This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.
1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else.
3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway.
Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept".
The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:
1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.
So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
> 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets
Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?
> speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself
Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.?
> end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects
if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu.
Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023.
We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough...
How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.
> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?
Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution
Did they ever pretend, and anyone ever believed that? "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.
Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.
> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.
There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.
> Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore?
Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.
1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere.
2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies.
3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.
IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years.
It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.
But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...
These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas.
But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway.
Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?
I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.
I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.
I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.
Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.
the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems
In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.
> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.
"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.
But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.
Within 18 months I was unemployed.
There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.
Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.
And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.
And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.
Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors.
If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.
I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.
For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.
In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.
If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.
In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.
Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
> Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
1 employee doing the work of 3 is I think is a stretch
but 1 employee doing the work of 1.1 employees from a year ago I think is almost certainly true - at least, me and everyone i work with is _at least_ 10% more productive, and using AI extensively
Right
I think orgs are unclear how to wield this yet though
In my 20 year career I’ve rarely been on a team with more than 3-5 people on a team or within region on a team.
So at that scale it’s not really reducing a team member on a given team still. But you get more productive which is notoriously hard to measure in SWE, so yeah. It’s possible that translates to iterating faster or closing tickets further down the backlog which is useful but not per-se staff reducing.
Maybe in mag7 where you have massive engineering orgs the 10% can impact a given team more..
I think the bigger issue is employees who can largely just not be replaced.
For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.
> f 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%
If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some point just wave the AI-slop through b) there is not enough manpower because people got laid off because of "AI" c) People are generally feeling irritated by being asked to review and correct AI slop. There is a societal pushback brewing and it won't be nice for the so-called AI in the end. Think about the fact that most people who are exhilirated by the "AI" are either incompetent or incompetent and old. Most of the young folks, even those not in the technical domains, firmly reject AI. When did you ever hear of a revolutionary new tech that was actively hated on by the young people?
> Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex in their own ways which the retard-LLMs will trip on fair amount of times. Not if you are doing anything remotely complex. The retard-LLMs will still either put your secrets in plain text, suggest the laziest f*ing implementation of a problem etc. It's just a shitshow nowadays, compounded by the LLM companies trying to keep the costs low (and therefore keep the "users" hooked), which they currently accomplish by shortchanging you and dumbing the LLMs down - because otherwise they'd have to charge for true cost - upwards of tens of thousands of dollars per seat - which would render their initial value proposition completely useless. Something has to give.
> 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.
Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.
My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.
Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.
Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.
Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.
Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.
You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.
It’s slightly more nuanced than layoffs = capex. You’re right, they don’t. That said, they do create free cash flow, which the market uses as one important input into the value of a given stock. Moving FCF positively when capex spending is moving it the other way is the real financial accounting move that is happening here.
If I read it right, the 4B ballpark figure is based on total annual per employee cost of 500k * 8000 employees, so the figure is actually 4B/year. 20B over five years.
Is this because you think the market will short sell them, or because capex is so worthwhile right now that a company which doesn't invest will fall fatally behind?
The former; I think there's simply not the capacity to build the infrastructure that would be required to significantly improve the current tech as much as is expected (and there may never be the capacity to build that much infrastructure).
There's a whole lot of circular funding being passed among the same dozen or so companies right now with very little actual construction or assets to show for it and at some point someone will be holding the bag when actual money is called for, and nobody wants it to be them. The parallels with both 2008 and the '90s S&L crisis are troubling.
That is one of my huge complaints about the current levels of AI investments. You can do pretty much anything you want if you got $150B to spend, and then you go burn it on being uncompetitive in the AI space. Then you have the $80B Metas Reality Labs spend on a failed virtual reality and a pair of Ray-Bans.
It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.
I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether.
This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.
Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.
Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
I think it is also a matter on how the Meta stock comp works - and that people hired during the slump in stock price became very expensive once it came back up.
They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that
It’s almost as if a group of 80,000 dynamic humans in a wild uncharted environment might mean decisions are made that have to be re-evaluated in a year!
Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.
This comment put everything into perspective.
I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
> There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.
I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.
The 3-year old anecdote is a bit pointless. It literally could have been a bad day. I've burnt myself out on a problem the night before and absolutely bombed simple interview questions, too. Or it just happened to be the least competent engineer at Meta. It doesn't give much information on their average employee, though
We had the same experience with Meta engineers. One candidate had been with Meta/Facebook for seven years and had nothing to show for it. They had an incredibly hard time articulating what work they actually did. It was something related to storage, but pretty much every answer was "well, actually someone else does that part". Also same experience with basic coding, no actual skills, yet somehow manages to have a CS degree.
Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
This is my experience too. I actually briefly took the cool exciting climate change related science job and then realized that I couldn’t actually support my family’s lifestyle on $160k so I left and went back to surveillance capitalism. I do feel guilt about that decision, but I like to imagine I’ll be able to go back to working on interesting and ethical things after my kids are out of the house.
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
My famous interview question: "How do you copy a file to another computer?", I was told I need to tone down. It filters out too many entry/mid level candidates.
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.
...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.
That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it.
> Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.
> But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.
All true...been a huge fan since it originally aired. I was about the same age as the characters and doing the same work and got all the references and loved every minute of that show but looking back now overall I only feel regret for not buying BC when I saw this scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU
I dunno what you expect, everyone wants to avoid the negative consequences of their actions, should we be surprised that the rich and powerful can actually do it?
If you hire a house cleaner, and the house cleaner doesn't do a good job, would you fire yourself from the house? What repercussions will you personally suffer?
It is irrelevant if the workers did a good job. They are at the service and discretion of the house. The house, i.e. the owner, always remains. Until everything burns down. In case of Meta, pipe-dream, one can only hope.
Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down?
What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?
The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.
I think you're more upset about this than the typical Meta employee. Judging by... vibes, the main reason they aren't taking volunteers for these layoffs is that they might get more than 10% champing at the bit to take the severance.
The 2022 RSUs at Meta have more than doubled since the grant price, and are mostly vested out now, ending Feb 2027, after which there will be a steep TC decline for people employed since 2022, especially those on an initial grant or with very good performance for that refresher. There are a good portion of people sitting on either FIRE or at least extended funemployment amounts of money that the severance is looking mighty tempting to.
He is not putting the shares down himself. He is just subject to price fluctuations like everyone else — so how is he taking personal responsibility for it?
if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
Things have changed. I worked with a very senior and professional recruiter at FB during that time. While things didn't work out then, someone else reached maybe a year and a half ago for a fairly similar role -- massive difference, strictly a disposable drone style process and barely a conversation. I chose to not even start the process.
A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.
Back in 2020, $META was desperate to hire. Nowadays the tide has turned and interview process shifted accordingly. They are super picky now, even for those who nail every stage of the interview, folks are still routinely passed over.
So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.
The "usual" process in big tech is a recruiter call, 1-2 technical screening calls (sometimes an EM call), then the main series of 3-6 domain knowledge interviews are done over 1-2 days.
