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.
So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO.
Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?
In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.
If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.
According to EU Commission's estimates whole EU needs ~600 000 more programmers, with Poland (where I'm from) needing 50 000. This seems conservative to me, everybody's hiring and salaries grow pretty quickly.
You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
In Poland you'd be usually talking post-tax per month but I converted for American standards, so pre-tax per year. You can get more, mind you, that was just the average.
It’s usual to talk in “brut” in France, and it means mid-tax. 60k€ “brut” = 90k TCO = 45k€ in the pocket of the employee.
That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.
With the fact that you got the demand/offer law not in your favor, these salaries will definitely go down.
Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries
When you take into consideration taxes and social security; you will be taxed at an effective taxrate of around 40% for a salary of 40k euro. To get around taxes, you need to work as a contractor, and use some copyright law on the time you spend coding (you create something) which cuts the taxrate for that time in half.
Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.
50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.
> With the fact that you got the demand/offer law not in your favor, these salaries will definitely go down.
Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).
Not exactly, only the "living expenses" part of the salary can get this "equivalence multiple" applied. The rest of the salary should be counted 1:1 with the US because other purchases cost the same regardless of where you are (branded clothes, travelling, buying a laptop, buying a car, investing for retirement, stocks cost the same everywhere). So it's more like the first 20k are like getting paid 100k and the rest of the 80k will just be 80k, so more or less 200k equivalent.
It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.
But you will probably stay there for life so you have the benefit for life. "investing for retirement, stocks" are cheaper as you also need 3 to 5 times less.
With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.
I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.
I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.
It's good to look at the whole picture like that. A lot of "cost of living calculators" tend to implicitly assume you're spending every take-home dollar on eggs or gasoline, which isn't true for highly-paid software engineers.
I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.
I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.
You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.
> But you will probably stay there for life so you have the benefit for life.
Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow
Traveling is cheaper in EU simply because more interesting stuff is very close, flights are crazy cheap (usually you can find flights under 100 USD both-ways inside EU), and you can do it a lot while being paid (20-30 days of paid vacations per year in most countries).
Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.
I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).
Not quite; an iPhone costs more in Prague, a Tesla much more, a laptop can be double the price. You don't purchase lots of iPhones, but the global goods generally have higher prices in Europe than EU, partly due to VAT, partly due to market conditions. Energy and gas are much more expensive in Prague.
Not really most contractors I know are just regular programmers, average in skill. Their rate is around 800eu/day, they all work in big bureaucratic enterprises. Hiring contractors is basically the only way a lot of those companies can get access to somewhat decent talent.
And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.
The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.
I don't know where you live, but 800 euro/day is not a standard rate for avg programmers in many parts of Europe. Is most probably half or sometimes less than that.
In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy
Nobody denies it. Again is the offer and demand law. Probably high delocalization brought new jobs which ended up and saturating the market and growing salaries to fight for the very same talent pool.
Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations
Yes, but your salary will be 1/2 of what you're used to.
My brother moved from FAANG to Atlanta to work for Home Depot. His comp went down from 400k to 140k. Which is still great for Atlanta, but there is no situation where a move from FAANG to any other company comes without wage deflation
Roof over your head. Seriously? In Europe if keep it modest you can keep a roof over your head by working in supermarket. I don't think this should be your aim honestly.
Depends where in Europe you live, though. And in recent years, even that is not enough for most countries with a strong Tourists sector, as rent goes up year on year (they increase rent during summer then lower it, but it's still higher than before). That's been going on for at least 15 years in some regions of Croatia. Not to mention everything (except salaries, od course) is being rounded up to Euros, so that's additionallt going to affect Croats.
Yeah, but that's still in the USA. The poster is talking about a totally different type of switch.
As an aside, you're talking about switching from a company that supposedly makes revenue selling ads but really is inflated with free money to one that makes revenue from selling hammers. People who made this switch before the free money are going to be fine. Now that 11,000+ people are going to try to make this switch, they're going to wish they had.
The other thing that happens with this is your job becomes much more practical and less oriented to whatever fads are sweeping SV and HN. Some like it, some don't.
High frequency trading pays better than FAANG if you got the right skills and can cope with the work environment (which is not as bad as it used to be from what I hear).
I don't think these people need either sympathy or pity. They will do fine. They're all smart. Most are also hard workers. People like that don't struggle for long.
The damaging wealth inequality is the hundred millionaire + class and the rest.
If prosperity distribution had kept track during the last 50 years (wealth has increased dramatically due to tech), the average salary would be 6 figures, so it’s actually better for wealth distribution to have tech folks making higher 6 figures to put pressure on the 8+ figure class.
High tech-sector salaries are the result of extreme wealth inequality, not the cause of it. The 0.1% are not Meta engineers hammering a check and fretting about RSUs. They are the ones investing in every half-baked TechCo and startup because they already own a few small countries and a Blackwater detail the size of the 82nd Airborne, and they can't think of anything else to do with their money. It's this desperation for anything approaching positive real returns that has inflated US tech salaries.
At German car manufacturers? Absolutely not. The maximum compensation that an IC can commend at BMW is just above 100k€ -- and that would require more than ten years of experience.
Compare that to a new grad at Google Germany making 130k€. Somebody with ten years of experience there would be making closer to 300k€.
But that typically old-school setup where there is only one way to make more money is move up the career ladder into management or in German “Führugskarriere”. I have no pity for these types of companies who don’t understand that a senior engineer is worth more than a young group leader. A few companies have started to change but Germany has along way to go to adapt from this mindset, but in reality there would be enough money just another distribution is necessary.
The GINI coefficient for Germany is about 32 vs 41 in the US with the global average being 38. That's not so far apart, and the US is skewed by have a chunk of the world's wealthiest people.
It's hard to take two numbers in isolation that we don't really use day to day and make any kind of sense of them. It's only when you graph a few countries together[0] that you see:
1. the US is somewhat of an outlier, while Germany is grouped together with other wealthy countries
2. the US' Gini has been steadily growing last few decades - implying inequality is getting worse
3. Germany's Gini is very slightly declining in the last few decades - implying it's staying roughly stable
I don't think higher-than-average is particularly good at all - you're in the neighbourhood of places like Qatar, Iran, DRC and Argentina. In fact the only way you'd use Gini to suggest the US has a ok level of wealth inequality is if you presented two countries Gini coefficients side-by-side to someone who doesn't normally think about Gini, presented them without any other context and said "look, they're kinda close"
What I'm getting at is that Germany isn't some paragon of equality, it's average. The US as I pointed out is skewed by the high number of staggeringly wealthy people and a trend of people moving from the lower to upper levels of what you might call middle class. In the US wealth held by people form 50% of the distribution up to 99% represents about $91T vs $18.2T for the top 0.1% and $4.4T for the bottom 50%. The coefficient really hides the vast middle and upper middle distribution in the US.
Also this obscures the fact that it is far better to be poor or working class in the US than somewhere with a similar Gini coefficient.
> The US as I pointed out is skewed by the high number of staggeringly wealthy people
I think you might want to lookup what Gini tries to measure. You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad, and now you're having to backpedal and say that actually Gini kinda sucks but the USA isn't so bad.
> You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad
No, I'm pointing out that at lot was being made of a small difference in a ratio that's really sensitive to marginal differences. I'm noting a marginal difference that makes the US look more different than other OCED nations than it is in fact and more like autocratic developing nations than it is in fact.
I'm also pointing out that it isn't a good measure at all. It's as coarse as GDP and more misleading.
Sure, that makes sense. It's just worth noting that the U.S. are not an outlier amongst developed nations when looking at wealth inequality -- which, IMO, is the much more important metric.
Not really. The US attracts wealthy people from around the world, has a gigantic internal market, and is friendly to financial business. If you don't consider the top 0.1% then the picture looks totally different. The VAST majority of wealth in the US is help by people in 50th to 99th percentile range. The Gini coefficient makes the US look superficially more like Qatar, which is obviously nonsense.
Some metrics aren't linear so w/o knowing more about Gini coefficient, my first thought is "I have no idea if the difference is significant or not". Can someone ELI5 this so that I can build an intuition for what "1 unit of Gini" means?
It's a curve reflecting income (not wealth) share of a population against a line of perfect equality, which is a 45 degree angle. A low disparity hugs the line and a high disparity hugs the X and Y axis. Gini = A/(A + B) where A is area over the curve and B is the area under the curve. So an increase of 0.1 in the gini number reflects a larger A.
It's not a very good way to measure what it is trying to measure[1].
I think the main problem is the lack of intuition of what "1 Gini means", except the "lower is better". Is difference between coefficient of 10 & 11 the same as difference between 30 and 31? The poster to which I responded said that "32 vs 41 is not far apart" - is it? Is difference between 10 and 19 the same as difference between 32 and 41 (delta is the same)? How about between 0 and 9?
