I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.
The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.
I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.
I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are.
From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good.
I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
> People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection.
Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS.
My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first.
NSA is also probably a great place for hackers, but their mission is trash. Someone once drew a 2x2 grid for me. One dimension was competence, and the other was right mission. I was then asked what is the most dangerous square on the grid. The answer is competent with the wrong mission.
You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.
90% of the work they do is purely defensive. The offensive work targets bad actors and foreign governments/militaries, compared to other countries intelligence services that also engage in economic espionage.
In a perfect world they wouldn't need to exist at all. But we don't live in that world.
You contradict yourself. If you don't know what they are doing behind the curtain, how can you be so confident that 90% of what they do is defensive?
They don't work within the bounds of the law and constitution, and thus their mission is bad by my simple definition. I don't need to know what they do in secret.
People with clearances also have huge incentives to lie to themselves about the decency of what they're doing. One of the main thing secrecy protects, is such people's morale.
You know what they say, "if they cheat with you, they cheat on you too". A liar is a liar. If your job involves seeking people's trust in order to betray it, you're not very smart if you think your boss wouldn't betray you.
Are you really unaware of this? It was the top story in the country for months. A documentary about it even won an Oscar. As someone else has already replied, we are talking about the vast domestic spying apparatus that Snowden revealed, including the PRISM and xkeyscore programs. They are unquestionably unconstitutional and illegal. Anyone that suggested they existed before the reveal was an insane paranoid nutjob. Furthermore, the fact that there was virtually nothing done about this severe crime by the rest of the government indicates that the entire system is a farce. The NSA is still doing the same thing as before, and probably more.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the whole Snowden series of events. Spying every citizen, is wrong. Also, I'm seeing the effects of something similar in my country, where this sort of spying is used to curb free speech, dissent, and completely kill the very essence of democracy.
It is wrong, and there has to be better ways. I don't remember the exact procedure, but NSA didn't need much clearance to spy on any American citizen.
Given the natural opaqueness of the organization I would likely fundamentally disagree with a great deal more of what the NSA mission is if I had any knowledge of it.
They also basically have zero real congressional oversight.
And just because 90% of what they do is purely defensive doesn't make the 10% any more acceptable (x key score, data mining, hooking into Google, etc.)
> You don't agree with the tiny sliver of the NSA mission that you know about.
Strong "trust me bro" vibes.
Hand-waving and baseless assertions don't contradict the fact that it conducts activities against it's country's most basic founding principles and laws.
This regrettable line of argument is in line with blindly defending the police in spite of all the police murders, abuse, and outright corruption.
I never had much complaint about Facebook's engineering culture, it seems like they get more right than the other giant tech companies.
Facebook's failures were always with business morals and product direction, and it's the latter that they really really screwed up on this time with the attempt to turn their cash cow into TikTok and the investment into the metaverse.
"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.
Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable.
TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
Maybe it got to his head, like child movie stars that never enjoyed a normal childhood? Being a hacker is no guarantee of being a well adapted adult, specially if your hobby transforms into an international behemoth in just 15 years.
He was 19 there right? Thankfully I've seen people who were writing keyloggers at that age be very decent, good people, so that article isn't an indictment of who he is now - plenty of things to look at more recent than that. It would be really nice to hear him candidly express how he fucked up with the rohingya, and content promotion/moderation.
Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.
I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.
However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
I don't think this is a "SV techbro" thing. In the 80s (when I was in college), "hacker" had a connotation of someone who built cool things in software, usually outside the "normal" approach. It was sort of the opposite of what eventually became software engineering - quick and dirty "tricks" that explored the edges of operating system. We looked up to hackers as repositories of esoteric knowledge. Long hair and hiking boots were common.
Certainly, some of what they hacked on might be related to security. Or maybe they wrote little games. Or threw together a curses-based interface to the Unix shell. Or some other cool utility.
As I recall, there was a concerted attempt to distinguish between people who exploited security vulnerabilities (aka "crackers") from people who could quickly build these useful things ("hackers").
I feel like the modern use of hacker (ala "hackathon") is actually pretty well in line with the usage I grew up with.
I know but it certainly was one of the most prominent names when I was googling for best hackers ( :-) ) back in 2005.
Still, I prefer having someone like Kevin in mind when saying the word instead of any other desperate "growth hacker" that is trying to mislead VCs with their trite ideas that will forever change tech the way we know it.
>I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
Your claim is that solving a hard math problem (which takes smarts for sure!) is more "hacker" than bulding a web app (Zck) or an operating system (Gates)?
I understand why you would think that's what I meant to say, but no.
If we aren't talking about computer security, hacker imo would be someone with remarkable technical/scientific contributions. Indeed, there may be some personal bias for math hackers (cryptographers, theorists) but then their skillsets with the respective programmer ones converge.
> ...he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back...
Article says his paper on it was published in 1979, which was 43 years ago. I wouldn't call that 'a few years back'. I interpreted your comment as he took a break from his philanthropy to come up to an efficient solution to the problem like 3-5 years ago.
No problem. It's still cool, still makes him a hacker, just slightly less impressive than if he had done it while juggling the needs of his Foundation.
> Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.
Spot on.
> However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years back by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.
Gates personally wrote the embedded BASIC interpreter for the TRS-80 Model 100, among other things. It isn't valid to question his technical "hacker cred."
Pick a different line of attack if you want to slag Gates; there are several others to choose from.
I worked at Ticketmaster when covid first hit. Since the beginning, management has always been positive and re-iterating that the cash reserves are substantial and the company can endure the loss of revenue. Then the first layoff hit. Same re-iteration. We are good. Then came the second layoff.
Salesforce announced their largest profits ever the same week they announced their first layoffs ever, I believe. The company, as they said, was in great shape.
Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.
> He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
This. Yes.
Facebook came within a whisker of establishing themselves as the central communications hub for the planet. They ruined their own business from greed. Grew it huge (instead of long steady growth) and it has collapsed.
Greed
It would not have been a good thing if they became "... He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around. " so we are all better off, probably.
I hope the story of Zuck and FB become business school lessons on "greed is bad and will destroy you". Not what they taught me at business school (I was there in 2008) but they should have
There's a classic Tim O'Reilly line about the importance of "creating more value than you capture."
Early Facebook was very good at this! I used their ads platform a lot in 2009-10 to raise engagement for a small non-profit that I was helping. The Facebook experience was simple, easy and great value for the money.
And then the ads ecosystem gradually got "optimized." Our nonprofit still kept using it for a while, but it was clear that the focus no longer was in providing great experiences for us -- or our intended audience. Pricing went up; as did efforts to steer me into packages that worked better for FB than me. It was as if someone said: "Stop creating 2x the value you capture. Move toward 1.01x"
FB made many billions over the next decade. But it drained the ecosystem's goodwill. Old-economy industrial giants usually took 80-100 years to paint themselves into this corner. Kind of amazing that FB has done it in less than 20.
How exactly were they greedy in particular? To me it seems they are doing what every other company is, I’m unaware of Meta engaging in anything greedy that is out of the ordinary, is that not the case (genuinely asking) and why do you think that is tied to these layoffs?
Zuckerberg was hauled in to US Congress more than once and was chastised for all kinds of wrongdoing. E.g. spreading foreign propaganda in US elections, encouraging extremist violence. FB chase for user engagement has made it into the modern version of a gladiatorial freak show. If broadcasting two one legged gladiators fight to the death will draw eyeballs, Zuckbot will do it.
They tried to connect people, but that didn't make money. So they pivoted to ads, but that didn't bring steady growth. So they fueled participation with tools like the Like button which stoked conflict from the start. Had they been cautious about their steps at any point then problems could have been avoided.