The latter are pretty grueling, especially when conducted on-site. Apple recommends you show up 1-2 hours ahead so you have enough time to get through security, for example.
That might be fine if they are offering incredible pay and conditions at a highly desirable company. But you get so many mid tier companies looking at Apple and Google and replicating their process without the pay or reason to put up with that process.
I just eject from the interview process when I hear it's going to be so many rounds because I know there will be another company that's just as good that will get it done with less.
Pilot at a major airline here: 1.5 hours of interviews with two people (recruiter and another pilot). Technical and HR-style questions, a personality test, no other homework.
Blood test, background check including all prior training records that are reported to the FAA.
Not a lot of work for the candidate in the interview, but it's easy to fail one too many training events or accumulate a violation and become radioactive.
While I cannot respond as a doctor, I can respond as an EMT. Totally different. But heres the deal.
The person who is the most important to you on the worst day of your life is the emt. The interview was literally "do you have a drivers license, and are you grossed out by stuff?" The rest you learned on the job.
Weird how doctors are vetted but prehospital folk are not.
edit yes there is training, but it happens after hire
Pilots and doctors are exhaustively certified for a very narrow set of work. A cop gets a title, to perform a job that's identical in every part of the country.
Software development is neither exhaustively certified, nor narrow, nor perfectly transposable.
Developers want a 15 minutes interview, but also scream "Would you ask a builder if he has experience with blue hammers specifically?" when they get denied an interview because they do not have experience with the exact tech stack of a company.
Because that's how pilots and doctors work. They not only need to have experience with a blue hammer specifically, but it needs to be exact same make and model.
Imagine if a GP claimed to be neurosurgeon because they cured a headache. Developers get to call themselves fullstack the day they modify an API route.
My doctor probably thinks we software developers do a very narrow job. And she is kind of right, we always turn up with those back problems from sitting too much, or RSI or whatever. While doctors have all those medical specializations and different roles and employers.
Rigorous formal education, multiple rigorous exams, then years of shadowing and training. I went through this process, and tech interviews are a breeze by comparison.
That's presumably what he meant but the response is highly relevant nonetheless. Comparing credentialed and noncredentialed professions is apples to oranges here because the credentialed professions effectively consist of pools of prescreened candidates. Among those, MDs in particular have an absolutely grueling process before they can get started. Imagine if your surgeon (versus backend dev) was proud of being self taught.
The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
I believe they optimize for fairness and consistency. They interview a huge number of people from very different backgrounds so they need a standardized process. It's not perfect but I can understand the logic. And there's team matching phase if the candidate pass the interview, it's not a random allocation.
This was exactly my experience too. The interviewer seemed more focused on checking boxes on the grading rubric than actually understanding the design discussion. They barely engaged with alternative approaches.
The interviewer was also very hard for me to understand, which made the interview harder than it should have been.
I am ESL too, so this is not about someone’s background. The problem is communication in an interview where both sides need to understand each other clearly.
From what I have seen on Blind, others have had similar experiences.
Firing 10% of their workforce on the one hand.
Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other.
Get fired or get tracked.
Well, isn't that convenient...
I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.
The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.
inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.
Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
90% of employees aren't getting laid off and continue to earn top of market pay. Even if you think layoffs are distributed randomly (they aren't), that has positive EV.
Making it 2-5 years there sounds like reasonable pile of money. And I don't think getting fired in one of these big layoff rounds is too big black mark.
I've not worked at Meta, but I was at a similar scale of company for 2 years before being let go. Once you factor in RSUs, they essentially paid double what I've ever made anywhere else. Knowing how volatile those sorts of positions can be, I just saved & invested all the extra, which worked out quite well.
During mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.
1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.
2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.
There's a fixed cost to every employee. Health care being the biggest, so you don't save 20% by dropping an employee to 4 days / week, even with a proportionate pay cut.
Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.
You’d have to go company-wide to sync schedules and norms. Not just opt in. Many would not like a 20% pay cut. The best talent would disproportionately leave.
Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.
Because it isn’t scientific. It is about appeasing irrational investors who demand a blood sacrifice. This is why it is always a big even number, and not some carefully established number based on analysis of operational shortcomings.
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
What people dislike is the boom-bust cycle inherent to all levels of a market economy. During some years, these companies suck people up like a vacuum -- that can be bad if you're on the inside and all of a sudden the culture goes out the window, or if you're expected to onboard 3-4 people at the same time, or you end up with a reorg every quarter. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, companies shut down (non-backfill) hiring entirely and layoff huge percentages of the company, with no guarantee that you'll be safe just because you're doing a good job.
Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.
Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
yeah, these big layoffs don't add up to me right now.
if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?
making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.
I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.
Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.
I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.
There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone.
Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China.
Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip.
Oh, and Europe can only do this stuff because of the USA military, by the way.
That obtained the cutting edge technology by buying an American company that had been founded to productize technology developed at an American defense laboratory based on a Japanese researcher’s work
You are forgetting 20 years and billions of dollars developing, in collaboration with research institutes like IMEC and funding from chipmakers like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.
But it doesn’t fit your ideological narrative of how innovation functions so…
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
It would be better because it would create a more diverse work space where multiple employers complete for employees, instead of one company playing musical chairs with people
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
Well Apple seems to be able to largely avoid these staffing whiplash problems…
I mainly call them problems because hugely scaling your org up and down on a whim is extremely inefficient when your recruiting and onboarding costs are high. Surely it’s more wise to repurpose the people you already have unless you have no time horizon on appropriate new areas of R&D.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
No but purposely forcing economic hardship on people when you're one of the most profitable entities on earth will always be a shitty thing. I'm sorry but treating workers like replaceable cogs is disgusting behavior and I'm not shocked that big tech routinely turns to anti-worker devices to enforce control.
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
Offshoring has been a common practice for decades, it works great for some functions and not great for others. Why would it suddenly have a massive uptick in 2027?
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
> But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people.
They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.
I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.
The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.
I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
It is about AI. The news is "the AI is far less monetarily lucrative endeavour than we thought but don't worry, we already fired enough people to compensate for the loss"
... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month.
Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
From what I can tell, its more about cashflow - basically companies need to spend most of their revenue or be taxed on it - and you can buy only so many servers.
Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.
but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves.
I don’t know if it’s a badge of honor, but it’s definitely highly desirable because they pay a lot. The term FAANG was originally coined to group together extremely high paying companies.
Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.
This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before.
I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.
I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.
in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.
A cut this big usually means the company let itself get too sprawling and is now correcting late. That does not make it less rough for the people getting hit, but it does make the move pretty unsurprising.
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.
Meta will go down in history as the quintessential case study of late stage capitalism. A company that has provided a consistently worse product over time and produced consistently less value over time to the detriment of both their users and employees, yet somehow gets consistently more profitable.
I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
Wonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.
I have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI!
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
one thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.
> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.
(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
When Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount.
