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Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

With the exception of instagram fb marketplace, meta just looks and feels like a chaotic, sloppy mess of a company. Between the incoherent and buggy garbage that is ads manager (something I have used for my own business) and zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason), it all looks like poor business operations. So its no surprise they can't figure out AI even with all the ads profits and brain power.

An adult needs to show up, put zuck back in a corner and right the ship.

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> zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason)

Were they not actually performing poorly, then? Maybe I'm missing some context, but laying off poor performers is a good thing last I checked. It's identifying them that's difficult the further removed you are from the action (or lack thereof).

You're replying to someone (rightfully) pointing out that you can layoff poor performers without proclaiming it with one of the farthest reaching voices in the industry.

Anyone who's worked in a large org knows there's absolutely zero chance that those layoffs don't touch a single bystander or special case.

Any kind of stack ranking privileges people who are good in presentation of self and high in pathological narcissism.

From what I heard, Eric Lippert was one of the layoff victims. I find it unlikely that he was actually a poor performer, since he's an industry legend.

"[My probabilistic languages] team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work.

...

We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with.

...

The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it."

https://ericlippert.com/2022/11/30/a-long-expected-update/#:...

Thanks, this is what I was looking for. Puts the original point into focus.

Several of my colleagues were laid off. We all worked on the same project. I reviewed their code and was in meetings with them daily, so I know what their performance was like. They were absolutely not poor performers and it was ridiculous that they were laid off and labeled as poor performers. The project was a success too.

I refuse to believe that companies are allocating major ad spend to Facebook in 2025. Instagram, yes.

Why do companies allocate ad spend on regular TV channels in 2025? There is still a big cohort of people (45-70) totally hooked on Facebook.

It’s such a wasteland. I really think FB is fudging those Facebook user metrics. I might login once or twice a year and realize even marketplace is junk these days.

Marketplace is trash. It is severely broken, the search doesn't work, the filters don't work. It throws in shit you aren't looking for, and constantly misses things that are there. Yet they destroyed Craigslist. Unfortunately its where everybody posts everything and you will sell shit much quicker on there.

Craigslist had the same problem. Once you have a two sided market it is almost impossible to kill your business no matter how hard you screw it up. Unusually Facebook was able to muscle them out, but Craigslist was characterized by years of stagnation where the only thing that happened was they kicked out the prostitutes.

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