That was me, and they aren't that far apart. Is 41% of the area under a lot more than 32%? Not really, see this example[1] Norway here has a coefficient of 27.5 and the US was at 41.2 but the graphs are barely different except that you can see that the US has a sharp bend on the far right hand side. The gini formula is really sensitive to that in a way that doesn't tell us much.
Wealth/income inequality is addressed by wealth/income taxes, or marginal consumption taxes. Controlling prices (limiting wages) would be a terrible way to go about it.
Use profit margins to determine what wages should be. I wouldn't be surprised if the wages are fine on that basis, actually. But let's draw the right conclusions for the right reasons.
Strong disagree with that one and this is a fairly unambitious take. Most companies and employees themselves in the EU buy their own kool-aid of "yeah we are ok with getting paid $40k because we got health insurance" (which does not work as efficiently in practice as one would like).
EU - esp. Germany and some other European countries - have abysmal salary compared to rest of the developed world and a poor wage growth over the last 10 years or so.
Heck, even countries like India have experienced faster growth: netto, a senior tech professional in India can earn more than what what they'd get in Germany. And that's not even accounting for 3-5x difference in cost of living.
Yes, but you get a social security which is without par. Including one year Arbeitslosgeld (in most situations), health insurance, the works. I always find it funny that we compare these things. In the USA the salaries are superhigh, but lo and behold if something happens to your crystal perfect life. And in life shit happens. A disease, an accident, an unwanted pregnancy. There is so much that might go off, you can literally drown in debts before you even know it.
Agreed, this is actually pretty scary for me (living in the US for a decade now) - bankruptcy is potentially one accident away (especially if it takes away the ability to continue doing the high-paying job).
In the USA in Meta like companies you have good healthcare insurance, one year paid maternity leave and a lot of other benefits. 4 months salary at layoff. And you make 2 to 3 times more than in Germany.
I thought about moving to Berlin and did some research. Median salary for a Senior Software Engineer is 86k EUR in Berlin according to Glassdoor. You will pay ~48% in taxes (depending on your Tax class), so it will be around 3700 net per month with an avg rent ~1500 EUR. So it's like 2200 EUR left, and you are supposed to have a life (and even make some savings) with that money. I don't know how this is fine to be honest. The only reasonable way to do it is to have this salary when you live in a more cheaper place with a better tax regime.
Nah. With 86K gross/year in Germany you get: around 4K for tax group 1 (single) and 4.7K for tax group 3 (married and your partner earns less than you).
Also, average rent in Berlin is among the cheapest (compared to other big cities like Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Munich). So, more like 1K/month for a decent apartment.
In any case, I agree with your overall statement: even if 86K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners in Germany, in reality it's hard to afford a decent house (not flat) with that salary (unless you wanna work until you're 67...)
For me it comes to an almost philosophical question: do you want to live like an average person in a developed country, or do you want to live better than average in a different place with a cheaper cost of living?
Thank you for the calc though, seems really helpful.
I have seen a previous manager at a company cannot compensate for FANG levels say for interview candidates "Don't put a high bar, besides we won't get that kind of talent because... you know... FANG".
But i don't see that being necessarily true and largely depends on type of software you build and the culture of the company. A lot of people are decent engineers and are not interviewing for FANG for a variety of reasons are for no reason in companies that may or may not deserve them. I think its hard to build street cred to get people to work for less, but interviews should always have a good bar.
One weird thing about the software industry is that the guys who design skyscrapers and the ones who put in drywall have the same job title
You don't need some Google genius to do a lot of this work, and sometimes a regular person will do a better job than some wonderkid who spends too much time and effort trying to automate it
Romania and Poland aren't exactly small by European standards, in fact they're some of the biggest by population and area. And Romania is not Central but Eastern European [1], so that's out.
Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland based on the most widely used definition of Central Europe [1]
Depends, Romania is either central, southern, or east european. Culturally is most definitely not eastern. Germany is by some considered central european. Austria and Switzerland see themselves as west european. Oh the delusion.
Every country changes their belonging to a region based on the perceived value bias of what is being discussed.
A user here humorously put it that Slovenians see themselves as Western European when it comes to how honest and hard they work, Southern European when it comes to weather and food, and Eastern European when it comes to drinking, partying and having fun.
But geographical location however is immutable, so let's stick to that instead of the other more biased definitions.
I think we are both talking now about the first chart in the section “Different views of Central Europe”. The one with the caption “Central Europe according to The World Factbook (2009),[1] Encyclopædia Britannica, and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1998). There are numerous other definitions and viewpoints.”
I would probably not classify Poland as small, especially noting how big of a population drop between Poland and Romania is. And if Poland were a US state, it would rank 2nd in terms of population, sightly over 1 million people less than California...
While it might not saturate the US job market as a whole, it will saturate the parts of the local programmer market that can come even close to matching the sorts of salaries these people where probably paid.
If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.
It should also be noted that a person recalled from the home office already has a hidden 20% pay cut if she or he has to commute for about an hour in each direction.
EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".
Definitely true normally but we’re in this weird world where a ton of people got to try a previously unavailable or unemphasized option. Full-time remote work used to be a bit unusual but a couple of years was enough for a lot of people to get used to the idea and now it feels like a cut to go back, even if they were used to being in the office in February 2020.
No, but commuting has other expenses: beyond the obvious cost of cars that often includes eating out more (often at pricier locations), extended childcare, wardrobe expenses, etc.
No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.
I work at Stripe. I can’t throw a proverbial paper clip at this company without hitting someone who could be founding a company right now. There’s no way to lay off 14% of Stripe without setting free scores of future founders.
Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company
If you were that risk averse (that you didn’t act on your entrepreneurial instincts) when times were good, my money is that you’re more likely to double down in searching for safety.
I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)
Imagine thinking that starting a new company is a bad idea. It might not be easy, but the engine of progress is the birth of new firms, not the monopolization of markets through a handful of them. The vast majority of jobs are provided by small to medium-sized businesses, not companies like Twitter or Stripe. This is particularly true in Europe, but it's quite universal. We need new companies, even if some fail (or even most).
OP isn't saying it's "easy". They are pointing out that forming a startup is achievable by a small (scores = several 20s ~= 60-100) number of people impacted.
I feel exactly the same. I would love to run my own tiny company, but it looks very tough to bootstrap. Everytime I hear someone say it is easy, I cringe.
Not necessarily… a potential good startup founder is not necessarily a skill set that a FB needs right now. And many business ideas that aren’t “FB-scale ideas” can still be quite successful for a small founding crew.
That’s right—-any time you’re laying off thousands people at once, some of them will the “the wrong people”. There is no mechanism for mass layoffs that can accurately target only “low performers”. Even if these layoffs reflect good decisions, good decisions at corporate scale are not necessarily good decisions at the individual level.
This is a valid concern in a recession but there are different niches and business models. Facebook has been very profitable selling ads but that’s not the only option, and there are opportunities which might be a good fit for a small company which a big one is structurally incapable of finding. After the dotcom crash, I knew several people who found solid niches selling services to other businesses - it didn’t have the hypergrowth potential of something like an ad-supported social network but most of those fail, and there’s a lot of money in less sexy industries.
Clean tech also seems big - even if the Republicans did manage to gut federal support for renewables (I’m doubtful given e.g. how much money Texas wind farms are making) consumer trends are looking solid and a lot of state policies represent locked-in market.
Less competition, more available labor, the books start with a "this is hard" and get better when things get better (compare with starting when things are easy and then having it rough when times get hard)...
Only if you can start a company that's cashflow positive from essentially day one. Burn rate provided by suppressed interest rates and cashed up venture capitalists is quickly becoming a disappearing concept.
The first dotcom crash was good that way: people make worse decisions when they have piles of VC funny money and anyone with a real business has trouble standing out when the field is full of competitors burning bright but fast.
I’ve been here long enough to have seen the countless comments lamenting the current state of qualifications and ability in the industry. Here’s to hoping that meta and stripe laid off under achievers that would be wise to get into a different industry where they’ll perform better. Musks layoffs ignored since it seems clear that his were indiscriminate and hasty to the point of negligence.
Does the small EU country you are living in pay FAANG level salaries (200k and more) for their developers? Because in the small central EU country where I live, they always say skilled workers are in demand until you tell them your desired salary ;-)
“Oui mais vous avez des tickets resto” — Explanation: French people seem always very happy with low salaries as long as they have social benefits such as 4,60€ ticket for restaurant at lunch. And free healthcare, which they pay 800€ per month (for a 65k€ salary).
They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.
