I will always pour one out for the fellow wage slave (more for the people who suddenly lost a job), but I am admittedly a bit less sympathetic to those with in demand skills receiving top tier compensation. More for the teachers, nurses, DOGEd FDA employees, whatever who was only ever taking in a more modest wage, but is continually expected to do more with less.
Management cutting headcount and making the drones work harder is not a unique story to Facebook.
We're talking about overworked AI engineers and researchers who've been berated for management failures and told they need to do 5x more (before today). The money isn't just handed out for slacking, it's in exchange for an eye-watering amount of work, and now more is expected of them.
And do not forget that people have autonomy. They can choose to go elsewhere if they no longer think they’re getting compensated fairly for what they are putting in (and competing for with others in the labor market)
(For me, I found the limit was somewhere around 70 hrs/week - beyond that, the mistakes I made negated any progress I made. This also left me pretty burnt out after about a year, so the sustainable long-term hourly work rate is lower)
And wanting that is not automatically a bad thing. The fallacy of linearly scaling man-hour-output applies in both directions, otherwise it's illogical. We can't make fun of claims that 100 people can produce a product 10 times as fast as 10 people, but then turn around and automatically assume that layoffs lead to overburdened employees if the scope doesn't change, because now they'll have to do 10 times as much work.
Now they can, often in practice. But for that claim to hold more evidence is needed about the specifics of who is laid off and what projects have been culled, which we certainly don't seem to have here.