Greed and arrogance. Zuckerberg doesn't respect his users and everyone knows it. Eventually you break trust to a degree where it can't be repaired--no "investments" or "metrics" or "new offerings" will fix it.
You can fool some of the people some of the time...
This is the key thing that people need to realize. Being a very nice person is simply not enough to be a good person. Hitler was famously kind to his dogs and domestic staff. He even personally intervened to save Ernst Hess, his Jewish CO from WWI. Big-time "but I have black friends" vibes.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
I don't care if you give your employees ice cream with sprinkles and a 40oz every day. If you say shit like this you deserve to have your entire company decompose slowly
Not a great look to introduce sexism into the conversation. Nor labeling grown adults as names we call little children.
Sheryl was given credit for creating current facebook culture. Before Sheryl employees had unaudited to your private photos for example. Are you going to say she deserves no credit and we better credit the boys instead? If not then she must accept any failures that come from that culture.
I'm pretty sure Scorpio's lair of paradise was inspired by Microsoft in Redmond. In the 90s, it was legendarily posh with how well the people were treated. Nobody in corporate america had that quality of fitness centers, on-site cafes, etc.
Google was the next to up the ante in mid-2000s with things like daycare, a ball pit, food, drycleaning. All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.
I don't believe MS ever had onsite fitness centers. Employees got subsidized memberships to offsite gyms, but the only things onsite were/are playfields and showers for bike commuters, etc.
Food might have been okay by 90s standards, but was pretty mediocre overall until ~2010 when they started redoing all the cafes to have a higher quality food. Still, it was slightly subsidized but not free and many, many employees went offsite or brought food from home.
> All equally mind-blowing to the populace who expected a workplace would have an elevator, and a coffee machine nobody refills.
There was a "coffee pool", where you joined to contribute a dollar or something a week and someone would buy the supplies.
At big companies there were often food trucks. Also a cafeteria, which probably sucked. There might also be a small library where you could hang out and read relevant trade journals.
You can't be serious. I think it's rare for a company to treat developers poorly but that's beside the point.
Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides.
This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
He is not perfect but the only person I can think of is Sal Khan of khanacademy. His content is completely free and provides free prep for SAT and other subjects.
I'd be interested in the stats, but my perception is that he (and his products) are much more well-known now than before. I always saw his foray into politics as a very aggressive niching strategy. He saw Trump's momentum and hitched his wagon.
He might have lost Costco and their low margins, but he picked up an army of high-margin D2C sympathizers who have been shown to be generous with their money (if the cause is right).
Lindell just wanted to sell to gullible Trunp fans and make himself a celebrity and power broker for a fascist. The good of the country wasn't a factor.
This is legal fiction that has no bearing in the kinds of subjects that it often gets brought up in. Simply put, those responsible for a company (e.g. officers of a corporation) have a fiduciary duty towards its owners (e.g. the shareholders), and it means that the owners would have legal recourse against the officers if they were provably pissing money away on things that don't benefit the company at all.
That latter part is a high bar and critically does not mean that they are, for example, legally required to prioritize quarterly profits over the long-term success of the company or to pay employees as little as possible, as is often mentioned. It just means that officers must take action that furthers the interests of the company in the way that they prudently and reasonably see fit.
> legally required to prioritize quarterly profits over the long-term success of the company or to pay employees as little as possible, as is often mentioned.
Obviously this isn't a legal requirement, but pretty much every CEO would be out of a job if they choose country over company. Shareholders are generally not interested in furthering national geopolitics.
> Shareholders are generally not interested in furthering national geopolitics.
I don't think that's true. Look at all the corporate action about Ukraine for an example of interest in geopolitics - lots of donations, public statements, etc. And then there's companies actually in Ukraine, or next door - when politics gets unstable enough, contributing to the stability/security of the country over the short term of the company looks like the right move. Evaluating when that point is reached is probably about as contentious as any other decision in politics.
This is a popular deflection of responsibility that is, in fact, entirely false.
You are required to abide by shareholder decisions at official meetings, and generally not act against shareholder interests, but there is absolutely no law stating that you must act to maximize shareholder value. (And it's a damn good thing that's the case; things are bad enough as it is.)
You're required to put forth a good faith effort to act in the shareholders interests, but no court would say choosing country over company breaks that law. The CEO would certainly be fired though, so it still won't happen.
If the majority of Facebook's shareholders wanted to liquidate the company and blow the proceeds hosting the biggest ice cream party in the world the executives are supposed to make that happen.
It's not about producing profits it's about doing what the shareholders want.
Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is about money in the linked article:
"Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "
In fact, this is one of those truisms about the "down" side of the classical business cycle - that recessions partly function as an excuse to cut inefficiencies. How accurate this truism is, I don't know.
This is a lean period, and the fat that meta had enabled them to cut fat rather than cut muscle or bone, making them now more lean, but still strong. The fat they had served its purpose similar to how fat serves its purpose during famine.
and in modern terms it makes you a social pariah. Really though trimming the fat probably refers to a butcher removing the unwanted flesh from meat, not losing weight.
Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.
But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:
1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);
2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.
This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.
But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.
But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
> Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
I've said this same thing a thousand times. It's not lack of content or use-cases killing AR - the tech just isn't there yet. Form factor is one of the very pressing issues. It seems inevitable that the tech will get solved, but it's not clear whether it's a couple years or a couple decades.
I feel like if we do see VR going mainstream it’ll be something like the background screens used in filming the Mandalorian. Big wall displays / projections that adjust what they’re displaying based on viewer location. All the viewer would need to wear is 3d theater glasses.
Drawing an opaque, dark line. Almost all these screens are adding light to an existing scene. The only way they can make black is to just not project light, which means you need to have a dark background to actually show dark.
Ever view a projector outside in a bright sunny day?
My Facebook interview process was not only more professional, objective, and relevant than any other, it was also actually enjoyable, as I said elsewhere.
Facebook (and social media in general) has made the world a more divided place full of sadder and angrier people. He runs a company that optimizes for that scenario while accruing unimaginable sums of capital, and he doubled down with Meta. Hmm I wonder why some people are not fans.
Social media is just a tool for political atomization.
People were already angry on AM radio and cable "news" channels. Gerrymandering works on political maps and demographics - politicians have figured that by boxing voters into bins and away from the center, they can have their votes forever.
It's not social media, it's the internet. Whether on Facebook or reddit or Twitter, you can find a group of people who reinforce whatever bad ideas you have. This creates echo chambers wherever you go. If you think the world is flat or run by the illuminati you can find 10000 people to reinforce that belief. But it's also great to be able to find communities for whatever niche hobby you might have , and it's spreading real knowledge faster than ever in history.
Same boat as you. I understand the privacy concerns and the fear that Facebook is changing society for the worse, all of this is worth discussing but I don't see it as an evil company trying to actively ruin people.
Truly excited to see how far they can push VR and AI.
> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?
> As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly the response is "Yes, but what does that mean?"
Taking responsibility means just that. It means saying you fucked up and not blaming others for your failures. It doesn't mean that self immolation follows soon after.
I move on from bad breaks pretty quickly but there are few things that I've held on to. Things that still burn years later and all of them involve refusals to accept responsibility. Hearing someone say: "Yep, it was me. I fucked you and I'm sorry. Here's what I can offer." isn't nothing.
Layoffs suck but the rate of hiring in big companies wasn't sustainable. A correction is here. It's temporary, but, it's real.
If you've tried to hire outside of FAANG over the past decade you'd know one thing: FAANG is hoarding talent. Every developer I've really wanted to hold on to has gone to a big tech company.. I can't blame them. But, here's the thing, so have many of the contractors that I didn't end up hiring for very good reasons.
These layoff messages, down to the structure and content, all sound the same because PR people follow best practices just like everyone else. You wouldn't ask why all Redux or Angular apps use similar patterns.. They're using patterns, that's what patterns are for.
