Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgeburdell | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting

View on HN

You mean throw those billions, tens of thousands of man hours, shareholder attenton, industry power and mindshare to a mostly useless concept, just because he had the money? Why are those resources not better spent on 100+ startups and 100+ unique ideas that are immediately tested by the market?

Just because the end concept was useless doesn’t mean the individual pieces don’t have value. Meta’s loose wallet probably kickstarted the work of dozens of smaller companies in the hardware space whose work can be parlayed into other areas.

It was not very efficient usage of the money. It actually ended up paying for overpriced real estate in the bay area and vanity toys such as Porsches.

Considering other mega corps would either hoard the cash or increase dividends, the fact that any money went to engineers is a win. Saying the money would be better spent funding startups does not reflect any real possibility.

That would be useful if they open sourced the effort. Otherwise it will die of total irrelevance 15-30 years from now.

Facebook's mismanagement of VR financed and launched Anduril.

Meta has more than enough money to do all of that at the same time

If you look around at the startup scene the past 5-10 years, has it really been any better?

On the other hand they seem to do layoffs liberally too. Feels like thrash from the outsider's view.

Hilarious thing to say a couple days after the news of 20% layoffs at Meta dropped. This is after a 10% "performance based" layoff last year and successive rounds of 10%+ layoffs post-covid in 2022-23.

The company may have been a wonderland for devs a decade ago, but at this point it is right up there with Amazon in terms of terrible work environments, internal politics, PIPs and layoffs.

Meta employee count has been increasing for the last 3 years, same as other tech companies: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

PIPs and layoffs have always been a thing in tech. That's kinda one of the defining traits of the industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com