For years the advantage big tech had was that capital expenditure was minimal and now with every big tech company trying to become an AI company they’re blowing gobs of money on data centers and everything that goes inside of them.
AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.
America is rich, but that money is spent on new problems we invented for ourselves. We subsidize farmers growing unhealthy foods, then subsidize buying those unhealthy foods through food stamps. Then we subsidize healthcare to address the consequences of extra obesity.
Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.
As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.
Similarly, I roll my eyes when people still blame Ronald Reagan for the current homeless situation in California. There's been plenty of time to correct that mistake and well???
But honestly, IMO America has become a joyless, directionless dystopia of soma and bread and circuses in the middle of a geopolitical knife fight to define the 21st century and maybe even hit the singularity. I'm not happy with the current management, but it was the same unhappy bunch talked about here that decided by voting or opting not to vote that gave it a second shot. Kinda deserve this, no? If no, I'm all ears for your one weird trick to fix America, go for it!
Yeah I know, downvotes incoming for such heresy. If you don't pick a side, then what are you even doing?
It's the housing prices and the affordability of life in general. We are all debt slaves now. I am 100% using 2020 as an excuse because it broke the market and sent housing prices up 50%+ in 6 months.
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
Pretty much. Lots of people who really were violently supportive of those measures will never admit to themselves what a horrible, entirely predictable mistake it all was.
It absolutely destroyed a ton of very good things, perhaps forever.
That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.
There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As I understand it, happiness increases for most people as their income increases. However, this doesn't mean that a person is happy overall since there are other factors. So, it's not that money can buy happiness in a binary sense, but it's a factor and often a significant one.
The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):
“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.
It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).
I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
> With time, their intentions have become much more clear
Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.
Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.
The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)
One can only hope that he just fully turns to philanthropy a la Bill Gates sooner rather than later, and gives up trying to "connect" people (which somehow always turns into privacy nightmares).
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?
Sort of.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
Britannica:
> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Wikipedia @ 3:
> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties
Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!
Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.
This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.
Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).
Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.
Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?
Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live.
It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.
Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
This isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.
So is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?
https://archive.is/3ZeOv
This is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.
3 and a half ways AI takes jobs:
1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else.
3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway.
Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
Meta has no real product moats at this point. Yes, many of us still use instagram and facebook on occassion - but I'm not giving it any data beyond "what short form slop content will I accept".
The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
It's #3 - it's always #3.
All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:
1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.
So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
> here are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:
> 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
> 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets
Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?
> speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself
Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.?
> end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects
if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu.
Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023.
We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough...
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv
[2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
How many hall passes do CEOs get for pandemic over hiring? Its been four years, and four years of layoffs and hiring to go back to layoffs. Pandemic over hiring might explain the first layoff or two a year or so later, but not the tenth or so layoff nearly half a decade later.
> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?
Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution
Did they ever pretend, and anyone ever believed that? "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.
Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
> "Agile" organization is even more of a bullshit concept than "Agile" in the team.
> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.
There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.
> Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore?
Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.
agreed. zirp has become a meme, it does not really explain any current dynamics.
> In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere
I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
1. If it scales worldwide. There's a decent chance that considering current global geopolitics, China will never allow them in, India and the EU will probably do the same or favor local competitors, Africa/Latin America will probably not have the money to tier 1 markets, which kind of leaves the US + Anglosphere.
2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies.
3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
Stadia was a minor footnote compared to Android, Pixel, and the other large organizations at Google. But there was plenty of hiring there during the pandemic, so your broader point is not wrong.
Where did all the extra employees come from? Did this result in shortages in other industries that the employees supposedly transitioned from?
IIRC, CS majors in universities grew a lot over the past 2 decades in particularly past couple years.
It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.
But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...
These West Coast tech companies had some of the highest salaries on the planet, so yes, they took employees from other locales/areas.
But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value. And the QA is usually outsourced to service companies like MindTree, TCS etc anyway.
Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
What do you think about Cory Doctorow's theory that the AI produced code is going to come back to bite companies due to tech debt / unmaintainability?
I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.
I've heard OpenClaw got over 600k lines of code vibed over 80 days.
I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.
Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.
Claude Code is similar. It's fairly clean for AI coding standards but it's also most likely much, much bigger than what it should be for what it does.
the near term is not an issue, because most ai code is still reviewed by experienced engineers with experience. the problem comes in the future where junior engineers who never acquired enough experience to handle engineering problems
In the mature service I worked on, adding new code was “templatized”, you had to add feature flags, logs etc which didn’t vary much no matter which feature it was. The business logic was also not that complex, I can see AI tools one-shotting that and it indeed is a productivity boost. You would be surprised to know that most work was exactly this, writing rather mundane code. Majority of the time was spent coordinating with “stakeholders” (actually more like gate keepers) and testing code (our testing infrastructure was laborious). This was at MSFT. There are lot of teams that are innovating at the frontier (mine wasn’t, at-least not technically), I don’t know how AI tools work in those situations.
> My experience working at Big tech companies is that people with roles like “agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers add questionable value.
"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.
But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
At MSFT, Product Managers were Technical Program Managers. Yes, a good PM is a joy to work with.
>But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.
> A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.
Within 18 months I was unemployed.
There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.
But it all came back, and more.
The number of tech employees worldwide in 2026 is probably 2x or more compared to 2001. Maybe even 3x. Things are not the same.
My observation is mag7 got less picky in hiring.
Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.
And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.
And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.
Pulled from other technical fields, leading to them having an ageing workforce and struggling against far-eastern competitors.
If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.
Other industries and other countries. Until recently, other industries were struggling very hard to find developers for example.
> notable exception of Apple
I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.
For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work.
Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.
In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
Meta basically "pivoted."
The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.
That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
Meta is fundamentally a media company and they're using AI towards that end. They don't seem to be productizing their tech beyond that in the medium term.
Why is #1 hypothetical?
If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.
In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.
Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
> Because I think "1 employee can do the work of 3 now" still hasn't actually been demonstrated
1 employee doing the work of 3 is I think is a stretch
but 1 employee doing the work of 1.1 employees from a year ago I think is almost certainly true - at least, me and everyone i work with is _at least_ 10% more productive, and using AI extensively
Right I think orgs are unclear how to wield this yet though
In my 20 year career I’ve rarely been on a team with more than 3-5 people on a team or within region on a team.
So at that scale it’s not really reducing a team member on a given team still. But you get more productive which is notoriously hard to measure in SWE, so yeah. It’s possible that translates to iterating faster or closing tickets further down the backlog which is useful but not per-se staff reducing.
Maybe in mag7 where you have massive engineering orgs the 10% can impact a given team more..
I wonder what proportion[1] of knowledge workers believe they have at least one colleague who the business would be better off replacing with software
and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it!
[1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models
I think the bigger issue is employees who can largely just not be replaced.
For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
Pretty sure it has for coding
Personally, no, haven't seen it in professional settings. Colleagues using AI heavily did not show any superhuman development speed, but definitely increased review burden compared to writing code by hand.