I don't see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day. The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it's been literally weeks since I had one. Lots of companies froze their hiring. The music is stopping, and there's a lot less chairs. Not everyone is going to find a new seat.
Well to be honest 1/10 was a little bit of overstatement, but yeah every year there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers so it's about 1/8 or so.
> there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers
You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.
The problem is this statistics contains jobs ads that are not viable:
If i put out a job ad: Need a software develioer with skills in COBOL, latest react and assembly, to lead a team of 10 for $30k
And I cant hire anyone
It will still end up in government statistics for shortage.
This is lile if we all put out ads on Gumtree/craiglist 'will buy a Toyota, brand new, for $1000", and someone counts thise ad and concludes there is a shortage of Toyotas.
In that example, you still want a Toyota though, right? Just because you don't want one all that badly doesn't mean your life wouldn't be better with one.
We have this too in Germany, but it's usually not based on open positions but some "we would need this to grow the GDP further industry is saying they miss these number of people" from some lobbying group like Bitkom. But Chapeau! for your country.
Keep in mind that government reports have a time lag. It's based on someone doing research some time ago. The time lag could easily be months. If it was 100% true at the time of research, the current situation may be very different.
Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.
Yeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :D
Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.
I hear you, but things will be different this time around. It would take me 20 minutes to explain, but gist is there is a HUGE diff between senior engineer and senior tech, there was no H1B phenom until 2001, almost no senior level engineers (cough) remaining in the biz until around 2006 (thanks to dot-com bust nuclear winter) and balance wasn't even restored until recently (very recently) because, you know, engineers with 10 years experience aren't half as confident as techs with 5 years experience. If you're a senior level engineer who can write operating systems, firmware and glance at a data center blueprint and see RF signaling issues as easily as you can look at a schematic and see DMA inefficiencies, are you going to pledge allegiance to a turd like company run into the ground by the spoiled Boomers or are you going to start your own company (or throw in with some hungrah folks you maybe met saving from the supremely over-confident senior technician crowd)? This time around, those Strange Conditions don't exist anymore and, much as it was in the 80s, you can't buy/refi a house in the US unless you can show significant ATR and lastly, with tightening credit (that comes with higher interest rates and, for now at least, higher home prices), you are going to need to be compensated in greenbacks (not stock) and show stability (not 1-3 years per gig)...all things that are harder in startup-land. For now, find another gig with a large company, go overseas (Europe not Middle Eassssst) if you have to. I will write a book, but they won't let me publish until the movie is done roflmao
> I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.
Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.
Going off the article it sounds like most of the layoffs are in business and recruiting so I suspect a small-ish fraction of the layoffs will be programmers
You're right but its not as if only Meta are firing or we're anywhere close to this recession ending. There's gonna be a bunch of pain to come still unfortunately.
I reckon 11k would pretty well fill all the available tech roles in Czech Republic (which fits the "small Central European" description). God knows where they'd live though, rents + prices would explode
I think the pay will go down its the meta and google etc that have been pushing up the salaries without the demand from them the pressure on salaries will bring them down.
The real problem to worry about is hiring practices, shitty HR people, algo-based auto rejecting and shitty fucking interviewers... THIS will have impact on these people suffering to find a new position....
So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.
There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.
It does mean that a lot of folks will be looking for work, expecting really big salaries. Because they have become used to a very high standard of living, these salaries will actually be required.
MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.
I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.
Similar here. Over the summer my country of 3m people, reached its yearly immigration quota in tech jobs of 16,000. And that doesn't include people moving inside the EU or refugees from Ukraine.
the effect this kind of thing has on the broader market is that it makes everyone else reconsider their hiring plans. I doubt there will be as many open positions after this announcement and it won't all be from hiring
True, but these aren't ordinary engineers who'll settle for ordinary salaries. These are the top paid engineers in the industry - there are practically no places that can hire all 20,000 of them at their current salaries.
Per last job report in US, there were two positions for every person finding normal jobs. For IT, I would think that ratio is twice. However, the biggest issue that people have to deal with: (1) Meta paid 2X to 4X higher than regular employers so that’s massive pay cuts for the folks, (2) they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked for.
So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.
I think the parent comment is talking about your general 5-year vesting schedule. In other words, for each of the past 4 years you worked, you will have some unvested stock today.
Meta does pay higher (maybe not 2x higher) and the message in OP says employees will get their November 2022 vesting, which implies they won't get any future vested stock.
Yes, which is what the GP post said, they lose their unvested stock. By future vested I meant, stock that will vest after they are laid off. Could've been clearer I guess.
I remember the dot-com (and Y2K) bust, when all the people who got into tech for the money (and not the love of it) suddenly decided to switch career. I hope the same happens now.
I dont really care why you got into it so long as you remain excellent while you're here. the Problem is the (seeming) correlation between money driven motivation and apathetic (sub)mediocrity.
For me it’s about how CV-obsessed our industry has become, which you could say that is also caused by the money factor.
Basic things like the KISS principle have been thrown in the garbage can, almost all that matters is how the tech we’re now using can further increase our career prospects.
So you're implying only people who are passionate about tech should be allowed to work in tech? This does not hold water for almost any profession. Tech pays extremely well, and if you can do the work, who cares how you feel about it?
If you can do the work, awesome, no one cares how you feel about it. But that's the keyword: *IF* you can.
People who went into IT for the love of it are diligent by default (from my personal experience) and CAN do the work. Then you get people who enter IT for the money (nothing wrong with that) and not all of them can do the work.
Those are the show-stoppers usually which incur various debts (from tech-debt to actual financial debt) because you end up having to carry them.
Let's not pretend as if they don't exist, there's so many of them.
Absolutely, and it's hugely demoralizing to work with them.
A person like that was moved off of my team recently, and the general lift on the team from just having them gone has been astounding. Everything is up: velocity, stability, even just the vibe of technical planning sessions.
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
The other most interesting part of the book (while certainly dated), is the citations to see what came before and more material on it.
Weinberg, Gerald M. The Psychology of Computer Programming (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971)
Dunn, Robert H. Software Quality: Concepts and Plans (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990)
Christenson, D. A. et al, "Statistical Methods Applied to Software", collected in Schulmeyer, G. Gordon & McManus, James I. Total Quality Management for Software (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992)
(and so on)
And while one can certainly debate the "is the advice given in something that is 30 or 50 years old still valid" - that debate itself is interesting in considering what was going on in the minds of managers back then and how they tried to solve these problems.
There is a certain lack of institutional knowledge and a desire to throw much of it away with the phrase "we're agile" or some other management buzzword of the day... and yet Brook's Law is still as valid today as it was nearly five decades ago (gotta keep an eye on that... I wonder if they'll do a third edition in 2025).
I once had to fire that person. I hated it, it was very hard to do because they guy was a personal friend of mine and he never talked to me again afterwards. However, it fixed the team and we went on to do a lot of very good work that we couldn't have done otherwise.
Bit of a tangent, but it's kind of harder to hire as well.
Years ago when interviewing people I didn't have to wonder as often how passionate the candidate actually is towards the field, or whether they're just looking for a high pay job.
These days I get those doubts a bit more. I think most people are still at least somewhat passionate though (bad/awkward programmer tooling which we've gotten used to are somehow great filters....)
It is more fun to work with people that love the work they are doing, who get jazzed up on covering all the corner cases and really good test suites and efficient use of a computer. People who will listen to tech talk for ten minutes and then act like they are thinking, “how will this get me director or VP by thirty” are less engaged and less fun.
During the dot-com days, you could get a job if you can fog a mirror and turn on a PC. Now you typically need to get a degree to get your foot in the door so at least there is a vested interest. (Not to say there aren’t talented people without degrees.) I think the OP is talking about getting rid of some of the dead weight. We’ve all worked with someone who coasts along and wonder how the hell they have a job in the first place.
Excitement about what you’re doing brings excitement to others too and many great ideas come from people tinkering with side projects and the like. We shouldn’t stop anyone from going into tech on anything but competency but yes, given the choice to hire someone passionate about it or someone who sees it as a droll 9-5 with roughly equivalent skill sets, I’d pick the passionate one.
My 2 cents is that it's going to be mostly recruiters, sales, customer success, and other misc operations folks. That's the pattern I've been observing since the post-covid layoffs have begun.
The submission itself is such a link. Did you even read it, or just dive straight into the comments?
> Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
Add to that thousands of smaller companies laying of 10 people here, 100 people there. We will not hear about it, but it quickly adds up.
In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
> In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Hiring students is much cheaper so companies may still hire them whilst letting go of other expensive employees at a cost of quality.
>Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?
Well I predict two things:
One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.
Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.
i would imagine other industries are going to suffer as well. my partner worked in fashion for a decade and realized it was horrendous and nothing was changing so she went to a bootcamp for UX design and got a job not too long ago. the pressure of the success of another industry would force bad industries to change certain ways of working for the better. when there is 0 competition, there is nothing stopping outdated and overworked industries from becoming any better. like it or not, the tech industry has helped elevate the broader market to a certain degree
Oh yeah you're right. I read it as "developers in the non-Bay Area"
Nonetheless, I don't think the point changes. One group getting less doesn't usually mean that it's going to transfer over and some other group will get less. Most likely, everyone is going to get less.
Rising tide lifts all ships as they say (and the opposite is true as well)
Not really. If anything junior engineers are not going to see comp like this going forward. But it's still incredibly hard to hire more senior folks even with big comp packages and they do command a premium.
Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.
Its also worth noting: Its easy to get scared by a number like "11,000", but just pulling estimates out of my ass; engineering likely represented less than 20%, and the bias toward those let go in engineering is likely junior. Not asserting no one senior was let go; just proportionality.
Here's what I'd add: Its extremely difficult to hire really talented senior engineers. Its easy to look at layoffs as "great, we should be able to find senior talent now"; but the opposite may actually be true. Layoffs, at least in otherwise "fine" companies, will predominately not impact senior engineers, and they'll also be less likely to leave. Moreover, the industry is effectively building a wall to breach into seniority; the pathway from junior to senior is harder and harder, even going back a year or two, and many of these junior/normal devs were massively compensated at these roles.
My heart goes out to the junior devs right now; there really are two industries and job markets.
It was obvious that those days were going to end eventually, it was never going to be sustainable. A few people I knew were deciding between job offers at beginning of this year and I straight up said take the most comp, this shit isn’t gonna last forever…
on the face, it should be pretty easily sustainable based on the profit per employee these companies make. i guess we just really hate anyone but shareholders actually getting a piece of the pie.
I checked a few days ago and the revenue per employee at big tech is eerily similar to "Biglaw" and non retail banking (Jones day, >200k entry level, goldman is similar) at 1-2mil per employee. One could argue the market for IB/trading has been saturated by applicants for years but they pay is still well above norms ~>150k entry level. Pretty interesting.
I think the folks who rode the ride a couple years back got it good: somewhere around 2012-2019 was great time for someone who had worked at marquee tech companies, had massive stock options, and commanded premium on the job market when they moved on from their orgs.
I just can't really believe this at all, unless these companies entirely crumble. It's just not feasible for the majority of folks to live comfortably in the Bay Area with a family at less than $200k TC.
I make ~$300k/yr and could probably swing $200k/yr if I didn't save anything (I save ~$100k/yr currently). I just can't imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.
1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world.
2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100/wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family.
3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.
As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000/mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I'd need $100k/yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.
We could downsize and save $10k/yr, but that's not really making a substantial dent long-term.
$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.
Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren't going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.
The housing costs in the Bay Area are primarily caused by 300k salaries from companies in the area. It's not going to crumble immediately, but I can imagine that if the (to-be-)recession drags on, there's be a downward pressure on both salary and housing prices (and other costs of living). Nobody is going to cut your pay in half, but those 8k/month rents are just a function of the demand (of housing) and supply (of money) in the area, not really a law of nature..
It's not a given that everyone will be looking for a job immediately. They're getting a multi-month severance package. Some will look immediately - some will take a breather and start looking in a few months - some will take the time to switch careers or go back to school. Also, it is 15,000 people presumably located around the globe - not just 15,000 people in Menlo Park.
It says those will be “disproportionately affected”, but that could just mean that they represent (say) 10% of the layoffs even though they make up 5% of the team. It doesn't mean that the layoffs are mostly those folks.
Programmers don't make up more 10% of fb's employee base anyway (a guess) so if you assume that fraction at both fb and twitter you're looking at about 1500 additional people looking for jobs not 15000. Suspect this has little to no impact
If that’s the company-wide number, I imagine it’s even higher in the Family of Apps and Reality Labs groups (the ones affected by layoffs), because it doesn’t include cross-org functions like facilities or accounting.
It says about 12k are software engineers. Now it does say 40k total employees instead of the real number but I suspect software engineers are much more likely to be on linkedin. Still fairly confident that its closer to 10% than 33%.
Honestly, tech companies that were formed in the last decade have very little to show in terms of value creation. Majority are unprofitable. Most will never make profits in a recession AND tighter monetary environments.
At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.
The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.
Well Meta severely downsizing their HR department shows you they're not gonna recruit much if at all. It's not a great sign for someone looking for a job...
These numbers are just the start of the avalanche... There have been a lot of pie-in-the-sky initiatives, especially as the result of the massive cash infusions during Covid.
Now all that easy money is going away.
The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.
It will probably spill over into the rest of the economy. No matter how generous the severance, a fired worker isn't going to be buying new cars, buying houses, or taking expensive vacations.
Were you around the dot com crash? It was much worse than what is going on, layoffs happened left and right. But the future would have never been better for tech jobs. So no, incorrect to say anything for sure.
I've long argued that it was the "creative destruction" of the dot com crash that made so many of the FAANGs possible.
For instance, Amazon in Seattle benefited as thousands of engineers found themselves out of work in 2000 and 2001.
In addition, AWS was largely inspired by the fact that Sun Microsystems refused to cut their pricing. Amazon was using a lot of Oracle databases and Sun hardware, and when Sun wouldn't negotiate their prices down, Bezos began to figure out A Better Way.
Bezos was particularly irked because there was a flood of practically new Sun hardware available (due to the crash) but Sun wouldn't negotiate on price, despite the market being awash in high quality used hardware.
Basically Bezos didn't want to spend $80,000 on a new Sun server, but he also didn't want to run hardware that was used.
Comps will come down from the stratosphere but good devs will not be unemployed long. They may fall to less exciting roles at banks or other traditional tech, but there's still tons of demand.
The US has 2.7 million developers. Who knows? They may have to sully themselves and become “enterprise developers” like most of the other 2.7 million developers…
The difference here is that it is all at once, and those same companies are slowing hiring. Net effect is that there are loads more people with prominent names on their resumes competing for those jobs that the recruiters are canvasing en masse with. Right now if you replied to one of those positions they'd likely turn you down after a screening call because the calibre of candidates on the market is really high.
They are actually going down because of inflation and the lack of a full compensation for that. You get the same money but it's worth less.
As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.
salaries rarely and hardly ever go down. however inflation does exactly that in real terms. This is an interesting article about it: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html
Will this saturate the market for all open programming/software engineering positions? No.
Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k/yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.
I think there's going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets/from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.
Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.
Also a lot of those people are going to take time off. A large number of high earners that have worked at a place for a decade and now have ~9 months paid vacation.
cost of living in those areas means these guys live at best above middle class unless you want engineers to essentially never have children and live in an apartment all their life, then even 200-300k in these areas isn't much.
As an engineer living in Europe and inside an apartment I can confirm.
Also wanted to add that when we want to feel less trapped we can very easily escape to many other nice places that surround us in the near vicinity, I usually go for bookstores and coffee-shops (from where I’m writing this comment), other people also choose parks, bike-rides, stuff like that. We manage.
Without those soulless entities who over hired by a large numbers those people may not have their job in the first place. So sympathize, but with perspective.
if reports are to be believed, large swaths of these layoffs were in business and recruiting units, much less so engineering, so not exactly 15k+ new applications coming in
They can try. But it would be a better time to build a team without the overhead of renting office space. I guess it depends on whether companies see an opportunity to wind back leverage from employees or to embrace new possibilities.
Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.
Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well.
Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need.
edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers
Facebook has a program where a majority of new hires go through to learn about their tech stack and contribute to a variety of teams. It's also where you find a team to join.
Basically a high powered onboarding program that is really good.
Recent hires who haven't yet been allocated to a team, though they do work with teams on real tasks and produce code. Usually non-specialists, though some like ML engineers do go through bootcamp.
I wouldn't say that. At least, I haven't talked to many FB employees and yet bootcamp was used for onboarding at two largish tech companies I worked at.
I don't have hard data (do you?) but all bootcampers we were working with were laid off and threads on Blind seem to indicate bootcamper layoffs were heavy
> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.
I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.
Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.
He's also probably not an accredited investor, selling a stock short in any significant volume is not like making a retail purchase. It can be quite hard to make money off knowing a stock will crash, and that's not even accounting for needing to know _when_ precisely since most of the ways involve short dated options. I gave up after investigating ways to bet on interest rate hikes and market corrections, and just went cash heavy at the end of 2021. That doesn't make you a billionaire it makes you just not lose principle.