Taking responsibility is more than just admitting reponsibility. It is also about bearing the consequences. Such as, if you broke something, you fix it. If you lost something, you pay up to replace it. Or similar. A manager usually can't fix a problem themselves though. But unless they pay a cost for their mistakes, they are not really taking responsibility. Then they just pay lip service to the word.
What specific consequence would you expect him to bear? It's not like there's any meaningful financial consequence that he would actually feel. He ain't gonna know what food insecurity or the specter of medical bankruptcy feels like. Should he impose some consequence on himself, like he only gets to spend $1 million on leisure over the next year?
I'm no fan of Zuck, but what did he do in this case but create a company that provided a lot of jobs, then made some bad forecasting decisions that resulted in losing some of those jobs?
Plenty of CEOs have blamed the economy, the pipeline, the customers, the competition, the weather, etc. He's accepting he made some decisions that over-extended the company and as a result they have to make difficult layoffs. (Which has happened at every company I've been a part of and is happening at many other companies just in the past week.)
There is always employee turnover in business, this is normal and employees are never guaranteed lifetime employment or the CEO quits too, that's silly. Standard part of all contracts with US companies is an at will clause stating that employees can be terminated at will without reason except for an illegal one. The people losing their jobs should thank Zuck for the time he did employ them, the chance he took on them, and also for the generous severance packages he's giving them during a general economic downturn.
Maybe he could see that these people all receive the same salary they did at Facebook until they can find another job? No idea how the math would work out on that, but that seems to be the kind of "taking responsibility" that would actually be meaningful.
In a case like this, I don't think the point should be whether Zuckerberg "would actually feel" a consequence: it should be whether the people getting laid off—as in, the ones who were wronged—can feel it.
> Maybe he could see that these people all receive the same salary they did at Facebook until they can find another job?
If you mean unlimited, this seems like an unreasonable expectation. FB employees receive a 4 month severance package, 4 months should be plenty of time to find a job for a developer/office worker.
I read 4 months of severance, plus 2 weeks per year of service (likely up to a maximum?), 6 months of health insurance paid, plus job placement services from a 3rd-party vendor.
I dunno, think Zuck losing however may billions of dollars of net worth is a pretty stiff consequence. He didn’t have to take responsibility but did. He also literally paid for the consequences.
Is it, though? On paper, I've lost about 35% of my net worth in the recent market downturn, and it hasn't affected my life even the slightest. Maybe it's different if it's your own company and your ego is tied up in the stock price, but some numbers in a brokerage account going down doesn't feel like a "stiff consequence" to me.
A billionaire that looses half their net-worth is still a billionaire. They still hold more money than you can dream of, they still hold more power then you can imagine.
It is not the same for a billionaire to loose money as it is for you or me. To take a concrete example. Elon Musk could just close down Twitter right now, and waste away his 44 bn USD he spent on it. After that squander, he would still be the richest man on the planet.
Right but that’s got nothing to with consequences. You’re annoyed that the consequence is… the consequence. Instead of what? Some abstract punitive ideal?
You are correct on technicality, but you know I was speaking generally. Even so, a millionaire that still has 500 millions after they seriously screw up, still has a ton of money and power. The consequence is still minuscule next to me loosing half my money.
A real consequence would be them loosing everything except 5000 USD
idk. If this many people were to loose their jobs under my authority, I think I would at the very least loose my job. But perhaps there also ought to be a class action law suite, workers should be able to sue a negligent business leaders that costs them their jobs, similar how a shareholder can sue for lost profits.
But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
Such a policy would mean that the consequences of a risk going wrong vastly outweigh the benefits of success.
That would incentivize extremely risk-averse decisions by business leaders and lead to society-wide stagnation. The result would be far more suffering overall.
I think that doesn’t need to be a bad thing. This all depends on what risk behavior does in a societal context and how much a particular leader is actually contributing to the business.
We actually have a reason to believe that the standard risk attracted business is a net-negative for society. These businesses tend to rely on government bailouts when their risky behavior doesn’t work out, or they lay off a large number of people, or they cause massive environmental damage, etc. I much prefer a business that plays it safe and doesn’t risk our environment and our economy while maximizing the profits they give to their shareholders.
Secondly, there is no reason to believe that a CEO is any sort of supreme decision maker of a company. Perhaps a democratized workplace—where the workers have a say in whether the business should engage in a risky behavior—is better at evaluating the risk. If that is the case then a CEO dictator might not want to lead the business into a risky endeavor at since they might get sued if it goes wrong, but workers who have only their jobs to loose might vote to do exactly that.
I find the society-wide stagnation prediction lacking in imagination.
You'd have to prove negligence, which is practically impossible in this case - he bet on some technology, it didn't work out, that happens thousands of times all over. Also, I know this is not something you'd like to hear, but you are not entitled to be employed at any particular firm, and company owner does not owe you a fiduciary duty to continue your employment. Also, FB employees hardly could complain about being treated poorly - I heard 500k+ compensation packages for engineers aren't out of the ordinary there. Tell it to somebody who works in a factory for 50k and see if they would think you were mistreated, after earning more in you short while than some earn in their whole life.
> similar how a shareholder can sue for lost profits.
Only if there's negligence or fraud, which you have about zero chance to prove in this case.
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad, should probably loose all their wealth, like 100%.
Would you agree to lose 100% of you money each time you make a mistake? If not, why should he?
> If this many people were to loose their jobs under my authority, I think I would at the very least loose my job.
This doesn't seem logical. Companies aren't some static things. Especially social media companies, which usually have very short lives. A corrective, appropriate, action, in response to a changing market, could very easily be a reduction in headcount.
All evidence suggests Facebook has no future [1].
> But honestly a business leader that screws up so bad
What's your metric for screwing up? Is it short, medium, or long term? Should short term goals/profits be the only goal of a company?
> What's your metric for screwing up? Is it short, medium, or long term? Should short term goals/profits be the only goal of a company?
As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker. A company screws up if it fails to bring profits to the workers. Laying off 11,000 workers certainly falls under a big screw up by that metric. I know companies—such as charity/non-profits exists who have humanitarian goals, or even amusement, as their goals, however I don’t see Facebook there.
But we live in a capitalist society and most companies’ goals are profits for their shareholders. Facebook seems to have screwed that goal up as well. And instead of letting the person who lead the company into this failure pay the price of failing, they take it down on the workers... This seems quite unfair, and is even illegal in many (most?) countries.
> As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker.
I can't extract any meaning from this. Could you be more specific?
Maybe a scenario will help. What if the company becomes not profitable enough (there can be reason's that don't require leadership fault), and it will fail unless workers are let go? Do you let it fail, causing all to lose their jobs, or do you trim the fat, allowing some to continue?
I would assume you would want to look at the whole, more than the individual.
Please note the above happened to a company I worked for, during the last recession, and it was, very objectively, not the fault of the leadership.
In Facebooks case their owner is worth so much, he could give every layed of worker a million USD and it would only cost him a fraction of what he’s net worth. I don’t know your scenario but the recession was for sure a special time. Now companies are seeing record profits and are blundering it in stupid endeavors like the Metaverse, so I don’t think your case applies at all. But in any case, other countries—outside of a global recession—have laws against mass layoffs, companies usually declare bankruptcy if they are at this point, and their respective governments starts a salary insurance program where they pay the workers that lost their jobs for a set amount of time. If the bankruptcy is bad, and the leaders manage to take some money from it, they will go to court for the damages the bankruptcy causes.
If I try very hard to tease out the answer to my question, it seems that you're suggesting that bankruptcy would be preferred to layoffs, with the government providing temporary relief after everyone loses their jobs. This seems like a net negative, compared to some people losing their jobs, and the company possibly moving on to great success, with those remaining, and future, employees.
