Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
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I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
If it's a restructuring, nothing you do will save you or condemn you. The decisions are made via spreadsheet, and it's unlikely anyone in your management chain will be involved. In fact, if you're a high performer who's accumulated a lot of compensation, that might paint a target on your back. If you're a protected class, you might get passed over to minimize the risk of legal action.
If it's a decimation, you'll probably have a good idea whether you'd survive.
The takeaway is keep your ear to the ground, maintain some familiarity with where your company spends its money and how executives make decisions, and you might be able to tell what kind of reduction is in the cards and prepare for it. And also, keep relationships up with recruiters.
If this is where you're at in relation to your employer, that doesn't avoid a layoff, it accelerates the next round, whether or not you're in the batch is just a matter of time.
I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason.
Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough.
I also think it closely parallels the practice of companies being actively hostile to their customers (or Pareto optimal as they might see it). Big companies would rather provide an offering that suits them, actively mistreating their customers, and just target customers that will go along with it rather than wasting time on customers that want some less profitable version of the offering.
it's also about as valid a Freud or Horoscopes. Maybe some grains of truth, sure, but it's a view of the world filtered through old management textbooks then filtered through a comic and then filtered through the Office.
It's Dilbert meets Simulation vs. Simulacra.
Thus the company gets hurt 2 ways: good ones leave, and bad ones stay, making the lives of everyone else miserable.
This goes for the economy writ large. There are two generations of Americans who have been taught that housing is unstable, and that so is their paycheck, and that neither political party will lift a finger to help in any meaningful way (i.e., one that sacrifices donor sentiment and dollars). It's like the opposite of postwar Europe and Japan. How do you fix half the country not believing in your economic model?
I don't think that should be the real fear. The real fear is those 10x engineers still putting in equivalent effort, but now having to spend mental capacity on positioning themselves for future layoffs and worrying about getting fired.
I think we greatly underestimate the performance boost there is in security. When you don't have to worry about plan b, you can be so much more efficient at plan a.
Morale problems can be just enough to make your best people pick up the phone when recruiters call.
1) empathy is a weakness
2) introspection is a waste of time
3) move fast and break things
The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).
Even worse, the claim it’s bad
In general it seems that companies are pretty bad about this type of logic. It's the same issue with trying to force attrition through "return to office" or similar things as a way of getting the cost cutting without having to pay severance; the people who will walk away are the ones who are have enough money to not need immediate employment (who are more likely to be from the higher-compensated members of the workforce, which in a competently-run company would be the most valuable ones) or who know they're in high enough demand to be able to find something else fairly quickly, so likely the ones who they should be trying hardest to retain. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what they actually want, which is to stop paying people who they don't need.
Jobs are ephemeral, as companies consider employees to be replaceable / expendable cogs in the machine.
Keeping expectations equal makes sure all parties benefit. Companies base their decisions on revenue and cost, employees should as well.
Any past illusions that loyalty to a company has personal beneift are long since dispelled.
In fact in the US worked for a company bought by a Japanese company and really nothing really changed and the Japanese and American company were quite similar.
Personally I work at a very small company, I make changes largely how and when I wish ... lots of freedom. In a couple minutes the fix is in production and we're all good to go. It's great.
But I don't think the folks attracted to those big companies with big pay are applying for tiny co for less money. Actually I know they're not because I'm not seeing them in interviews.
To some extent folks make themselves hired guys for top dollar and if that's the deal there ya go.
Meta needs to be careful IMO. The subset of capable people willing to work for a company as demonstrably evil as them is not infinite.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...
Actually... I wouldn't be surprised if some people were actually running the tool and got away with it (or praised for getting the metric up) for a long time...
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
His team then enabled lots of people to become influencers. Those influencers influence their followers to buy products (aka generate ad-revenue).
And that is the pure essence of the business model.
The credit for that belongs to the advertisers not Instagram.
Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.
Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
OK, not the saying. Perhaps should be.
Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.
A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.
Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.
But no, you're right, it doesn't have to be one or the other.
He saw that coming and slyly prevented it. He cannot be as dimwitted as you suggest.
i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?
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You can pretty much see his thought process in real time.
"Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me."
Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it.
"Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
"I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work?
Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
(And yes, I did make an HN account for this.) https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destr...
Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat.
Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR.
A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.
If I hire ex-Meta guys its for one reason only: squeeze them dry to repent their sins. Literally squeeze, squeeze... and squeeze and til they quit.
Personally I wish others would do it too. Working there is a choice.
> Working there is a choice
look into non-competition clauses, there's a real chance its not. also people who work there are not somehow vastly less moral than those that work at Google ect
If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance."
This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks.
It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other.
I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool.
The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.
A broad studio-like portfolio, where you mostly stay hands-off and willing to burn a ton of money in directions that won't work, and accept that they are out of your control. Stochastically let the best 10% of isolated plays rise on their own while 90% fail.
I think the VC model tends to do this relatively well. Large orgs though are inevitably culturally, or even legally -- "shareholders! fiscal responsibility! optimal deployment of capital!" -- INCAPABLE of being that intentionally lossy and hands-off.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
> Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here.
> Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible?
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
People who innovate without becomming super rich dont get ackwnowledged as innovative. CEO buys or copy an app - innovative.
But also, while I'm not mega rich, I'm very comfortable, if only to keep me from stirring the pot some more with my troublemaking nature. This is where Tom Lehrer's advice that selling out is OK if you get a good price comes into play. And yes, satire, but surprisingly good career advice in the real world.
I can.
He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
The visa issue guys should play safe, stick to stabler companies, more reward isnt without more risk
I get that whats happening at meta is wrong, but please stay away from these excuses as to why thats wrong, these aren’t for those employees
He is basically a middle-aged college bro that always got what he wanted and never had to ask twice for something.
Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.
Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.
By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.
Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).
Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.
Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.
By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.
The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
Lots of people don't want to sell ads, particularly not with a side of societal harm, even if it would be lucrative. There are other things to value.
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Duh.
I know many math talented guys - olympiad level. What are they doing 30 yrs on? nothing special.
The unfortunate truth for many is (and the lie they got told) - none of that stuff has any relevance to large contributions in the economy.
Evil
> Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.
Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.
Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.
They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)
React and zstd don't count, obviously.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.
For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603).
What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."
This will never work because then you are expecting the more experienced people to be reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people. They will either do a bad job to comply or just quit
> reviewing endless slop coming from less experienced people
/s (just in case)
I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."
Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.
> Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automation's ability to continue scaling beyond a level where human capacity was saturated. We're only at the very beginning of that process for coding, and right now we tend to see LLMs somewhat awkwardly inserted into pre-existing software development lifecycles. But it's unlikely that'll be still be the way we're creating software in 10/20 years time.
I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.
Every new technology we discover from here on out has a compressed lifecycle.
In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.
Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.
I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.
What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?
That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.
Looking at history, there is not really an argument for progress to stop in the long term. I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about. But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path. I agree that there is a limit to everything. But it is almost impossible to forsee when and where that is going to happen.
That’s my point. We have no reason to assume that AGI exists within that limit. Certainly not enough to confidently state that it’s inevitable.
> I think I get what you mean, that further advancement gets more and more complicated and the human mind gets to a limit what it can comprehend and reason about.
That’s exactly what I meant!
>But lots of research and progress have been augmented by technology in the past 70 years or so, and I don't see a reason why it wont continue along that path
I agree that we’ve probably got a long way to go.
It’s true that if AGI is easy for a small group of people to build prohibition isn’t really possible. But if AGI takes a massive data center and billions of dollars, it could be.
I doubt it. Why do you believe it's possible?
> You make a grand claim when you think that in 50 years that 'all forms of AI is bad' will become an equally globally-recognized sentiment as 'all forms of unjustified killing is bad'.
No I don’t. You need to go back and reread.
Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?
He's always clearly been both
It's metaverse deja vu.
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
He failed to counter the rise of Twitter, failed to combat misinformation during elections, directly contributing to the result of the brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump in 2016
> The self-created tragedy of Meta is that the company is loath to invent new products. Instead, Meta’s management more or less relies on “vibes” to govern its decisions, and those vibes are often either wrong or far too late. The most pertinent example of the former is the ill-fated metaverse, which was developed solely on the (unbelievable) whim that the pandemic would last forever — or at least far longer than it actually did — and people would become accustomed to replacing in-person interaction with virtual reality. It was precisely at this moment, roughly around mid-2020, that Meta (then Facebook) disintegrated from a social media company into a Ship of Theseus that still technically operated its core social platforms but fundamentally was distracted by a red herring. Vibes-based management.
This is bullshit. All businesses need to take calculated risks, which sometimes don't pan out. The reason Zuck went full bore into VR/AR is because he desperately understood (correctly, IMO) that not owning a major computing platform was a huge risk. Microsoft had Windows on the desktop, Apple and Google had iOS and Android on mobile. When iOS restricted advertiser tracking (requiring opt in, which nearly every same person thought was a good thing) it cost Facebook a ton of money. So Zuckerberg made a big bet that VR/AR would be the next big computing platform.
Except the bet flopped. Turned out very few people want a big pair of goggles strapped to their face all day. But Facebook wasn't alone in making a bad bet - Apple spent billions on Vision Pro, and that's basically dead.
The problem isn't that Facebook made a big bet that flopped, and that alone isn't "vibes management". The problem is that since Zuck has majority voting power, basically all decisions come down to him and nothing is tempered by the expectations/desires of others, so you get this "pendulum" management as I call it. Sometimes you have these visionary leaders and it works out, but a lot of times it crashes over time. Musk runs his companies largely the same way, and while obviously it has worked out well for his companies and shareholders, it's widely known now that employees at his companies see a primary task as "managing Musk". Tesla's self-driving capabilities are far behind Waymo despite having a lot more driving data, and a big issue is Musk's insistance on cameras only. I've seen comments here on HN that any self-respecting AI leader would never work for X AI because the marching orders are basically "grok has to say what Musk wants".
Having an "emperor CEO" means the company can move quickly, but that goes for both beneficial and detrimental directions.
...Yes
Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.