True, this was the wrong way to phrase it on my part. What I should have said is "they probably aren't a professional investor who knows what they are doing and has access to lots of capital or leverage, and a Bloomberg terminal or whatever people use these days to locate stock to borrow and sell short".
buying puts probably isn't going to make you a billionaire though? The maximum return is the difference between the strike and the lowest price before expiration, and prices generally don't drop to 0. Realistically, you would need access to a lot of leverage to become a billionaire with puts, or already be a multi-millionaire.
It's a good counterpoint to the equally throw away argument that "if you disagreed with x you should have shorted it".
The problem with shorting is you can't just be right about the eventual direction... You have to be pretty bang on with the timing as well.
Therefore it's absolutely possible for people to suspect or have strong belief that something is unsustainable without having the liquidity or confidence on timing to take action on it.
No it's not to say there aren't Perma bears and other I told you so people crawling out of the woodwork, but that doesn't mean that every person who didn't capitalize on this is Monday-morning quarterbacking.
FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people.
Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.
Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!
Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.
> FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people.
The quarterly revenue was about $27bn but net profit $4bn, so you're off by a factor of 7 or more on the estimate. R&D expenses alone are $9bn, and the largest operational expense is employee comp, by a LOT, distant second being data centers. For added measure, they also reduced real estate footprint along with the 11k employees.
The company has also essentially doubled in size every year since ~2013, and that was certainly encouraged by false positives in terms of future projections when the pandemic hit. So this is really not surprising, and a major cost-saving function for them.
They are laying off people because the value of the company just tanked 70% in a few months. The value of a company contains all the future estimated discounted earnings, the trend of earnings matters more than current earnings. The actions of a company is determined by what its shareholders want, which is to maximize stock price, not be satisfied with X billions in profits when the stock is down 70%. The actions of companies will remain a mystery to people who do not understand this.
They lay people off, because companies always want to lay some people off, and doing so in normal times is even less palatable. Employees are not fungible, and some employees are worth to companies less than the company wants.
This is not to say that every single person being laid off is of low value, that’s not true. It’s just it is hard to lay off only low performers, some average or even good performer will always be collateral damage. But, overall, if you want well-performing companies to not do mass layoffs on recession, the only way is to make it more palatable to people to see mass firings in good times.
> Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point
This is super idealized. How many layoffs have been going on in startup land recently?
While I agree it's very idealized, a lot of those startups probably are legitimately financially threatened in the immediate term in a way that Meta most certainly isn't.
I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
Let’s say you are an employee at a company that does mass layoffs. They do not lay you off like everyone else and keep you on. What is the best course of action to take at that point?
Prep hard. My 2c below, not trying to tell you how to live life :)
1. Review your finances. How long can you skip work without feeling financially stressed? This should include full expenses (medical insurance, family, etc.) and will determine the level of risk you can comfortably take with your job.
If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk. Even if the job market and your company both collapse you can downshift for a year or two and work on a new tech as a personal project. Droughts seldom last more than a couple of years. If you have less than 3 months of cushion, look for the lowest risk options (a strongest company you can work for) and try to build it up.
2. Decide whether you expect your current company to do well with the reduced headcount. If your company is publicly traded, read financial statements and analyst opinions try joining an investor call. Look at the outside information, not the HR infomercials.
If the company is expected to do well you can stay. Layoffs in strong companies often mean shakeouts beyond actual layoffs (teams merging and forming, etc.) and you might even be able to move to a better spot. If the company is in trouble, start looking for other options ASAP.
3. Learn what is the job market for your skills and if any adjacent areas have significantly better prospects (if so, buff up your skills). This can change quickly. Talk to your tech friends, especially those in hiring manager spots, to figure out if they are hiring/frozen/RIFfing.
> If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk.
In my own experience I think this is a dangerous attitude: anny other HNers out there that thought this and failed, maybe add a comment about your own experience?
I thought I had cushion. However that attitude led to me reseting my equity to zero when I was about 30, and it took more than a decade of my life before I felt like I was starting to recover.
Perhaps sometimes we had some luck, so we get some savings, and we then think “that was easy, I could do that again” and try something risky. But the environment or our circumstances have changed, and we can’t always replicate our past.
The other aspect is that I think we underestimate risk: for example when I was younger I would think creating a business worth a million dollars would be unbelievably great. Now I see that opportunity costs of a $X00,000 loss of income require a 10x return ($X million) to break even (to only just cover your risks). Also you need wayyyy more return than 10x to cover the fact that your time investment is not diversified: a 10x return on a game you can only play a few times is a massive gamble that you end up with nothing. You don’t want to end up with nothing after say 40, because the world starts to randomly switch into extremely-hard-mode sometime after ~40 (and everybody is unaware they were playing on easy-mode until after the switch changes).
I wonder if we are talking about different risks. If I may ask, in your case did you go through your savings over several years by using it for regular living expenses or by pursuing a business/investment idea?
I have seen people go from a good sized bank account to zero quickly by buying something expensive (a house, a boat, etc.) or by trying to start a business. One can always lose money on risky investments or outright gambling.
But I have never seen someone deplete a 5-year savings by downshifting for a period of time. I was talking about the second case: I do not have to worry about losing a job if I have 5+ years of living expenses. If I lose my job and have to cool heels for a year, so be it; there are still have 4+ years of cushion. My 2c.
Sure. Travelling lots led to low equity, then I got involved with a business that went nowhere which led to “having nothing”, followed by cofounding another business (zero money investment but plenty of time investment). My income went to nearly zero and my spending went very low for a couple of years: for example I was living in an abandoned building with some dodgy people. I still had backstops (I could get a job, parents could have supported me, and I live in New Zealand which provides social welfare). The second business I helped found is mildly successful (I think it will pay me back for its risk plus a little, but it cost over a decade of my life plus some other even heavier costs).
My opinion is tempered by watching so many others flame out when trying to start businesses. Early flame out is often way better financially than many years of not quite succeeding (a friend just sold a business for peanuts after nearly a decade: costs and benefits but didn’t get the success they wanted).
Part of my comment is related to something I just read: a summary of Warren Buffett’s investing as:
RULE #1: don’t lose money.
RULE #2: don’t forget rule #1.
I”m not suggesting we shouldn’t chase rainbows - dreams are awesome even though they are usually social constructs driven by status. I guess my comment could be summarised as: don’t advise people to take risks. Either they are risk averse, in which case if they flame out due to your advice, that is bad. Or they are risk takers, in which case they need the opposite advice - try to be more sensible and less gambling.
I mean, the world needs founders, but I strongly believe it is not a financially sensible risk for the vast majority of people that become founders. I am assuming your comment was aimed at potential founders.
Here, SBF realized, was the rub: When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he’d get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus the decision to stick with Jane was a risk-averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between $50 and 50 percent of $100, and saying, “Give me President Grant.” SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
Ask if there are VRIF (voluntary reduction in force) options open to you. Most of the time there are unless you have some kind of "special" status.
I've never known a company that is in the process of layoffs not jumping at the chance to VRIF an employee because it is a far cleaner termination and honestly less stressful and upsetting for all involved IMHO.
I'd be nervous about asking this unless I'm 100% committed to leaving the company, even if they say "no". Otherwise, you ask, they say "no", but now you've signaled that you're not especially invested in staying at the company, which feels like a negative thing to signal if you're interested in staying.
(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
This nervousness is what companies rely on to keep the ship steady during massive lay-offs.
In other words that same company that in its heyday relied on the person pulling an all-nighter 'for the good of the company' yet failed to ever offer a reciprocal 'sure, take all the paid time off you need buddy' in return gets what it earned.
Although you may hear the 'rats from a sinking ship' and 'you're deserting the company and leaving your colleagues to pick up the slack' shrieked from on down high by management - Fuck 'em. They didn't actually give a shit about you on the way up and they don't give a shit about you on the way down.
I don't at all mean that I feel guilty about abandoning the company or anything like that, I'm saying this 100% from a place of selfishness. Wherever I am, I want my manager to think I'm engaged, I want to seem like a team-player. I worry that otherwise, I won't do as well at perf, I won't get put on interesting/meaningful work, I'll be relegated to the side and not feel as integrated into the team.
It's possible some of these are unfounded/exaggerated fears, though?
If you're 100% set on leaving with or without severance, for sure ask. But if you think you might prefer to stay if severance isn't an option, asking feels risky.
I think what you are describing is both a reasonable worry and also exactly the kind of ambiguity the company encourages. You have no leverage if you're unwilling to leave, and it's foolish to initiate a discussion like that from a position of dependency.
I'm not suggesting issuing ultimatums, of course, I'm just suggesting that you mentally prepare for needing to quit first, otherwise it takes a real pro to have that conversation. I know I'm not good enough to do it unless I talk about things like that with my manager regularly already.