> f 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%
If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some point just wave the AI-slop through b) there is not enough manpower because people got laid off because of "AI" c) People are generally feeling irritated by being asked to review and correct AI slop. There is a societal pushback brewing and it won't be nice for the so-called AI in the end. Think about the fact that most people who are exhilirated by the "AI" are either incompetent or incompetent and old. Most of the young folks, even those not in the technical domains, firmly reject AI. When did you ever hear of a revolutionary new tech that was actively hated on by the young people?
> Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex in their own ways which the retard-LLMs will trip on fair amount of times. Not if you are doing anything remotely complex. The retard-LLMs will still either put your secrets in plain text, suggest the laziest f*ing implementation of a problem etc. It's just a shitshow nowadays, compounded by the LLM companies trying to keep the costs low (and therefore keep the "users" hooked), which they currently accomplish by shortchanging you and dumbing the LLMs down - because otherwise they'd have to charge for true cost - upwards of tens of thousands of dollars per seat - which would render their initial value proposition completely useless. Something has to give.
> Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex
This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago but it’s absurd now. I’m not going to convince you - but you really should give it a try.
> 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.
They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.
Yeah, this is a justification, but still -- they save single digit billions doing this, while AI capex is $150B (same timeframe) and RL spend is $16B. Feels like you could make the same cut from AI capex and barely notice a difference.
My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.
Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.
Though not all of that capex is cash; there's a whole phantom wampum AI economy where the big players are trading promissory notes for compute that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist) some time in the future and booking it as revenue.
Maybe you're thinking of AWS/Azure/Oracle? Meta isn't selling their compute.
Meta plays that game too; they're on the hook to buy compute that CoreWeave has yet to build (and may never be able to build) which counts as "revenue" for CoreWeave and an "asset" for Meta even though no actual money or compute has changed hands.
Meta promised to buy dc capacity for ai workloads. If I remember it correctly, it created a common company with an investment fund as well that took on debt to build capacity.
You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.
These games are far more dangerous to the industry than "AI now = badcode future".
They're a suicidal bet, because they assume cloud LLMs are efficient and inevitable.
Neither of those is true, or even likely, and we're going to see the consequences by the end of the decade.
The figure I've seen floated is $6B, but yeah, same idea.
It’s slightly more nuanced than layoffs = capex. You’re right, they don’t. That said, they do create free cash flow, which the market uses as one important input into the value of a given stock. Moving FCF positively when capex spending is moving it the other way is the real financial accounting move that is happening here.
salaries are opex, data centers are capex, you can't compare them in the same timeframe.
4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.
4B over 5 years is still 4B. It's 0.8B/yr
If I read it right, the 4B ballpark figure is based on total annual per employee cost of 500k * 8000 employees, so the figure is actually 4B/year. 20B over five years.
I think any company that is seen to reduce capex right now is going to be the Bear Sterns of this cycle
Is this because you think the market will short sell them, or because capex is so worthwhile right now that a company which doesn't invest will fall fatally behind?
The former; I think there's simply not the capacity to build the infrastructure that would be required to significantly improve the current tech as much as is expected (and there may never be the capacity to build that much infrastructure).
There's a whole lot of circular funding being passed among the same dozen or so companies right now with very little actual construction or assets to show for it and at some point someone will be holding the bag when actual money is called for, and nobody wants it to be them. The parallels with both 2008 and the '90s S&L crisis are troubling.
Doing slightly less than 150b looks bad to investors. Or at least it looks small.
Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!
That is one of my huge complaints about the current levels of AI investments. You can do pretty much anything you want if you got $150B to spend, and then you go burn it on being uncompetitive in the AI space. Then you have the $80B Metas Reality Labs spend on a failed virtual reality and a pair of Ray-Bans.
It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
And coke. Not the cold drink.
you get another taste of coke every time you clear 100 tickets. not the cold drink.
In other words: Nothing has changed.
Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.
I mean AI was auto-warning me for a Facebook comment I made, which was a somewhat widely known internet meme. Long story short, video of a young girl (maybe 8 or 9 idr) with a GIANT spider on her hand. I wrote the words "Put that spider down, we have to burn down the house" and Facebook's AI flagged it, I tried to appeal, a human allegedly reviewed it and denied it, because they didn't understand a subtle meme. That's when I knew, I had to stop logging on to Facebook altogether.
This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.
I think in several ways the promises of AI to leadership is taking jobs not what AI is actually doing.
Absolutely.
Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.
Funny how AI took all the jobs, but not from automation
Yup feels like it.
Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need?
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
Firing 10% every year is just good old Jack Welsh-style workforce intimidation.
its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
I think it is also a matter on how the Meta stock comp works - and that people hired during the slump in stock price became very expensive once it came back up.
More like “we need to lower median salary”
It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.
And for even longer if they’re hiring 8-10% per year through normal processes.
They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that
In the year 2040, they’ll still be using the same excuse. “BigTech lays off another 10,000 from all the overhiring done 20 years ago during COVID!”
It’s almost as if a group of 80,000 dynamic humans in a wild uncharted environment might mean decisions are made that have to be re-evaluated in a year!
And then how many years in a row after that can you keep blaming the single re-evaluated decision?
Overhiring wasn't a single decision.
Well, one could start by looking at how their total employee counts have changed between now and the beginning of the pandemic.
I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.
Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.
This comment put everything into perspective. I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.
And WhatsApp and Instagram were acquisitions, not creations.
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
> There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
“There is a population of qualified workers […]”
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
> keeping it successful
I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.
I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
Only The Zuck saw the value though. Why didn't MS, Amazon or Google buy insta? Or some Softbank vehicle?
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
This is the case with most tech companies. Google bought Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, Maps, etc. etc.
Although in this case Meta bought companies that were already established and successful.
Google bought Android before it had released products.
Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
Let’s go another step further!
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
Search was not novel, but PageRank was novel.
Stealing an idea is different from lying to people in order to steal their actual business, which is more like what Zuckerberg did.
Did he really steal the idea? I thought the idea was just a message board for Harvard students. That isn’t novel.
The original idea was this:
>I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Lots of things, but he then chucked all the profits at a stupid idea that he even renamed the company for.
Look at Meta's profits by year.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
build and tear down metaverse. zero sum.
The transition to mobile-first was a good call. Probably the last good call though. Oh, and buying Instagram.
And WhatsApp. And the VR glasses seem to be a success.
And whatsapp.
I think it’s hard to not have any kind of boss. There’s nobody to provide the critique needed to improve the products.
Everyone has clients and if your employees aren't incompetent sycophants they can give you actionable feedback.
Not a commentary on Zuck specifically, but many powerful people with fragile egos build an inner circle of incompetent sycophants
My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.
My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.
Very true the White House currently is an example of that.
I mean he’s got boz in his circle - is that short for bozo?
> to improve the products.
Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?