I apologize if I interpreted your response incorrectly, but it was, again, very indirect.
The purpose of my question was to help me understand your perspective, and to help you present some meaning to your statement "As a worker my metric is first and foremost about the worker."
The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business that provides a similar service (maybe even buying the intellectual property and/or branding from the bankrupt estate) under a completely new leadership. Or if the business isn’t actually providing anything useful (like many on this thread are suggesting is the case with facebook) then these workers are probably better off finding new jobs (after being compensated from the failing business).
Facebook is extremely rich, facebook can afford to break apart their business and give part of it to those 11,000 workers. Heck facebook can even afford to keep those 11,000 workers earning 6 digits while being tasked with doing nothing. In either case, it would be in the interest of the worker. What is not in the interest of a worker is having a leadership that makes bad decisions, wastes the time of the workers, and then lays them off. This kind of behavior should not be rewarded.
I can only, as charitably as possible, interpret that as a confirmation that bankruptcy is preferred.
> The workers don’t vanish with the business. If the government provides enough relief these workers can organize around a new business
Starting from scratch is rarely an efficient, or possible, solution, especially anything with IP involved.
> after being compensated from the failing business
Were they not compensated for their time during employment? Wouldn't being compensated for the failing business require knowing the future? I'm not asking this negatively, I'm just trying to understand perspective. Have you ever worked for a startup, or been involved in a small/medium business that's not-yet profitable?
I think you would find extreme risk aversion in a system implemented like you describe, if the only option were continuous success or quick failure. Are there any areas of the world that prefer bankruptcy over headcount reduction, where we could look at the statistics?
For a CEO, the next step is trying to get the business back on track and restore stock price. I think that his crazy to think Zuckerberg will not try to do that.
Wouldn't that mostly impact just the executives and not Mark Zuckerberg himself? He did seem to get a 23 million dollar bonus last year, but that's peanuts compared to his net worth.
There was a time when investors/the board could fire a CEO making terrible decisions (like sinking billions into white whale VR projects), but no longer.
> There was a time when investors/the board could fire a CEO making terrible decisions
This is still by far the most common case, and in fact it is probably becoming more common because large index funds have recently increased requirements related to ownership share structuring (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/08/05/sp-and-ftse-russe...).
In this specific case though, the investors knew that Zuck had complete control and they decided to invest regardless, so I do not have any sympathy for their complaints.
If a mistake I made resulted in thousands of people losing their jobs who wouldn’t consider it? At the very least I wouldn’t lie about “taking responsibility” if I had no intention.
The only mistake was hiring too many people in the first place, way way beyond what was really necessary. I suppose that gave them false hopes of being forever employed by Fb, aka millionaires in the making. I know being fired stings like hell, but it just a job, a limited time contract. Hopefully some good startups will come out of this whole situation.
What does zuck losing his job look like? He just stops collecting a salary? His stock stops vesting? Does he have to relinquish all his ownership? I can’t imagine anything short of that would affect him in any appreciable way, and that doesn’t seem like a reasonable result of “getting fired.” If I got fired today, all my stock would still belong to me.
> Admit that you either no longer know how to steer the ship
This makes the assumption that the current path was the only, and best, path, and that the CEO doesn't see a better path in the distance, or some danger immediately ahead.
Most of the big tech companies were made by people who ignored the crowds yelling at them to keep going straight. And, many of the failed behemoths of today did just that.
I've called this the public apology ritual. In the minds of the angry mob, the person is irredeemable and should suffer the worst fate (in our society that might entail being "canceled"... shunned).
They don't WANT to forgive them, or provide them with any redemption. Regardless of the apology, you will use it to push back further. Look for any hole in the apology to point to. If that fails, criticize the apology for being too late, or only to save face... in any case, make sure to proclaim that you're even more angry after the apology.
I'm not saying people should never apologize, but I get sick of this whole routine and all the acting. People will always just do what they want and it will just be based on a knee jerk sense of how much they like you.
I think people are forgetting that a severance package is not a legal requirement, and that this one is actually pretty generous. "I fucked up, here's what I can offer" is more or less what this letter is saying, but it's just not drawing the connection between the two parts in a way that makes sense to people.
People can disagree about whether the package is satisfactory, but that's completely beside the point. The severance package is the make good Zuckerberg is offering: it is an expense his company is paying when they do not have to.
It is the implied answer to the question "Oh yeah? How is he taking responsibility?" Argue about whether it's good enough, but it is an answer.
> Remember a few years ago when people were asking "Why can't people just say they made a mistake and own up to it instead of shifting blame?" Now that people are taking responsibility for mistakes publicly
But they aren't, this isn't “taking responsibility”, this is just following the latest spin doctor trend in public communication.
Taking responsibility for a failure means stepping down.
Admitting mistakes and taking responsibility are two different things. People were calling for the first, not the second.
What they're complaining about is that Zuckerberg can't take responsibility here, it's too late (being responsible would have been gambling less), but he is claiming he will which is more obvious marketing speak (sounds good, doesn't make any sense).
Real numbers here: $250k for a mid-level UX designer and $575k (base comp) for an Angular dev. That's expensive. And, depending on the candidate, not worth it.
There's a lot of reality outside of FAANG and finance.
Nothing short of seppuku streamed live via Oculus will redeem the honor of a business guy putting his honest level best effort behind some business things that didn't make as much money as he hoped.
It means he's not trying to scapegoat a VP or the board or say "It's not my fault nobody foresaw this economy."
It doesn't mean anything in terms of action or "self-punishment" but nor should it. The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see.
I'm no fan of the guy, but some people won't even take responsibility verbally. So at least he's not descending that low.
And the severance seems decent so it all seems to be handled fine. Not sure what more you're looking for.
> The dude has already lost many more billions of dollars than you or I will ever see
Those are mostly virtual dollars and he has a lot more real ones in his account, while I agree that whatever he does to "punish himself" will be practically meaningless it might have some symbolic meaning. Lowering his and senior management salaries and incentives won't save jobs but will give a better image of the crisis
His salary is already only $1/yr, and has been since 2013. So there's nothing to do there.
And lowering the salaries of senior management doesn't make any sense. They're paid market rates. If you punitively cut their compensation in half or something, they'll just leave for another company that does pay market rate. You can't force them to stick around and be "punished", that's not how salaried employment in a market economy works.
Also, punishing management goes against the idea that he's taking all the responsibility here. Wouldn't that just be scapegoating?
> His salary is already only $1/yr, and has been since 2013. So there's nothing to do there.
That's a joke, a tax dodge, a PR gag, a farce. There's nothing fiscally responsible about it. Taking financial responsibility, if such a thing exists, would involve giving up his equity comp or even some of his holdings. Give it to the employees whose careers you've disrupted through your bad business decisions. That's responsibility.
"Market rates" is likewise a joke.
A: "Market rates for corporate executives are obscene."
B: "They're paid market rates, what's the problem?"
You're right, he has given up equity comp. I was curious so went looking...
Based on the latest proxy, he does not take any equity compensation. He only gets his $1 salary, a corporate private jet for business travel and $10M / year "to cover additional costs related to his and his family's personal security. This allowance is paid to Mr. Zuckerberg net of required tax withholdings, and Mr. Zuckerberg must apply the net amount towards additional personnel, equipment, services, residential improvements, or other security-related costs."
Just so everyone is clear here, $1 salary + travel/security rounds out to $27,000,001 for 2021.
Additionally, travel/security don't seem to have any hard spending limit and alleviates Zuck's personal tax liability. (by $27M anyway)
Per the filing you linked:
" Mr. Zuckerberg uses private aircraft for personal travel in connection with his overall security program (including, beginning in 2022, a private aircraft that is indirectly and wholly owned by Mr. Zuckerberg and operated by an independent charter company). On certain occasions, Mr. Zuckerberg may be accompanied by guests when using private aircraft. "
"the costs of Mr. Zuckerberg's security program vary from year to year depending on requisite security measures, his travel schedule, and other factors."