I do wonder if these are questions you can ask confidentially in a different way. Like I dunno how big your place is but you might find this information easily in a meeting with HR, but HR is there to help the company (not you) so it depends on their priorities a lot. It's a very reasonable thing to wonder about when tens of thousands of people just got laid off from similar positions... I'd think a reasonable manager or HR person would understand that. But I certainly can't argue that managers and HR people are all reasonable!
Having said that, if you're going to be worried about possibly/probably losing your job 6 months down the road what does it really matter if you have signalled you're not very invested in staying? The company has signalled they're not very invested either is how I look at it.
>(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
Of course I am saying this as someone in Europe where firing someone "normally" is a lot more complicated and time consuming and comes with a whole list of other issues a company needs to make sure they manage properly. They can't just turn round and fire you with no pay because you "showed you were not very invested in the company as you asked if you could be let go when we were letting go of several thousand people". That is a 100% guaranteed legal hell hole no company likes to be in by choice.
In America perhaps that is something you genuinely need to worry about I don't know.
You're definitely not going to get fired for that on its own. Maybe I'm over-estimating how much this ends up mattering. But I think it can matter in other small ways too that can negatively effect your career growth.
I understand your concerns and certainly don't mean to minimise them, this is just my personal experience and opinion after all :)
Do what you feel comfortable with at the end of the day. My original reply was meant as one possible answer that I have seen first hand to work well for both parties.
I will add as another personal opinion though that I very rarely see people that choose to stay at a company going though layoffs hanging around very long.
More often than not those people experience a 'depression' (for want of a better word that escapes me as I write this) seeing their friends leave, not having the freedom the had back in the "good old days", little if any progression, the constant "sorry not this quarter, we're still recovering from the layoffs", living in constant anxiety that they will be in the next round of layoffs, etc. So they often leave within a year or two anyway.
Over the years I have played this game and now I am a bit more proactive about exiting before that 'depression' hits me. Of course what is right for me is not right for all, only you can truly decide what you feel is best given your situation.
Once the redundancies have started, the clock is running: you no longer have career growth at that company. You need to start planning your next career move elsewhere.
But it does mean your options for promotion and salary increase are clearly limited. And in tech there's strong evidence that more career development happens when you move companies than within a company.
You may find there's nowhere better to go, but switching to "looking externally" rather than "looking internally" for new jobs is definitely a good idea.
Yeah that's kinda the rub right now though. Everyone's frozen, tons are laying off. If the only information you have is "my company did a layoff", it's not clear you're better off looking externally vs. internally vs. staying on your current team.
One bad case is you leave your company that just did a layoff for one that has yet to do one (but will need to soon).
Don’t volunteer to quit if you’re not willing to lose your job is sound advice, even if it’s a bit on the obvious side.
Even in an economic downturn an engineer with Meta on their résumé is going to be well positioned to find employment inside of the three months or more pay and six month insurance runway this deal provides.
You don't need to ask your manager, why not go to HR and stress that this is a sensitive topic you don't want making back to your team? No guarantee they'll honor your privacy, but I'd say it's worth a shot.
In my experience, HR may act kind, but they are 100% aligned with the company and not you. Giving them a signal that you're open to leaving at a time when they're trying to reduce the cost of resources that are human is a terrible idea if you aren't looking to leave.
Find a trusted friend in the company who is a survivor and ask them. Survivors have strong information networks for office politics and know such info.
HR is there to protect the company. Sometimes that aligns with protecting the employee but when shit hits the fan ask yourself does HR work for you or for the company?
I know I sound a bit 'down' saying that but it is an unfortunate reality that companies are not very loyal to their employees when times get tough.
In general you're probably right. Though once upon a time I tried to volunteer about three different times and never managed to get a package. At one point my manager literally said "Shut up, you're not getting laid off so quit asking!"
In my personal experience some random senior employee isn't even pennies on the dollar when it comes to the total amount factored into the layoffs that are in the hundreds of millions.
The bigger factor is are you in a position that requires the company longer to replace you? If so you may just be in that shit position of being kept on another 6 months until the next round of layoffs and get a package half as good.
As the first poster said always get out first if you can as the packages never get better the worse a company does.
Never fool yourself into thinking you're too amazing to be let go and that is why you 'survived' this round of layoffs. The worst case is as I said, you are too good to be let go of yet.
But if the senior person is in a role that the company ultimately wants staffed, they're going to need to hire someone else to replace them, who will be new and less effective? (Though OTOH, given the current macro, maybe they can get away with paying the replacement less?)
To expand on why, what often happens after these is there now a round of "cost cutting" which on the surface may look like ok we just don't get as many, or any of the cool perks we used to- which will be true, and you will suddenly realize that work doesn't feel like it has a fun aspect to it anymore. But that's really nothing compared to the next step- when they start squeezing you- and everyone for more hours.
And more hours may not be a direct request- anyone at the periphery of the dev process- in the past this was QA, now gets cut because devs can do it, SWE roles might have to start doing more ops work, etc...
When I last left the financial industry, it was so bad, that VPs- and that was back when it least had some meaning- at least it did when I first got the title around 2010, started having to do mundane weekend work like checking out the system after network/firewall changes, etc.
It can be death by a thousand cuts. Now the financial crisis was way worse because essentially everyone was hurting, and losing money- and interestingly I "got out" of that bad situation by going to tech. But that's just how these bad situations play out and deteriorate.
That said, companies are still profitable. There was a LOT of overhiring in the past few years. I don't expect things to get so bad, at all.
It depends on where you work. But I've definitely been at a place where the first email was "we've decided to reduce staff in key functions, please read the attached offering and submit directly to your manager". This was a reasonably generous package, in one case health benefits would be maintained for nearly a year even if you had only worked there 3 years.
The next round was a security guy waiting in your office with a box and a packet of information about how to apply for unemployment.
True but there are exceptions. At a previous job of mine, layoffs were happening and my manager was tasked with laying off one member of my team. He sat us in a room and told us about it and the severance package and basically asked for a volunteer. A more senior engineer volunteered and went on his way with a good chunk of cash.
Oh how I wish I had volunteered cuz a year later basically everyone including me had quit anyway.
The last job I had they offered very generous buy out packages to a few thousand employees to lower the head count. We got to decide if we took it or not. id you accepted they would then figure out your exit date which could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 months out depending on company needs.
I don't know if it's an industry specific thing but my parents worked for big defense contractors and they would often talk about layoffs in conjunction with offers that people could take to leave voluntarily. Always signed crazy to me. My mom took one in 99, worked private industry for a couple years then came back to defense after the dot com crash for way more money.
Well, if you're in a 'critical' position and you want to take a more 'wait and see' approach, retention bonuses are usually a thing for folks they don't want to lose in a first-round layoff.
You approach that conversation like so, "I really love it here, but with the layoffs and uncertainty..."
I wonder if this mean a dearth of positions (i.e. a tech downturn is fully underway) or simply loads of applicants and enough open positions, but the recruiters are a bit inundated by the sudden influx and it'll take time to sort things out.
Either way I hope those laid off land on their feet.
I dont know the law here, but it seems you can ask to review your contract, and insist that they include a minimum employment term or guarantee a severance package. They have two ways to say no. They can fire you then, in which case you get the severance, or you're free to look for another job in the period before they're no longer legally obligated to give you severance.
It seems that you should take as much advantage as possible of your legal status.
If you're pretty close with your Director/VP, you can volunteer to be first on the list. Frame it as a sacrifice that you're willing to make to spare another member of your team.
It was petty, but I worked with a dude who got fired for doing that.
When he volunteered to get laid off (with the intention of getting a severance), the person he said that to fired him on the spot for "not being a team player."
Eventually, every last one of us were laid off. But it took six months and I used the time to find a new role and I also received a four month severance.
Sometimes voluntary layoffs are announced, but really you need to be able to read between the lines and smell that something is coming before the layoff is announced. (The reason is that layoffs are usually kept confidential because no one wants to incite panic.)
What I did a few years ago was have a 1-1 with a VP and basically implied that I was ready to do something different. I ended up with a great severance package right as the pandemic was taking off.
I've never understood why people in middle management seem to be blindsided by layoffs. I've even listened to a manager tell the CEO this. Are they that oblivious they can't see the writing on the wall? Or is it all just a weird act?
Sometimes voluntary buyouts are offered before the layoffs. And they typically will make it seem like the buyout option will have better terms than the eventual severance package, to entice people to take it rather than risk getting fired down the road.
Yeah this is what I’ve seen at previous companies. Basically, they need enough headcount for it to not eventually proceed to full layoffs. It actually seems beneficial if you meet the tenure requirements, are still relatively young, and have a good network. I saw several people make out like bandits from those types of offerings.
Yep. I knew several people at a previous employer who got 1 year full pay packages and had a new job lined up within a week. One guy took an early retirement package, worth probably $250k at the time, left for two years and worked at a startup for a while, then came back and within 18 months took ANOTHER early retirement package.