The only good things at Meta are the things they bought (Whatsapp and Instagram). They haven't made anything original in a long long time.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
Only someone who had so much luck in finding a product that clicks, would know the worth of buying such a product
Totally. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if I had to pick a FAANG to put all my retirement savings into Meta would absolutely not be my pick.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.
Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
You don’t consider YouTube to be social media?
I wish WhatsApp would get nationalized. I absolutely hate having to use it.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
If you try and hold a short position for 25 years, you will lose all your money, even if you were right.
I'm convinced that 99.9% of folks online who claim they're going to "short a stock" have never actually shorted anything in their life.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.
Apple also has an entire international retail arm.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
Aren’t they sort of unique in that they… have a retail division, as a real ongoing thing (I’m sure MS tried an MS store but I’ve never seen one).
Well, unique other than Amazon I guess.
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
> Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited
Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
By this logic you should factor that android was an acquisition, as were YouTube, doubleclick, deepmind and Waze
I forgot about that. Back to the drawing board.
Apple innovate in hardware.
What Google innovated during the last decade?
Apart from the Transformer architecture that enabled the AI boom/singularity/civilization-reshaping-event/whatever-this-is? Not much, I guess...
Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.
Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.
Different scenarios
The only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.
You are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
Also Google has a whole YouTube inside of it
Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America.
Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
Neither needs a lot of innovation, just some maintenance. How many developers do you think Telegram has?
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
Whatsapp is 5 years late in terms of features if you compare it to Telegram. It is here simply because of platform economics, nothing else.
Except those are both done.
WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"
That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
Heck, I could build Facebook in a weekend!
You're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple).
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
> If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.
Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.
Meta was over hiring engineers from about 2015, if we're being honest.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
> No operating systems, no processor design,
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.
Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.
Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though
> Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though
Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_.
Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.
I worked at Meta and they're spot on.
I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.
The 3-year old anecdote is a bit pointless. It literally could have been a bad day. I've burnt myself out on a problem the night before and absolutely bombed simple interview questions, too. Or it just happened to be the least competent engineer at Meta. It doesn't give much information on their average employee, though
Oh totally. In general I don’t think you can conclude anything about anyone, really. Yesterday they were someone. Today someone else.
We had the same experience with Meta engineers. One candidate had been with Meta/Facebook for seven years and had nothing to show for it. They had an incredibly hard time articulating what work they actually did. It was something related to storage, but pretty much every answer was "well, actually someone else does that part". Also same experience with basic coding, no actual skills, yet somehow manages to have a CS degree.
Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
The bureaucracy at Google has grown and grown. And then grown some more. But it is nowhere near as bad as the GP makes it sound.
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
I wonder if that's still the case.
It was less true when I was there more recently.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
Maybe not 1/10, but definitely on-the-order-of 1/4th or 1/6th as many.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
I've also worked (and currently work) at a big tech company and personally this has not been my experience. I'm sure it happens but it's not typical.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
Hard to motivate people to work on things that destroy society. Money helps.
Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.
What do you think is an appropriate time for most employees to end their workday?
I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
Because you have to pay people more to do boring or evil work vs meaningful or exciting work
In my experience the pay difference was never that close that meaning and ethics played a role in the decision.
Cool exciting and meaningful science job: 200k
Big Tech surveillance capitalism job: 800k (at the low end)
The calculus has only been about affording housing and providing for the family.
800k at the low end? Big tech pays well, but that sort of comp is reserved for very senior folks.
Where do I get this cool exciting and meaningful science job paying $200k?
This is my experience too. I actually briefly took the cool exciting climate change related science job and then realized that I couldn’t actually support my family’s lifestyle on $160k so I left and went back to surveillance capitalism. I do feel guilt about that decision, but I like to imagine I’ll be able to go back to working on interesting and ethical things after my kids are out of the house.
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
Yeah. This is part of why I wasn't excited to work at G after my first time there. It was very boring
My famous interview question: "How do you copy a file to another computer?", I was told I need to tone down. It filters out too many entry/mid level candidates.
You’re painting with a pretty broad brush there.
“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.
Not popular? Who asks someone to break their confidential agreements in front of them, and why would you hire someone who would do that so easily?
Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
"couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks"
Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
Apple being Apple
Yeah, like I don't think ARA could build a mobile app for ordering at a cafeteria, period.
I feel better working at a company when the support staff are also working for the same company.
Good, they want you not asking a single question, your paycheck obviously requires it.
Exactly
I would not have wasted my time and yours if Bon Appetit was running it.
“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”
What is this from?
I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
Truly the US military is a logistics organisation which dabbles in warfare.
> A certain large company
Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?
I know of a large company that does not like to be named https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_Macs
Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.
...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.
Moreover, he has no idea what those laid off people actually did or who they are
Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.
All of those government organizations are under the same management: the government. Subsidiaries are still under the management of the parent firm.
That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:
As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
You don't need 80k employees to self-host. The Wikimedia Foundation does it with a team of few dozens SREs.
There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
I still feel like he stole the word "meta" from the world. It was ours. Not his.
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
On the other hand 8000 people can potentially do some jobs meaningful to society.
Is this what Zuck meant when he said he “takes full responsibility” for spending 80 billion in the wrong direction?
I have no idea whether he said that but it reminds me of something. I'm rewatching (by which I mean "playing in the background while I do other stuff") the HBO show "Silicon Valley" and it literally has this in it.
> Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.
> But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.
Mike Judge is a masterful satirist.
All true...been a huge fan since it originally aired. I was about the same age as the characters and doing the same work and got all the references and loved every minute of that show but looking back now overall I only feel regret for not buying BC when I saw this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU
Taking responsibility doesn't mean paying people to do nothing.
So what does it mean, concretely? What repercussions will he personally suffer?
People will snark him 30% harder for a week.
I dunno what you expect, everyone wants to avoid the negative consequences of their actions, should we be surprised that the rich and powerful can actually do it?
No one is surprised, but why shouldn't it be called out and ridiculed as fake accountability and moral theater.
If you hire a house cleaner, and the house cleaner doesn't do a good job, would you fire yourself from the house? What repercussions will you personally suffer?
Are you implying the 10% being fired are all bad workers? What if the house cleaner was not the problem here?
It is irrelevant if the workers did a good job. They are at the service and discretion of the house. The house, i.e. the owner, always remains. Until everything burns down. In case of Meta, pipe-dream, one can only hope.
Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down?
What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?
The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.
I think you're more upset about this than the typical Meta employee. Judging by... vibes, the main reason they aren't taking volunteers for these layoffs is that they might get more than 10% champing at the bit to take the severance.
The 2022 RSUs at Meta have more than doubled since the grant price, and are mostly vested out now, ending Feb 2027, after which there will be a steep TC decline for people employed since 2022, especially those on an initial grant or with very good performance for that refresher. There are a good portion of people sitting on either FIRE or at least extended funemployment amounts of money that the severance is looking mighty tempting to.