There is generally very little that is weasely "implied" in SEC filings. The company is representing those facts to shareholders (maybe even more so in a proxy filing, which is what shareholders must read before voting at their annual general meeting). So every single word is very heavily scrutinized to avoid ambiguity, with the text remaining mostly constant over the years except for what really needs to be updated to avoid any inadvertent change in meaning.
The excerpt I quoted was written for a different purpose (namely to explain the $10M / year and whether the compensation committee deems it appropriate), so perhaps you feel that the language is somewhat vague as far as answering your question goes. I actually think it's pretty clear as it ends with
> "has requested to receive only $1 in annual salary and does not receive any bonus payments, equity awards, or other incentive compensation."
> "2021 Equity Awards. Mr. Zuckerberg did not receive any additional equity awards in 2021 because our compensation, nominating & governance committee believed that his existing equity ownership position sufficiently continued to align his interests with those of our shareholders."
It seems fair. If executives were making the decisions that landed the company in a difficult situation, it's only fair they bear the consequences of their failure. Besides, it's difficult to empathize when their compensation packages are, while market rate, significantly higher than the engineers who do their bidding. I wouldn't be surprised if the fraction of executives that would be able to retire at this point was much higher than the one for engineers, which is likely much higher than the one for non-engineering individual contributors.
Also remember that since it's executives who set executive compensation, there is some incentive to inflate it.
> And their careers have been more disrupted than some random software engineer's career.
Were they really? Did they just lose their jobs and are they now underwater on mortgages that their families can no longer afford without that income? How many executives lives were "disrupted" worse than that? Because I'm talking about a significant fraction of 11k people that you're dismissing as "some random software engineer."
Need to point out that this “there’s nothing you can do, all the incentives align to him keeping the wealth while others suffer” is the sort of dunking on capitalism that leads people towards socialism
We’ve tried it, it was far worse. There are still people alive who were there, maybe all the younger people advocating socialism should chat with them?
Europe is far worse? The New Deal was far worse? We’ve decided to go down the cyberpunk corporate hellscape path since the 80s and post 2001 it’s just been consistently degrading workers lives. I think most millennials and gen z would trade their financial outlook for their parents so I really can’t accept this “far worse” description
None of that was socialism. It’s welfare capitalism which the entire west today has in one variant or another. Saying we should tune up regulations and/or the safety net is an entirely reasonable thing we could have a discussion about. Talking about socialism is ignorant or foolish.
They’re all socialist policies, no country is purely capitalistic or purely socialistic. To be clear when I said “leads people towards socialism” I meant pushes them in a direction that advocates for more socialist policies like increasing the safety net
On the contrary that’s what actual communists believed.
There’s a Baptists and bootleggers coalition to pervert the meaning of socialism. Right wingers want to call everything to the left of Ronald Reagan socialism so they can paint it all as evil and a subset of people that are fairly bog standard welfare capitalists want to call themselves socialists because they think it sounds edgy and cool.
They are both wrong. Socialism involves collectivizing the means of production. Not a wealth tax. Not a greenhouse emissions rule. Not forcing companies to put women on their board. Not repealing at will employment. Collectivizing the means of production.
If you want to call for nationalizing Facebook then you are a socialist (and a fool.)
glib low effort put down to a glib low effort statistic.
When there are an estimated 7 to 9 million excess deaths recorded for the duration of the USSR, there's certainly going to be some survivorship bias with any polling.
The fall of the soviet system to capitalism was a mess, but it doesn't actually tell us anything about how people felt about communism vs capitalism. The statistic presented was in defense of socialism/communism. But, the transition from the soviet union to capitalist Russia was messy in its own right. Russia was looted by oligarchs taking advantage of the disarray.
All that being said, it looks like the poster was referencing this article, which is based on a survey conducted in 2009, long after the collapse of the soviet union...but one year into a worldwide recession. So I'm still not sure what conclusions one can really draw from that survey.
Oh thanks, good point. Bringing up the people killed by the ideology puts Capitalism on even shakier footing. In one country, India, capitalism killed more than the overinflated imperialist "estimates" for all soviet bloc countries over its entire lifetime. If we're including dead people in our hypotheticals, then there's the near-entire population of the Americas and Australia before colonialism, and a good chunk of Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
I'm really not interested in beating a dead horse. My only point is that using one survey from an unsuccessful implementation of communism, is not a sufficient critique of capitalism.
I no longer buy into either ideology as inherently good/bad anyways. At the end of the day, the powerful will exploit any system to their own benefit. I do believe that Communism is inherently dangerous, but only because it relies on an involuntary contract from everyone in the system to participate in a specific way. That contract violates the human impulse to act in their own short term rational interest. So you need to enforce rules, and that means establishing a more authoritarian governing body. Communism demands personal sacrifice of the accumulation of private wealth- and humans are naturally selfish. It just doesn't scale well.
Notably missing from understanding is that advocating for collective ownership of things for the benefit of the masses instead of the 1% is not the same as advocating for gulags and mass graves. It's as ridiculous as advocating for space exploration and people like you retorting "you want Challenger 10, you do, you want schoolteachers dying in agonising explosions".
Salvador Allende became President of Chile in 1970, he presided for 3 years before being taken down by a coup supported by the US government. In the time he was in power, he pushed a socialist program for Chile. Let's see some highlights of his "prisons, labor camps and starving", eh?
- nationalization of large-scale industries (notably copper mining and banking)
- a programme of free milk for children in the schools and in the shanty towns
- payment of pensions and grants was resumed
- increased construction of residential buildings, averaging 55,000/year
- all part-time workers granted rights to social security, and increased payments
- proposed electricity price-increase withdrawn
- bread prices fixed
- 55,000 volunteers sent to the south to teach literacy, and provide medical care
- obligatory minimum wage for workers of all ages was established
- free milk introduced for expectant and nursing mothers and [young] children
- free school-meals established
- rent reductions
- construction of Santiago subway rescheduled to serve working-class neighbourhoods first.
- state-sponsored distribution of free food to neediest citizens.
- minimum taxable income-level was raised
- middle-class Chileans benefited from elimination of taxes on modest incomes and property.
- Exemptions from capital taxes were extended, benefitted 330,000 small proprietors.
- According to one estimate, purchasing power went up by 28% between October 1970 and July 1971.[53]
- The rate of inflation fell from 36.1% in 1970 to 22.1% in 1971
- Average real wages rose by 22.3% during 1971.
- Minimum real wages for blue-collar workers were increased by 56% during the first quarter of 1971
- real minimum wages for white-collar workers were increased by 23%
- Although the acceleration of inflation in 1972 and 1973 eroded part of the initial increase in wages, they still rose (on average) in real terms during the 1971–73 period.
By contrast, the UK today has 27% of children living in poverty[1], and the UK government has voted against free school meals for children, and just tried to push through a tax cut for the rich, and electricity prices have gone up while energy companies are posting record profits, housing construction is down and prices are up so normal citizens are being priced out of the housing market.
I appreciate a full throated defense of real socialism over people that say “fuck capitalism” and then when you dig into the details they want capitalism with some regulations and redistribution.
He's lost literally 73% of his wealth over the past year and change (assuming it's all META ownership). That is a spectacular drop.
And the people getting laid off are getting very generous severance packages.
So I don't know what you're talking about. The market has punished him, and quite severely, for his missteps.
But it's not like he was being evil or malicious or something. He overhired thinking growth would continue. It didn't. Now he has to lay off. A million managers have found themselves in the same situation before.