The writing is usually on the wall for a while before the layoff actually happens, so there's time for you to let your manager know that you wouldn't mind getting the boot.
I'm not saying there won't be more layoffs, but I don't think this advice makes sense for people at places like Meta. They are generating a ton of revenue and profit even with the current economic conditions.
In the case of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has set the controls for the heart of the Sun. It has no future because Zuck will lose everything in the quest for a product nobody wants.
There is VR and there is the Meta version of it. One can succeed despite the other, in fact, the Meta version of VR endangers the success of VR in general. Specifically, Zuck is working overtime and spending his shareholders money to convince people that VR is somewhere between Axie Infinity and watching paint dry.
Most of the VR advocates I know are no fan of Meta:
What is missing from Zuck's vision is any of the understanding that can be had from or had about fiction. If he was willing to listen he should take a sabbatical and go watch Ready Player One and all of the Sword Art Online anime and then he should buy a Switch or a PS5 and get a serious gaming habit. At some point he might get some insight about virtual worlds that aren't just a pale shadow of the real world but rather a place you might really want to work or play in.
Have you heard anybody say anything positive about Horizon Worlds?
If you believe that Superbowl commercial for Horizon Worlds is representative of what they think the market is it for people who feel like they are over the hill, the best is behind them, and they can recapture what it was like to live back in the day? (Is that you Zuck?)
I am very interested in getting a VR headset to help with some 3D GFX development I do, I like the Oculus hardware but I nuked my Facebook account a long time ago so it's not for me. I game plenty too but I try only to play games that are fun. (I am a little vulnerable to grindy RPGs, my son will smack me if he catches me…)
I survived two rounds of layoffs in 2008/2009 and they went as you describe. The first round had significantly better benefits. Which, ironically, ended up going to the worst performers.
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
If your team lead can protect you they will but the employer at large is rather indifferent. Also further in your career those relationships to your team mean a fair bit while who you worked for as a company might not make that much difference.
I’ve gone back to work for a manger who laid me off. There were literally no hard feelings.
When he laid me off it was clear that he had to hit a hard headcount number, and I knew the project I was working on was “discretionary”. The HR meeting was “this is a headcount reduction and not a reflection on your work. Have a lawyer look over your severance and please accept or decline it within a week.” Really quite professional.
Others have pretty much covered the matter, you will always bump into former team mates, or it will be thanks to them that you will get some gig.
Employers themselves usually look into spreadsheets with a bunch of KPIs deciding who to lay off, without any regards for the effort you have actually placed into the job.
This is going to be a repeat of 2000, not 2008. There's seemingly no contagion and no secular stagnation. This is just unwinding of the cheap money era that flowed overwhelmingly into SV. You'll see a cooling off of red hot compensation, a lot of failed startups that no one ever understood and the ongoing crypto crash. This may end up being enough to trigger a mild recession.
Software engineering is far more saturated than it was in 2000 and 2008. In 2008, Amazon, Apple, and Google all had a seemingly endless room to grow. The iPhone, Android, AWS, and video steaming were still in their infancy. There's nothing like that right now. There are definitely a lot of exciting innovations in ML and VR, but I think it will be a while before these technologies find a mainstream consumer use case.
In 2000 some people still worked with paper rolodex. We need to keep things in perspective. The world changed massively in the last 20 years, everything is software and software is almost everything. There are a lot of contributing factors to this economy which are unrelated to the actual demand and value of software. There will not be an oversaturation of software engineering for a while to come.
If memory serves, Meta is cutting a lot of non tech jobs. Engineers might lose their jobs if entire projects are scrapped, but maybe a different position will be offered to them.
I hope that everyone is looking at Twitter and learning what not do: no company wants to beg some engineers to come back after being too quick to pull the trigger.
We're like 2.5 years into one at this point and some people still don't acknowledge it. A lot of people just keep saying "we're heading into one." It's likely this one will pass long before people come to a general consensus on whether or not one really happened.
If this is a recession, its not one I am feeling. 2008, the .com bust, those were recessions that everyone felt acutely. Unemployment is still at record lows. If the GDP dial isn't where people would like it to be then fine, but overall jobs are plentiful and no one I know is scared like they have been during the previous recessions.
People act like there were no layoffs between 2010 and 2000 but there were plenty, if you were in the wrong company and/or the wrong sector. IBM comes to mind. There were still CEOs out there trimming the fat while everyone else was getting high on the hype. If you had exposure to this, you're ready, at least emotionally, for what's going on now. If you didn't, you're probably shellshocked right now. Don't worry, you'll get used to it.
There was a lot of commodity-inflation in the early 2000s, the second biggest rise in commodity prices after the 1970s[1]. Unlike the 70s (supply shock), this was primarily a demand-pull out of China/Asia, so the net impact to the economy was much more positive.
The 5 year breakeven inflation rate today is 2.61% Since Treasury Inflation Protected Securities didn't exist in the 70s we can't compare, but the market thinks inflation is not going to continue like it did in the 70s.
You'd almost think cities and metropolitan areas are being thoughtful when avoiding the demands from those following the latest gold rush. But surely, that would be an unpopular opinion around here.
It really depends on the Fed and the overall market. I would say the economy is at a much greater risk now than in 2000, for these reasons:
We have several fundamental inflation factors
- The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year.
- Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare.
- This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception.
- The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs.
- Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up.
- During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe.
- Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.
On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors:
- Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything.
- Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well.
- Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.
All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.
As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems.
- Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation.
- Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more.
- In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy.
- People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US.
- Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs.
- Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts)
- These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.
In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).
Mild recession? How are you not understanding the global macro set up right now? Europe will see a ~10 year recession, possibly the worst ever. America may fare better but there's no way you're getting away with a "mild" recession.
Predicting the future is hard, but the labour market is still extremely tight, boomers are leaving the workforce due to retirement, and there will probably be (attempts at) on-shoring as the west tries to decouple from China.
Europe will probably get its energy sorted in the medium term with LNG, and they're going to need to build a lot of damn nukes, but I don't think it'll be 10 years.
I'm interested to hear your opinion: Do you have any thoughts on the current way companies are valued/how they operate vs how they were leading up to the 2000 crash?
Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.
This is literally nothing like 2000 unless in you're in something like crypto. Meta hired 30k+ people during covid and they are correcting that over hire mistake. They are fine financially.
In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.
Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.
Under what circumstance do you believe the current landscape would be comparable to the 2000's era? Certainly, I would hope that the same kind of foolish behavior wouldn't reoccur, outside of a very specific set of circumstances, but do you see any sort of comparison between the historical foolishness of the market, and the wastes of money that have been devoted to things like, Stadia, Zillow AI pricing, Quibi, WeWork, etc.?
When I see the amount of money spent vs brought in by the various big names out there (social networks, in particular) I can't help but see a thing essentially worth little outside of name recognition. I naturally assume it to be a house of cards ready to collapse at some point, I just can't really determine when or why that might be. Perhaps not anytime soon, or to the extent that it would have were it 2000, but certainly companies that has such a noticeably poor ability to create profit, that it seems assured to fail.
I've certainly been wrong about such things in the past. Twitter, for example, was a thing that I assumed around 2008 or 2009, would never catch on, and that whatever traction it had would fade within a few months. I had similar assumptions with Netflix being "doomed to failure" after they tried to split the steaming/DVD rental services. I've been laughably wrong on each of those things, so it's entirely possible that I'm just not appreciating that maybe the world itself works has changed in a way that I haven't grasped. I just don't see how tech companies which can't manage to turn a profit, let alone offer predictable income, are able to sustain longterm value investment. It just seems like a hopeful anemic.
Interesting question. I like the WeWork and Quibi examples. Imagine most of the Nasdaq being made of companies like that and you get an idea of 2000. 00 and then the GFC I think really hammered home business plans and path to profit in the broader market.
Crypto though I think is where we will see an 00 style collapse. Many of the companies are scams or lightly disguised gambling platforms. The technology is poorly implemented in many cases, leading to theft. There are also a large amount of drifters just taking people's money. Maybe crypto has protected the broader market by being a honeypot for all the exuberant behavior? IDK.
I think you should be careful discounting social networks. Meta, as one analyst I read said, is a cash volcano. IMO, ATT effects for Meta and Google are overblown because they have so many properties to gather data from. Ads on both platforms work and are valuable. Though they are not immune from general economic slowdowns.
Even though TikTok is private, the little that has leaked shows them doing extremely well. Twitter has been mismanaged for years. Musk is right that Twitter should be a decent business, but it remains to be seen if he can get it there.