>provide severance packages for those in the United States that include “16 weeks of base pay plus two weeks for every year of employment”
That is a standard package and no way a FIRE or at least extended funemployment if they have children or a mortgage.
But crazy level of sycophancy on your part
> Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket?
More or less? The vast majority of his personal net worth is tied up in FB stock.
As to the other questions -- the severance package is pretty generous.
He is not putting the shares down himself. He is just subject to price fluctuations like everyone else — so how is he taking personal responsibility for it?
if you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
That wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat)
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
Things have changed. I worked with a very senior and professional recruiter at FB during that time. While things didn't work out then, someone else reached maybe a year and a half ago for a fairly similar role -- massive difference, strictly a disposable drone style process and barely a conversation. I chose to not even start the process.
A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.
2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.
This seems a bit ridiculous, that’s only 5-6 years ago. Things change, but the mechanisms and culture isn’t entirely different.
Back in 2020, $META was desperate to hire. Nowadays the tide has turned and interview process shifted accordingly. They are super picky now, even for those who nail every stage of the interview, folks are still routinely passed over.
Market was so hot SNL did a skit where Meta just started sending paychecks to people as a recruiting tactic.
That SNL skit never happened, but the market was so hot it could have.
Remind me, was there a major event 5-6 years ago?
I had an interview in 2024 and my interviewer was CLEARLY doing other stuff during the interview. So a very different experience.
My experience as well, both at Google and Meta. Very positive and well-organized. I also got feedback from the recruiter on each interviews.
You had interviews scheduled longer than 45 minutes?
If it was the exuberant period of overhiring from around that time, then you're talking about a different company who interviewed you back then
The recruiting process has barely changed since then.
So let me ask this. What is the perfect mix of inerviews and durations?
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.
The "usual" process in big tech is a recruiter call, 1-2 technical screening calls (sometimes an EM call), then the main series of 3-6 domain knowledge interviews are done over 1-2 days.
The latter are pretty grueling, especially when conducted on-site. Apple recommends you show up 1-2 hours ahead so you have enough time to get through security, for example.
That might be fine if they are offering incredible pay and conditions at a highly desirable company. But you get so many mid tier companies looking at Apple and Google and replicating their process without the pay or reason to put up with that process.
I just eject from the interview process when I hear it's going to be so many rounds because I know there will be another company that's just as good that will get it done with less.
I had a 6 interview + take home ( which realistically took 2 days because I intensively studied for it ) loop.
Didn’t get the job. Got the vibe they were full of crap anyway. The salary range was never given. The business model, extremely easy to replicate.
The job I’m at now had a single 30 minute chat. Verbal offer 2 days later. And my co workers and boss are awesome.
Most of the best places I've worked have had the least process.
What does a pilot or doctor or cop do in terms of interviews, take homes etc.?
Pilot at a major airline here: 1.5 hours of interviews with two people (recruiter and another pilot). Technical and HR-style questions, a personality test, no other homework.
Blood test, background check including all prior training records that are reported to the FAA.
Not a lot of work for the candidate in the interview, but it's easy to fail one too many training events or accumulate a violation and become radioactive.
Thanks!
While I cannot respond as a doctor, I can respond as an EMT. Totally different. But heres the deal.
The person who is the most important to you on the worst day of your life is the emt. The interview was literally "do you have a drivers license, and are you grossed out by stuff?" The rest you learned on the job.
Weird how doctors are vetted but prehospital folk are not.
edit yes there is training, but it happens after hire
Pilots and doctors are exhaustively certified for a very narrow set of work. A cop gets a title, to perform a job that's identical in every part of the country.
Software development is neither exhaustively certified, nor narrow, nor perfectly transposable.
Developers want a 15 minutes interview, but also scream "Would you ask a builder if he has experience with blue hammers specifically?" when they get denied an interview because they do not have experience with the exact tech stack of a company.
Because that's how pilots and doctors work. They not only need to have experience with a blue hammer specifically, but it needs to be exact same make and model.
Imagine if a GP claimed to be neurosurgeon because they cured a headache. Developers get to call themselves fullstack the day they modify an API route.
My doctor probably thinks we software developers do a very narrow job. And she is kind of right, we always turn up with those back problems from sitting too much, or RSI or whatever. While doctors have all those medical specializations and different roles and employers.
> doctor
Rigorous formal education, multiple rigorous exams, then years of shadowing and training. I went through this process, and tech interviews are a breeze by comparison.
I think he meant - what's the interview process for a doctor while switching jobs.
That's presumably what he meant but the response is highly relevant nonetheless. Comparing credentialed and noncredentialed professions is apples to oranges here because the credentialed professions effectively consist of pools of prescreened candidates. Among those, MDs in particular have an absolutely grueling process before they can get started. Imagine if your surgeon (versus backend dev) was proud of being self taught.
The short interview time helps keeping the interview process focused on high signal questions/discussions. That is better than a 1h where 1/3 of the process is a bunch of soft balls.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
I believe they optimize for fairness and consistency. They interview a huge number of people from very different backgrounds so they need a standardized process. It's not perfect but I can understand the logic. And there's team matching phase if the candidate pass the interview, it's not a random allocation.
This was exactly my experience too. The interviewer seemed more focused on checking boxes on the grading rubric than actually understanding the design discussion. They barely engaged with alternative approaches.
The interviewer was also very hard for me to understand, which made the interview harder than it should have been.
I am ESL too, so this is not about someone’s background. The problem is communication in an interview where both sides need to understand each other clearly.
From what I have seen on Blind, others have had similar experiences.
Last time I talked them they also wanted an NDA just to interview, which was just insulting and dumb so I kept my existing big tech job instead
What is your point exactly lol. You'd prefer longer interviews? More, less?
Isn't this the same idea of the old Roman decimation.
Firing 10% of their workforce on the one hand. Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other. Get fired or get tracked. Well, isn't that convenient...
Introducing the tracking in such a public manner is probably a way to drive voluntary redundancies as it encourages people to leave.
This is my thought as well. Fewer severance packages.
I wonder if in a parallel universe without the extremely stupid metaverse sidequest this could have been prevented.
I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.
The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.
inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.
Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "central banks got inflation so wrong the last time"? You mean Covid or 2008?
Why would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.
90% of employees aren't getting laid off and continue to earn top of market pay. Even if you think layoffs are distributed randomly (they aren't), that has positive EV.
Because they offer an attractive job/package relative to other opportunities... same as any other job people take.
Because in the current job market many job seekers will accept 1st offer after spending months looking for a job without any offers.
Facilitates legal immigration. At least that was my case (not at Meta thankfully).
Making it 2-5 years there sounds like reasonable pile of money. And I don't think getting fired in one of these big layoff rounds is too big black mark.
I've not worked at Meta, but I was at a similar scale of company for 2 years before being let go. Once you factor in RSUs, they essentially paid double what I've ever made anywhere else. Knowing how volatile those sorts of positions can be, I just saved & invested all the extra, which worked out quite well.
During mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.
A couple reasons I would guess:
1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.
2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.
4. Layoffs let you cut by performance.
There's a fixed cost to every employee. Health care being the biggest, so you don't save 20% by dropping an employee to 4 days / week, even with a proportionate pay cut.
Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.
Because the stock market won't care about that.
You’d have to go company-wide to sync schedules and norms. Not just opt in. Many would not like a 20% pay cut. The best talent would disproportionately leave.
Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.
Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?
Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!
Because it isn’t scientific. It is about appeasing irrational investors who demand a blood sacrifice. This is why it is always a big even number, and not some carefully established number based on analysis of operational shortcomings.
I thought they were doing this in order to allocate funds for their multimillion acquisitions on their superintelligence labs?
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
There is nothing "cowardly" about it.
Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
What people dislike is the boom-bust cycle inherent to all levels of a market economy. During some years, these companies suck people up like a vacuum -- that can be bad if you're on the inside and all of a sudden the culture goes out the window, or if you're expected to onboard 3-4 people at the same time, or you end up with a reorg every quarter. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, companies shut down (non-backfill) hiring entirely and layoff huge percentages of the company, with no guarantee that you'll be safe just because you're doing a good job.
Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.
Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
Not saying you are wrong, but you could argue they made their big move with the Metaverse. Then again with those crazy AI contracts to ML people.
Maybe Meta missed on those big plays and now there’s too much pressure to make another.
I don’t know if I believe that, but worth considering
Pressure from whom? Mark Zuckerberg personally controls the majority of voting shares. He can do whatever he wants.
yeah, these big layoffs don't add up to me right now.
if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?
making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.
I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.
Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.
I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.
There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone.
Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China.
Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip.
Oh, and Europe can only do this stuff because of the USA military, by the way.
Is Meta innovative?
They make products, sure, but output isn't the same as innovation.
You heard it here first, Zuck and his peers are brave generals in the battle against the Y...Chinese Peril and we are all...cannon fodder, I guess.
You have brain poisoning from reading too much slop online.
>But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip
Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company
That obtained the cutting edge technology by buying an American company that had been founded to productize technology developed at an American defense laboratory based on a Japanese researcher’s work
You are forgetting 20 years and billions of dollars developing, in collaboration with research institutes like IMEC and funding from chipmakers like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.
But it doesn’t fit your ideological narrative of how innovation functions so…
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
AI isn't contributing to the layoffs though
It absolutely is. The funding for it, not the product itself.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
Toxic = green brokerage accounts for those in charge
It would also be green for everyone else's brokerage account.
A few% pump is only a salary replacement for the poly-millionaires. Not for "everyone else."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.
It would be better because it would create a more diverse work space where multiple employers complete for employees, instead of one company playing musical chairs with people
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
Literally not true. Some bets just don't work. If a company tries to enter some new market and fails, they may use a layoff.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
I mean, no company ever has solved that problem soooo
Well Apple seems to be able to largely avoid these staffing whiplash problems…
I mainly call them problems because hugely scaling your org up and down on a whim is extremely inefficient when your recruiting and onboarding costs are high. Surely it’s more wise to repurpose the people you already have unless you have no time horizon on appropriate new areas of R&D.
Sounds like a strategic mistake.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
Because hiring people and paying them a salary is somehow hurting those people?
No but purposely forcing economic hardship on people when you're one of the most profitable entities on earth will always be a shitty thing. I'm sorry but treating workers like replaceable cogs is disgusting behavior and I'm not shocked that big tech routinely turns to anti-worker devices to enforce control.
Nobody is forcing anything to happen. People chose to work there. They get paid a HUGE amount of money. Now their projects ended or whatever.
What world do you live in? Suicide? Crazy talk.
I'm not sure the 3 version of your account is going to fare better than the last[0] if you don't find a better way to contribute to the community.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=matchbok
Solid contribution!
That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.
found the ceo
With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you
Care to explain? Rather than these jugemental one-offs?
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
It's a failure, sure. But also a reality of every single company, ever. It's the nature of business.
And yeah, this approach to layoffs is sound. Been there, done that.
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
> profitable work for a set of people
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
Sadly a lot of people see profit as the only incentive.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
This is a very depressing and mediocre outlook on innovation and growth.
Based on your logic we should make it impossible to fire anybody. That surely will solve our problems, right?
I want a dynamic, innovative economy where anyone can find a job if they work hard. Not because the law says they can't be fired. How depressing.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
No, of course not. How silly. As an employee who's been laid off a couple times I greatly prefer an economy where it's easy to find a job.
If it's easy to find a job why would I care if I'm laid off? Just get another job.
I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.
Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months.
The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
Offshoring has been a common practice for decades, it works great for some functions and not great for others. Why would it suddenly have a massive uptick in 2027?
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
Hot take: their quality is possibly a reason these people were unable to leave their country in the first place.
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
Remote coordination tools are no longer utter dogshit.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
>Why is this time different?
The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.
AI: actually an indian
Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
I think this is broadly correct too.
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
> But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.
Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?
this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.
who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
That said, IMO they are right...
> They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter
Oh sure, but the MBAs running stuff don’t care about that. Their bonuses are tied to the now, so the system has optimized for that.
This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people.
They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.
I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.
The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...
When is it ok to lay people off?
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
BIG FAX
Imagine a world where people could just be happy with returns on investments. Even treasury bills.
Can't we all just be happy?
If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.
It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
It must be true what Schopenhauer said: "Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become."
If you make 900,000 but your rent and healthcare are 850000, how rich are you?
> It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains."
Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
I thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
> I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though.
That would be sad. I've never owned a Quest, but the technology is starting to be very impressive. I would consider buying a new generation one.
It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.
I wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
I think the Reuters article that preceded this said it would be 10% on 5/20, with more to come throughout 2026
10% May 10% November
Given the same trend at Oracle and Amazon (1), it seems large corporations are cutting costs ahead of bad news... and that news isn't about AI.
It is about AI. The news is "the AI is far less monetarily lucrative endeavour than we thought but don't worry, we already fired enough people to compensate for the loss"
... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month.
Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
Punchy FTW
From what I can tell, its more about cashflow - basically companies need to spend most of their revenue or be taxed on it - and you can buy only so many servers.
Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.
Does the Facebook corporate campus still have the Sun Microsystems logo on the reverse side? I hope these 10% see that and welcome its significance.
As of a few years ago, some of the restrooms in Classic still had purple and yellow tiles.
The clockwise swastika? Yeah
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/sun-microsystems-sign-at-...
Layoffs.fyi is not looking good right now.
but does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
The only part of Meta I care about is the PyTorch team. Are those people also being affected by this?
a bunch of them already left....
I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.
It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
Every time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves.
Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.
They are probably reacting to the general economy.
The scariest thing is that people with this amount of responsibility was caught by surprise.
Nice to see that decimation is back in style
With the way people get added and removed from big tech, why is having worked at these companies still considered a badge of honor?
