.js, I'm going to fault them for that.
We tried meta folks before. Every other sentence was “at Meta…” what works at Meta does not work everywhere else.
Plenty of other places for them to work. I am not responsible for their well-being.
If they volunteered for the job because they wanted to kill Jews more efficiently, then I won't forgive them.
Depending on the company, there may even be referral bonuses so there's a financial incentive for your "insider" to follow up.
Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.
FWIW left libertarianism is also a thing, but you won't find much of that in crypto.
What is bizarre now is that the biggest wallets are supporting economic uncertainty.
Anyway you’re wrong. There are a good number of left wing engineers out there but they’re outnumbered by libertarian chuds in the industry.
"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that. Most employees don't do that.
Ironically, you made that up lol. I know a few people who have worked at Meta as SWEs. A close friend still works there as a PM. They've all been pretty open about the work culture at Meta.
>"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up
If you really don't think companies aren't taking advantadge of this strict job market that is putting a lot more SWE's in their seats instead of jumping; I wish you the best at your current or future job.
I don't think Meta is uniquely taking advantage of job market dynamics; I think if anything, it's one of the most generous employers around. You could disagree, I guess. I've certainly worked other places that paid a lot less and were no less stressful.
My secondhand experience with some colleagues would not agree. They weren't the worst, but they seem to have felt Meta was the most cut heavy at the turn of the decade. Which was interesting to hear.
But sure, it was generally considered higher total comp than Google or Microsoft. If minmaxing money is all you care about, Meta is the way to go. Or was.
>Life isn't wholly not about money either. Money is a tool that enables a lot of things.
Yeah, hence work-life "balance". what are you working for if you spend all your days focused on money and not on life?
The narrative about there not being enough "talent" available in the US is such a hilarious, brazen lie. I'm disgusted at the entire industry. SWEs are negative on Amazon, Meta, etc but IMO nowhere near close to hating them enough.
Companies just want an excuse to save money without making wall street panic, as well as the usual cost cutting measures they've done for decades. They feel they captured the market so they aren't spending money keeping people away from competitors (and ofc startup funding is much worse too. No one to rise up). These layoffs are not a reflection of anyone's abilities as engineers.
Any employer who has that attitude isn't an employer you want to work for.
Just because someone didn't do well at one company, under one boss, in one team, doesn't mean that will be the case somewhere else.
As long as you come away having learned something - some new skills, what you could have done better or when you should have realized it wasn't the company/job/team for you, what you do well or don't, what work drives you or you just can't get motivated by. If it was a personality clash, did you come away with a lesson learned or realized you needed to work on interpersonal skills, that sort of thing.
Source: worked for 2 years on exec staff of large corp CEO. Had to leave cuz its really out of control heading no where. The main goal is survival. Thats it.
This is super tangential to this post, but All In is a wild podcast. While one guy is re-discovering the purpose and mechanism of taxes, some other guy is claiming that it's good actually that the entire government now has to justify itself, to him, from first principles. All to a cheering crowd of fans who think these guys are obviously the smartest guys alive.
It's an insane look into a completely stupid world.
Some decidedly very dumb people who have a lot of confidence and a very large sum of money are basically controlling the zeitgeist both politically and culturally and it is not looking pretty.
It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.
don't listen to it or come up with something people prefer over it?
Aren't cartels against the law?
Go Zuck.
Even when solving problems in the real world, nobody sits in a dark room until moment of genius strikes. We always try some tactics others have tried and only then innovate.
Exec bonuses have gone from like 2% of their total comp to like 4%. It's something, but still a tiny slice compared to their stock grants.
The past three years have been a semi-coordinated reaction from tech bosses against the rising labor power from the 2010s, and especially the pandemic. Pay has risen. Benefits have improved. Workers were able to demand things like flexible hours and remote work.
The bosses hate this. When the opportunity presented itself, they crashed the job market for developers in the US and are using this as an opportunity to push back against all these things.
The unfortunate part here is that there may not be a next generation with the way the incentive structures are setup. If there is, I highly, highly doubt any of Gen Alpha will enjoy the compensation that SWE's in the 00's and 10's did. We're aiming to be the next EE's in terms of career trajectory. And we certainly don't have the safety nets needed for a post-jobs world as of now.