I’d say the latter because what you end up with is much more relatively closer to zero. Of course you weren’t losing much in the first place so there’s plenty of argument for the former as well.
That latter argument ignores the marginal utility of dollars. It is a mental illness to think going from 2 to 1 billion is worse than going from 2k to 1k
The marginal utility of money is a real thing, but it applies to purchase of life basics, like goods, services, and security.
The marginal utility of money for power and influence in our societies seems to start a few orders of magnitude above the upper middle class, and so far doesn't seem to bend down very much as money increases.
To be fair, to "lose" billions of dollars. Really means putting that money into the economy without any immediate return. Which kinda sounds like a good thing?
> What this means is they don’t blame outside factors. Compare this w layoffs where the CEO says this is due to “the economy” “the macro climate”, suggesting they did everything right.
When someone says they take accountability, it means it was their poor decisions - that could have/should have been better - that led to this. You know who to blame.
This is a pretty poor take, IMO. I have not seen any difference in results of a CEO who "takes responsibility" vs "blames outside factors". Taking responsibility seems to be a cheap way to come off as a better person without actually doing anything differently.
I am making a much more narrow point than you're interpreting it. The Twitter thread is claiming people who "take responsibility" are somehow superior to those who don't. I am saying I see no evidence to believe that. Talk is cheap.
My personal belief is that I would like to see discussion of the system that gets us to the point of mass layoffs. As rich as Zuck or Musk or whoever is, they are still close to gears in the system than orchestrators, so we should probably have a discussion about if this situation is something we could modify the system to prevent, and if we want to modify the system in that way.
True, nothing he could have said would satisfy. But he is in a unique position to render stunning aid to those displaced. The severance is fine, not totally unusual for a company that isn't going under.
Let's say you have two leaders in this situation. #1 says "The macro economic climate is bad, so we're laying people off." #2 says "I made a mistake; this was my fault." All other things equal, I know which one I'd prefer to work with... How a leader comports themselves is just as important as their results -- especially in bad times.
I want to hear both. "The macro environment is bad, and we never baked that into any of our forecasts, which we should have. I take full responsibility for not doing that."
My take assumes that? I don't think it does. My point is simply that I don't see any evidence to say that someone who makes that claim is somehow better than someone that blames the environment. It's very easy to wrote those words down.
Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.
But I’ll tell you this from experience: lasting people off because you chose to grow too fast is really, really hard. I’ve done it, though in my case it was a lot fewer people and I actually knew and loved them all. If I had to lay off 11,000 people I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.
I can’t imagine life is fun for him at the moment. But, just like every affected employee, he will get through it.
He's lost a lot but it's not like he's having to ask his wife to stop going out to lunch with her friends. There's a level of wealth where the numbers just stop having any real meaning. $1B is still multiple lifetimes of the most decadent luxury currently possible.
They do have to be concerned about where the money is going to come from to pay their mortgages when severance runs out. They got laid off into an environment where layoffs at companies they might have worked at before are reducing headcount.
Not saying they shouldn't have saved for a rainy day. This is a scary time to be laid off.
$20 lunch. Must be nice. I don't spend that on myself --- ever. My target for lunch (if I don't pack it myself) is $5. That used to be pretty easy but getting harder these days.
This isn't hard for Zuck - he just directs his subordinates to layoff a bunch of people, and then goes back to swimming in his vault of cash. Losing x billion of essentially infinity money is the same as losing no money. Once you reach Zuck's level of wealth you can't really even conceive of non-billionairs as the being same species as you, much less empathize with them.
> Have you ever laid someone off or fired them? Was it so easy?
I've heard this sentiment from people who have laid those off and it always falls flat to me.
Laying off 1 or 100 people compared to being laid off - especially when the person doing the firing, usually a Director or above, is making 3-4x at least what the line employees are - is like comparing pricking your finger with a needle to cutting it off with a dull knife.
It should be difficult if you're not a sociopath, but they're so incomparable it's not even a statement worth making or considering.
I’m not arguing that laying people off is nearly as hard as getting laid off.
I’m arguing against the idea that if you’re a manager or have money, that moments like this are easy or that there’s no empathy. i’m not saying that anyone should feel bad for directors, CEOs, or whoever, but they shouldn’t paint a ridiculous straw man either.
You could even argue that in Zuck’s position, money is a non-factor. He has more than enough money. What he doesn’t have is a beloved and future-proof company, and these layoffs only push him further from that.
Billionaires are that because they have exploited the surplus value of their underlings. To say that they “care” about them is clearly a contradiction.
To be sure, laying off employees would be not be easy. Imagine if these were people you had lunch with, chatted with in the office every day, knew their husbands, wives....
Do you think Zuck was that close with any of the 11,000 people who were laid off?
If it was a small startup (been there done that) then yeah, when you see people day-to-day, and get to know them and their lives outside of work? Really hard to fire people, knowing how it will affect the other people in their lives.
A multi-national, multi-billion dollar company with 80,000+ employees? I'm not so sure.
> I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough or not when you’ve got another $38b left or whatever.
But that's not taking responsibility.
As an analogy, if you crash into another car with your car, you can't just say "It's my fault, I take the blame" and then walk away without paying for the repairs. Accepting blame is a nice first step, but taking responsibility means restoring the victim to how they were before the action happened.
Yeah that’s about it. He’s lost about $90b in net worth. I suppose you can debate whether that’s punishment enough
He didn't pay a fine, it isn't any sort of punishment. He tanked the value of the asset that is the primary component of his wealth. That money is gone whether he "takes responsibility" or not.
I'm pretty sure that there's some multi millionaires left at FB. Chris Cox is still there, he's likely a billionaire. There's potentially one or two others left...
I can't imagine these sort of layoffs, which are baked into the lifecycle and business plans of the company, were not something he wasn't anticipating years and years ago when hiring was being ramped up. In fact some notable fraction of these 11,000 were hired in the first place only to be fired, by design.
Just months ago, "The Crying CEO" guy became a viral meme for expressing too much empathy in a layoff.
It's fucking job terminations. You're GOING to be criticized no matter how you do them. The best approach is to just be robotic about it, and maybe throw in a platitude that amounts to, "It's not you, it's me".
Sure. But it's only "taking responsibility" if you demonstrate you're actually intending to either a) actually be accountable in some fashion and/or b) actually lay out how you'll change to make the bad thing not happen in the future.
"We need to layoff half of the company. I'm sorry and take responsibility. I have failed our employees and shareholders. Because of this, I am stepping down". That's taking responsibility.
"We had a major F-up. It was my responsibility. And here are the concrete steps I am taking to ensure it never happens again, along with the mechanisms you all have to hold me accountable. If these fail, the following bad thing will happen to me." That's taking responsibility
A company is bound to fire people in a well functioning economy or the alternative is every single employee will lose their job when the company goes bankrupt. Some people would rather bring every company down to the ground before firing a single person. In a well functioning economy what you then want is a short worker reallocation time.
Also if one of your options for "taking responsibility" is quitting, I guess your view of the world is that you would also fire any of your employees when they mess up, when whole industries have recognized the need for blameless cultures where making mistakes is part of the learning process.
You can fire people and/or let them go without claiming you "take full responsibility". That's ok, and exactly my point.
The phrase "I take responsibility" is never accompanied with any sign that the person does in fact take responsibility. It means more than just "Ooops, I did a bad"
He was not criticized for showing too much empathy. He was criticized for not actually showing empathy. He made it all about himself. You might want to look into how you misunderstood that so badly.
What? It wasn't for "expressing too much empathy", it's for being obviously staged. Like, who gets their hot-take emotional reaction on video and then uploads it? /r/whyweretheyfilming vibes.