I don’t know if it’s a badge of honor, but it’s definitely highly desirable because they pay a lot. The term FAANG was originally coined to group together extremely high paying companies.
Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.
Let me guess. Year of efficiency?
It’s being coined the decade of efficiency now.
I wonder if the quality of YC applications will go up as more engineers find themselves in need of a job.
It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.
This really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before.
I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.
I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.
in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.
If there's a number given, the reason is secondary.
A cut this big usually means the company let itself get too sprawling and is now correcting late. That does not make it less rough for the people getting hit, but it does make the move pretty unsurprising.
What happened to the metaverse ?I suspect maybe wasting all the resource wasn’t a good idea
The whole concept just didn't have any legs.
I came across this article recently and watching it play it out is wild: https://readuncut.com/the-survivors-paradox-how-layoffs-turn...
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
I remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.
Meta will go down in history as the quintessential case study of late stage capitalism. A company that has provided a consistently worse product over time and produced consistently less value over time to the detriment of both their users and employees, yet somehow gets consistently more profitable.
I'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once.
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
I guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
> I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time.
After the AI race and the large IPOs of 2026, this will be the case. The hiring pipeline will be a lot slower than 2021 and will be more controlled.
Again? Haven't there been waves of mass Meta layoffs already?
AI winter #3 incoming. Enjoy the cheep ram and gpus
I hope you're right. What my RAM cost me $130 last year is $650 last week. This is ridiculous.
Don't worry, these CRUD app software artisans will land on their feet somewhere.
Wonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.
I have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI!
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
one thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.
Systems are great, but the product has been very poor.
The real question for me is how the hell did this company reach $200 billion in annual revenue? Nothing about our economy makes any sense to me.
Something something ads
The firings will continue until morale improves.
Will Meta also cut down on their use of lobbyists, trying to mandate more age sniffing?
Something is seriously flawed here.
"letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here..." is a sacrifice Mark Zuckerberg is willing to make.
Everyone at Meta should know the score.
Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance.
Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.
> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.
(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
When Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
Layoffs are not the same as performance terminations
This is in addition to performance cutting just fyi. I get what you're saying but this isn't that
It's like the economy is struggling or something.
I bet they are worried about the class actions that the SC lawsuit opened up.
Neckbeards’rein is over!
and they're going to start monitoring employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI. good luck guys. save up aggressively now.
For years the advantage big tech had was that capital expenditure was minimal and now with every big tech company trying to become an AI company they’re blowing gobs of money on data centers and everything that goes inside of them.
AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.
Again??? Phew glad I don't work there. I hate that constant worry.
Programmers only or across the company?
They don't have 80k programmers. That's total staff
Never at the head... Although the fish begins to smell at the head, as we say here...
Re:
> If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad
> https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...
America is rich, but that money is spent on new problems we invented for ourselves. We subsidize farmers growing unhealthy foods, then subsidize buying those unhealthy foods through food stamps. Then we subsidize healthcare to address the consequences of extra obesity.
Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.
The richer a country becomes the more expensive everything gets.
The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.
Huh, did anything happen in 2020? I'm wracking my brains trying to think of anything.
As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.
Similarly, I roll my eyes when people still blame Ronald Reagan for the current homeless situation in California. There's been plenty of time to correct that mistake and well???
But honestly, IMO America has become a joyless, directionless dystopia of soma and bread and circuses in the middle of a geopolitical knife fight to define the 21st century and maybe even hit the singularity. I'm not happy with the current management, but it was the same unhappy bunch talked about here that decided by voting or opting not to vote that gave it a second shot. Kinda deserve this, no? If no, I'm all ears for your one weird trick to fix America, go for it!
Yeah I know, downvotes incoming for such heresy. If you don't pick a side, then what are you even doing?
It's the housing prices and the affordability of life in general. We are all debt slaves now. I am 100% using 2020 as an excuse because it broke the market and sent housing prices up 50%+ in 6 months.
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
On the contrary, 2020 permanently changed the nature of many of my relationships and the same is true of everybody I know
Pretty much. Lots of people who really were violently supportive of those measures will never admit to themselves what a horrible, entirely predictable mistake it all was.
It absolutely destroyed a ton of very good things, perhaps forever.
Yeah, also first thing I thought about. What a shit time altogether right now.
It's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.
That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...
There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. As I understand it, happiness increases for most people as their income increases. However, this doesn't mean that a person is happy overall since there are other factors. So, it's not that money can buy happiness in a binary sense, but it's a factor and often a significant one.
The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):
“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."
Money can’t buy happiness, but being broke will certainly make you unhappy
Money buys you Freedom. A much more general category theory type framing.
Money fills your Maslow. After that, you are responsible for your happiness. And there sure are a lot of rich people who aren't very happy.
Or as Daniel Tosh put it:
"It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"
These comment sections are getting more and more useless by the day.
Maybe not, but poverty definitely causes unhappiness
Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.
Not if you pop in to the HN thread for that article, funnily enough.
It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.
It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).
Maybe but this happiness chart seems to reflect economic recessions (including some unofficial ones)
The thing is that Americans don’t have much money. A few billion and millionaires skew the numbers horribly.
The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.
And little money buys even less. What’s your point?
Not really the standard line anymore. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...
I have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
> With time, their intentions have become much more clear
Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.
you would think being valued at billions of dollars for over 20 years now would give you at least a little validation
Funny thing about internal work is that it cannot happen via changing one’s external circumstances. And it’s super tempting to numb it out with status symbols.
The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)
One can only hope that he just fully turns to philanthropy a la Bill Gates sooner rather than later, and gives up trying to "connect" people (which somehow always turns into privacy nightmares).
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?
Sort of.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
Britannica:
> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Wikipedia @ 3:
> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."
[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
While we're doing historical quotes:
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg
I think the “face book” was used prior to the name of the company for what you would call a college student directory. Like a yearbook.
> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties
Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!
I’m pretty sure she’s ditching him
Meta products are pretty good specifically if you're a business owner who wants to advertise his product.
Now? NOW? Not 15 years ago?
Its pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.
This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.
Going back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this).
Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.
Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?
> their intentions have become much more clear
The hunter Biden laptop story was censored - including in private messages - and Charlie Kirk was shown being shot in the neck to death to children.
There's nothing else to say.
Well, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live.
It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
> just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in? erlang, tcl and perl?
You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.
You could work in Erlang, PHP, and C++ at Meta ;)
I'm still partial to Tcl from years in EDA - sign me up..
Just use lisp.
Haskell!
Now that I think about it, the Haskell Report did come out in '98...
Hey, erlang is brilliant
Is this what they mean to "Feel the AGI?"
AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.
> AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta
Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?
Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
Asocial Grumpy Interests?
Would it be Mark's cloned AI who will call everyone 'personally' to share this news?
I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.
This isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.
Ah yes so 8 billion (at least) companies are supposed to pull financing out of their rear-ends? You've re-discovered freelancing!
So is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?