Because there are a lot of people who just aren’t ever going to be satisfied with anything short of Zuckerberg feeling the pinch of not knowing whether he’s going to make his mortgage payment next month. It’s just people’s natural desire for punishment. I personally have a lot of disdain for zuck and what he’s built but the idea that he is ever going to experience enough misfortune to seem “just” as an offset for these layoffs is pure fantasy. If anyone is waiting for that, there is simply no path to satisfaction for them. Nothing except his own actions is going to stop him from being as billionaire as he wants to be.
Compare the Stripe layoff to the Meta one. The severance terms are very similar and I think the Meta offer is objectively better, if only slightly depending on tenure. Both the Stripe founders and Zuckerberg are both "taking responsibility" for the layoffs but without any resignation or personal financial burdens outside of just share price. This has basically zero chance of being a decrease in operating costs until well into 2023. Stripe and Meta seem to be on par with one another as far as how they handled their respective layoffs other than the Meta leak.
Taking responsibility would mean resigning as CEO, for example. Or altering the voting situation where he has absolute power, can't be voted out by the board of directors, and thus has no accountability for his actions and mistakes.
But just saying that you're taking responsibility is not actually taking responsibility. It's empty words.
I don't agree with that take at all. No leader would be able to learn from mistakes or grow if they had to metaphorically commit Seppuku every time they made a mistake by resigning or abdicating their authority.
Taking responsibility would mean owning the situation as being caused by you, and critically evaluating your actions to see if there were different paths you could have taken given the same information, or if there was other information that you should have added to your decision-making.
There are some mistakes so grave and unjustifiable that resignation would be the appropriate way to take responsibility for them, but I don't think a round of layoffs pending an expected economic downturn after excessive growth qualifies.
> if they had to metaphorically commit Seppuku every time they made a mistake
This is very far from Zuck's first mistake. In any case, though, I offered an alternative: making himself accountable to the board of directors. He is not accountable. He can't be fired, he can only resign. The fundamental problem is that Zuck gets to define the terms of his own accountability, which is almost an oxymoron.
> he is literally not accountable because he answers to no one
Zuck said he wanted to take accountability for overhiring and then having to do layoffs. So the question is, what does the theoretical possibility of employees resigning or users leaving have to do with accountability for overhiring and layoffs?
It has nothing to do with accountability. The reason that everyone has a visceral response to him saying he accountable is because we know it is not true
Ah, no. I’m in agreement that he is not being accountable. I am perhaps taking it farther in arguing that he is incapable of being accountable given how meta is structured
> Or altering the voting situation where he has absolute power
Absolutely this. Others in this thread are saying that the fact of having lost a lot of money is enough for him to be "accountable". But IMU the specific arrangement with Meta class B vs class A shares is that the group of other institutional investors lost _more_ but didn't have any ability to influence decisions, replace the CEO, etc. Zuckerberg's large on-paper loss isn't accountability for decisions he made, but is just the risk of being a wealthy person with a lopsided portfolio.
Both because of his role in deciding to hire so much, and because he's dead set on pursuing a metaverse vision which is controversial, I think "accountability" would require him to at least make it possible for other shareholders to vote on proposals on an equal footing.
That’s super pessimistic. What do you want him to say: “sucks all y’all lost your jobs but wasn’t my fault. Haha you’re unemployed now”. Like sure it’s not much, but without owning your mistakes how do you get better and improve to prevent them from repeating?
Either his claim to take responsibility means something, in terms of it actually leading to consequnces and/or actions, or it doesn't. If it's the former, then what are they? If it's the latter, then why?
For example: do shareholders hold him to his responsibility? And if so, how? If they don't, who improves Meta's corporate governance to ensure that this self-admitted mistake doesnt reoccur and sexure their investment?
I've never worked at a BigCorp. How does this stuff work?
The shareholders not named zucc have zero influence on him being ceo whether they want him or not. He pioneered the tactic of having multiple classes of stock that let him retain all the voting power while still selling off “stock” that let him get investment money. Imo that sort of setup should be illegal because it leads to the sort of societally damaging behavior we see from meta
Societally damaging? Was AT&T labs societally damaging? Xerox park? Etc.
Since when does HN care about the stock price of a random company? The share price reflected the ownership structure so the people that bought in were aware and not coerced to buy the security. We shit on corporate short sightedness and suddenly everyone and their dog has a highly opinionated high conviction bet on what a random company should do with its cash flow?
Personally, I don’t care. If dude wants to try to build the jetsons space car, heck yeah. I’d rather someone in society try hard stuff (positive determinism) than more stock buy backs (like apple) or cash just sitting on the balance sheet idly (like historical google). Even if it 100% fails, society is better if we do research that doesn’t look outright obvious at first…that’s how we get better.
They have sold, in droves. The stock has fallen 73% this year.
It's slightly absurd to say that "sell" is the only lever shareholders should have over public companies. It may be true in practical terms, but it's still a sad state of affairs.
Businesses can be successful while simultaneously operating in ways that you don't personally approve of. You're free to avoid doing business with those organizations.
Meta shareholders don't have much say on how Zuck runs things, that's what you signed up for when you buy Meta shares.
How many people upset about Meta layoffs were equally fierce in condemning Zuck for Meta's stock performance over the last decade? Seems like yet another case of people wanting their cake and eating it too -- the only novelty is the people affected are some of the most privileged people in human history.
If it was poker, then Mark just lost a big hand because he made a bad call. But he's still got a big stack, so he's not going to walk away from the table.
Wow, people can find a way to complain about anything. The severance benefits are insanely generous. Nobody takes a job thinking that it will be permanent, or is that a thing now? Would it have been better if he blamed the layoffs on the market? Maybe it's just a glass half empty kind of thing.
Everyone in tech whose job is a bet on the future success of a product should expect to leave it. Expecting 100% of products to have 100% success in 100% of economic environments is a bit naïve.
The employees don't have control of the company, and they agreed to not have control when they signed on. If they want to control, they are free to start their own company, invest capital to get more voting rights or provide enough value that the company wants their input enough to give them voting rights. Also, just getting another job is an option... But I admire what seems to be a very generous severance package, which is not legally required on the part of Meta.
He lost untold billions of dollars (admittedly off his giant pile of even more untold billions of dollars).
He’s the primary controlling shareholder and defacto owner. What other kind of accountability would make any sense at all? Even if he fired himself, he’d either have to shut the company down, or find someone to replace him and manage them, which makes him their boss.
Edit: to correct dumb statement around share ownership. But you know what I meant.
> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Perhaps he will give up his sixth boat, or his fourth house, or his 13th car? Maybe he's going to wait on buying that private island until next quarter.
It might slow the pace at which he tries to take over the private resources of the island of Kauai, Hawaii from the billionaires before him but I doubt it.
I think it's interesting how pedestrian Oprah, Zuck, and Larry Ellison are, obsessing over a place Elvis visited for pork barbecue parties while demonstrating 0 understanding of local people and their needs.
I think a Bayesian perspective is helpful here. 1) How likely is it that Zuck makes that statement if he feels like he is responsible? 2) How likely is it if he doesn't feel responsible? I think the answers to those questions are quite similar, in which case hearing the statement doesn't actually tell us much.
To use Bayes to update here, you must determine the conditional probabilities as they were before you knew that M occurred, and could thus update to P(M)=1. If one did not already know that M happened then one certainly could not say `P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1`. One might be able to claim `P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = P(M)`, which is just saying the events are independent.
Certainly with a prior that the events are independent, then you won't be able to update your probability of R by knowing that M did happen, any more than knowing last nights lotto numbers would probability of R.
In reality, things are even worse, as assuming independence is not fully reasonable, so you will end up with uncertainly about how or if the variables relate. One could assume some form of meta probability distribution of various ways the variables could relate, but then direct application of Bayes formula not feasible. You would still in that scenario not be learning much if anything useful about P(R).
You’ve identified the problem with many Bayesian approaches, not just this one. Without sufficient data to make the probabilities accurate, it just shifts the uncertainty to the process of choosing probabilities.
I disagree. The question at hand is how we should update our beliefs in response to the evidence of Zuck making the statement. Given the priors of P(M|R) and P(M|~R), it tells us that we shouldn't really update. Different priors would lead to a different update.
Sometimes this sort of thing happens where our priors don't allow for a belief update in response to evidence. For example, does me writing this comment change your best guess as to whether my favorite color is blue? That depends on what you think of P(favorite color blue | comment) and P(favorite color blue | ~comment). Both of those are probably the same right? If so, my comment doesn't allow you to update.
Professor Quirrell looked at Harry. "Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you're trying to convince everyone you're not Dark, not -"
"I can't believe this! You can't have every possible observation confirm your theory! "
"And that was a trifle too much indignation."
"What on Earth do I have to do to convince you? "
"To convince me that you harbor no ambitions of becoming a Dark Lord?" said Professor Quirrell, now looking outright amused. "I suppose you could just raise your right hand."
"What?" Harry said blankly. "But I can raise my right hand whether or not I -" Harry stopped, feeling rather stupid.
"Indeed," said Professor Quirrell. "You can just as easily do it either way. There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable."
Harry blinked. He'd just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.
I live in a oil rich area and there's a large economy of well paid folks attached to it. They all understand it's boom and bust. They get paid really well when it's booming. Then they take the L when it's busting. All to say, I think people need to come to terms with the fact they weren't being paid well due to their sheer brilliance but due to the risk they assumed by joining a boom and bust industry. Nobody was lured into a job at FB under unfair circumstances and I'm sure they're not exiting on unfair circumstances. Does it suck to be in a cyclical bust period, does it hurt worse that it's in large part self inflicted by Zuck. Of course, of course.
On some level it's not even Zuck's fault. It's Jerome Powell's. It's however up to each individual to plan for what comes after knowing 2020-2021 was an epic bubble.
Think about it this way. If I, for example, did a series of activities that led to 13% of my division's business being impacted adversely, I'm almost assuredly getting fired.
When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.
In practice, the change is they're laying people off and paying them generous severance packages and some other support options to help them transition as well as looking to cut infrastructure expenses. I'm not sure what other change you would be expecting. As a major share holder he is significantly impacted, losing over $100 billion since 2021. He's far from the only tech CEO to invest in fast expansion during the initial covid boom. It can very much be argued he made general good decisions to fast expand then and retract now given the information they had at the time, though I think his investments specifically in VR have been terrible for the company as a whole. Only time will tell if that will ever pay off for them or continue to be a money sink hole.
Taking responsibility might mean ponying up to give all the affected people additional months of pay / benefits etc. After all he is responsible for a big time disruption to their families
That would be a meaningful way of saying he is sorry as well as setting a precedent for all other billionaires who just "take responsibility" and continue on
People have a problem with it because it's a string of words without meaning. Better to leave it out than to sully modern language further with meaningless gibberish that looks like language.
I'd say yeah, that's pretty much it. In any case, what'd you expect? He's not giving up the control of the company. He made a mistake, yes - but there's no obligation for anybody who makes a mistake to give up everything and never have any responsibility again. So what else is there?
Good question. I don't know the answer. And that points to the problem, really. In rhe world as ut is, there isnt really a way to realistically imagine a CEO doing anything meaningful to take responsibility for a self-admitted error lile this.
If, just for the sake of argument, I said he should resign or compensate the affected people out of his own pocket, I'm fairly sure that people here would think I was being naive. People here are already saying that corporate leaders wouldnt take decisions if they had to be held responsible for the outcomes.
So we end-up with a bunch of people who everyone knows (a) are not responsible for mistakes, and (b) are tacitly understood to be able to make statements that habe no meaning. In other words, lies.
And thus the domain of trust becomes smaller and more fractured.
A reduction in net worth (i.e. stock price dropping) is a pretty terrible penalty, because a) it doesn't actually reflect upon the CEO's successes or failures, and b) because any bump in Meta's stock price will bring that net worth right back. And, usually, doing a mass layoff will do exactly that.
EDIT: Sure enough, Meta's stock is up ~17% since a week ago.
…he starts the company. Afaik, he’s never taken any additional compensation beyond his ownership share, that came about because… he started the company.
So the multiple houses? The land in Hawaii where he tried to just take from the current owners? All that was part of the company? Pretending like he just owns the company and hasn’t taken compensation anywhere cause he has a 1 dollar a year salary is a a child like understanding of how billionaires leverage their wealth
Or rather the person who is responsible should go before those who are not and have been doing their job.
If a middle manager was responsible for a bad decision, their head would be on a spike. But it's the chief executive officer, so he gets a pass, if only because he's in the position of power.
If the issue is his moonshot bets on AI research and metaverse that are not expected to immediately payout hurt the company by having too much headcount not contributing to short-term revenue, and core products can't support that, then he made a bad strategic decision, and the appropriate way to take responsibility for that is to remove the unique voting structure so that Mark is no longer the sole person capable of deciding the company's future strategy.
But either way, it's still inevitable that a change in strategy would entail elimination of some of that headcount.
Has he actually admitted how he failed in his responsibilities? I have not followed the FB fall closely but from the outside there appears to be some dubious strategic decisions at work. It would be interesting to hear him elaborate on the situation with something like “I failed to see how precarious it was to be at the mercy of Google and Apple for our core ad business”. Or, “looking back, it was a mistake to not get into cloud computing for a more diversified revenue stream”.
They wouldn’t need to use cloud, they would provide cloud services like the companies I mentioned. Of course it’s way to late in the game for that now.
Yeah, he could easily bankroll a 36 month severance package or something similar. Like "sorry I fucked you right at the onset of a recession, here's a pile of cash to help you weather the storm." That would be actually taking responsibility
"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."
I suspect he mainly had to figure out that it’s the same as everywhere else, but the displayed politeness of office managers make it especially delectable satire.
In Office Space there is the «pieces of flair» argument with the waitress (Aniston), it’s much more bitter, and I suspect much harder to keep it funny, because in truth those worker endured much more violent management, there is little space to spin it in a funny way.
> because in truth those worker endured much more violent management, there is little space to spin it in a funny way.
what? no one got beat over flair, and having worked in a lot of serving jobs, the level of violence serving drinks was roughly on par with the number of fights I've seen in the data center.
Yeah.... I'm going to have to ask you to come in on Sunday... thanks....
--
When I was an early IT manager my team would make fun of me and compare me to the manager from office space... because I would always say "thanks" when I would ask them for something...
But I learned to say "thanks" because at Intel - in the 90's it was company culture to always close an email with "thanks"
When I worked at FB though it was a hostile environment. so no Thanks.
I am imagining a scene were Gavin Belson takes over Pied Piper and installs his VC friends who immediately fire half of the people. Then website crashes in next hour and they are frantically calling back people to re-hire them.
Why not? Nothing you wrote suggests that we cannot have both. In fact, Musk bought Tesla, is not an engineer, has no engineering training or education or engineering accomplishments (the code he was writing for the company that became PayPal was notoriously terrible and had to be scrapped). Say what you want about Zuck, but if you plopped him down at a terminal and made him do the job of one of his own senior Devs I bet he would be able to do it. Musk couldn't do the same for any one of his companies in any of the technical positions.
I find it interesting that someone states something like 'you can't it both ways' without thinking it through and while presenting no reasoning for it, and then just leave it there like it is now a rule we must accept.
> is not an engineer, has no engineering training or education or engineering accomplishments
You should probably fact check this statement. There are plenty of people on quora or even here who worked with Musk. You are completely wrong on this.
The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.