While I'm pontificating, and since you also mentioned Netflix :) another spot I see about to implode is content spend. Look at how much Netflix, Disney, Prime, etc... have spent creating content the last 5ish years, and then look at how much they charge a family for the access. There is no way that level of spend continues. We have been living in a golden age for content with the variety and amount, and I think that is about to end. With the increase in rates and the market pullback overall, content spend is going to have to get cut.
I've been through 3 lays offs years ago and after the 2nd one I got pretty good at predicting the 3rd. It's basically a cookie cutter approach.
Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.
Maybe less relevant now that a lot of companies are still remote. In the past when a company cuts back on office perks, such as snacks, it’s often a leading indicator of financial issues and possible looming cuts.
I helped a friend move after she was laid off, a couple years after the dot com bubble popped. One of the eeriest things was seeing all those shiny new buildings in Silicon Valley, sitting empty.
It was like 15% of the businesses just evaporated.
It was a Cisco building in particular that I remember.
I was over on that street recently and everything is occupied again, though many of the names have changed.
I'm close to deciding to go back to University to get some additional education that's likely to improve my work in the future. I can afford it without any salary. Based on your experience, do you think this is the right moment to do so? I'm employed at the moment.
If you’re going in order to get education that you personally want, now seems like the best time. The economy will recover and you’ll be able to get back in later.
If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career.
Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.
Nothing interesting will be reliably funded over the next 5-ish years given the current macroeconomics.
If we’re talking about where the opportunities (jobs) are going to be, then you’re probably looking at tech roles within non-tech companies. These companies have been dying to modernize but haven’t been able to hire engineers due to the tech bubble.
After that, tooling that enables non-technical companies to build software - whatever that looks like.
The really high paying jobs of the future (well, and really now to be honest) are going to be some sort of combination of Data Science + Speciality Science. Think biomedical engineering, material scientist, chemist, any engineering discipline because the thing we need the most right now are better medicines and antibiotics against the rising threat of resistant bacteria, COVID showed us we still don't have a shot against a really bad virus, we need better batteries, better power generation, better cars and modes of transportation, etc.
What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face.
> What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face
(No snark intended, my background is in science...)
The fields that would benefit society the most are not typically the fields where the most money is to be made.
I did that after I got laid off early 2009, although for me it was going back to finish my bachelors.
Spent two years in school and got to sit out the worst of the recession. However, (in the US) tuition increased a ton from when I first went to school and has only gotten more ridiculous since I graduated.
Personally I'm glad I did it, it just took a while to pay it all off.
This was common on what a lot of people did when the dot-com era crashed to an end. Almost all my software engineering friends went to grad school, most for their MBAs and law degrees, a few stayed their course in software engineering and bit-twiddling.
From personal experience school is much better (and more fun) later in life, especially if you're genuinely interested in what it is you are studying. If you can afford it, or even better - get your company to pay, it's definitely worthwhile. You may have to pace yourself, as taking on a lot of credits and full-time work at the same time is not easy.
> There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse
Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.
Except the very last round, where you're the person left to handle sale of IP and so forth. Then they'll pay you well to stick around for a few months doing nothing.
Not the OP, but what I’ve experienced is severance packages get worse across rounds at a single company. A previous employer started at 1 year pay / benefits, then six months, then six weeks + two weeks per year of service.
Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.
I mean, the "world-changing" stuff they're investing in is what directly led to this layoff. The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.
Yeah, someone posting above literally said that their AR/VR teams were left pretty much unscathed. In fairness these teams might also be a lot smaller and more "optimised" in desired structure as they're younger than the rest of the company.
There were some contradictory signals about this in the article. In one bit Mark says they are continuing to focus on the metaverse but he also says some people at Reality labs will be affected. But it sounds like the apps teams are going to be affected too
I'm sure there are lots of competent people putting a lot of effort in "Metaverse", but to me it looks really just yet another VR world. Does anyone know what is the concrete new thing it would make successful?
I own an Oculus 2, I really love Half Life Alyx, I had a PC that works well for VR...
I have no idea if Metaverse is a game you download and run or it's supposed to be some tokens you take from game to game. I just have no idea. I've seen the creepy/shitty Zuck avatars, so I assume there is some chat-game involved somewhere.
Notice there are no questions in this post. I don't care to learn. Just re-stating how poor the messaging of what it is they apparently want me to care about is.
Just a name change for FB's parent company. Also zucc wanted to excite people with VR stuff but it is not even close to 5 years ago Recroom experience yet.
Smart people can also change the world by working on climate change, improving healthcare costs, addressing the energy crisis, coming up with new ways to mass manufacturer consumer goods at reasonable prices without shipping things halfway around the world and back, help an increasingly aging population do basic stuff.... the metaverse (maybe crypto?) were just natural evolutions of existing business models, but these weren't the world changing things people need, so capitalism (the brutal nature is why it works) didn't reward it.
If these smart people spend their brain energy to address these needs, which the world actually needs, they'll find success again, and the world will be changed in the way it needs to be... and frankly that's the way capitalism is supposed to work. Changing the world is only rewarded when people want it.
Lol way too hard given all the politics and gatekeepers in those fields. Doing software is so much easier than that right now.
And I disagree that solving climate change etc. is a "need" for most people. I think we all pretty much accept that climate change is going to happen unless some major coups or revolutions take place, and there's nothing we can do about it. Seems like the plan for the individual is just to ride it out for our 80 years, or until there's some food shortage or water crisis that kills us.
Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary? if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.
now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different
Getting laid off during a tech crash often leads to smart people deciding to finally follow the dreams they couldn't justify during the tech bull market. There's probably no shortage of people working at Facebook who have dreams of quitting to build some idea they have. But quitting a job paying 350k or whatever is just not in the cards.
To call Google an “advertising company” is disingenuous and I suspect you know that. Whilst Facebook has been obsessed with chasing eyeballs and advertising, Google has built Google maps, Gmail, Android, Translate, all kinds of search, GCP, the leading web browser, Chromebooks, self driving cars, the most advanced quantum computer, world leading AI research and a ton more.
> To call Google an “advertising company” is disingenuous
It probably depends on one’s perspective. Their Q3’22 financials show that $54b of their $69b revenue for the quarter is advertising income. It is also listed first in their financials.
Also, I can think of many people who would be building amazing things outside FAANG but choose to go to FAANG to pay off college debts or to build wealth i.e. they come from poverty. Let's not even get into biases in how capital is distributed. Like, there's a hierarchy of basic needs for a person and their family before they can turn down life changing compensation to 'build something cool!'.
I spent the first 10 years of my career paying off student debt. The last 5 have been catching up on the retirement savings I missed out on over the first 10 years. As long as I don't have a major medical event maybe I can turn down a job and "build something cool" when I'm 50.
FWIW I’m currently working on a startup side project with someone at Meta. I don’t know that we’re going to “change the world” but I think we’re both awesome and I can see us building something awesome.
We both have jobs because we need to pay our bills.
I think that many great, world-changing, folks have a non-linear life path and may end up doing all kinds of things including working for evil corporations for money, or bussing tables at Denny's before they get to the actual great, world-changing stuff.
> For the past 10+ years, in this forum, the advice is to stop trying to build something, go work at Faang
I think the advice given, when requested, has much more nuance that takes into account the context provided in the request. Do you honestly think HN is just a bunch of FAANG fanboys?
You may be thinking of the Google from 10+ years ago. I left all the way back in 2016 and the Alphabet transition had already turned it soulless. I've heard it certainly hasn't gotten better since.
I don't work at either, but aren't they both advertising companies with roughly same kinds of people working at them? Why do you think it would be different?
The one thing I want is the ability to work on my own startup in my spare time, without fearing legal repercussions. It wouldn't require me to risk my house on an idea.
FB still making 4Billion in profit, all the comments here dont seem to talk about that Twitter wasnt profitable, FB is and laid off 4x the amount of employees, Zuck just saw Musk do it and thought itd be a perfect time while the attention is on Musk and Twitter, that letter Zuck wrote is sick and sounds like its written by a sad emotionless robot he brags about how profitable Meta is in that letter its pathetic, reminds me of the 70s and Reagan and neoliberalism making changes to laws to allow capital flight from New York to the south and firing all the well paid factory workers in the Bronx 10,000 families now without a breadwinner over night Zuck blew through billions on his VR research that no ones buying and just saw the perfect opening to sharpen his technocrat knives and surgically remove 11,000 employees even though they all contributed to making Meta be 4B in profit and it was Zuck who blew billions he needs his stock to bounce back so he can continue buying the rest of Hawaii
> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office
wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it.
It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of
Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully
managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and
preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners"
(tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of
unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where
everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute
impunity for a day?
Would telling the truth be better if the real truth was “We’ve been waiting for a good excuse to drop a bunch of people and boost the bottom line short-term so we can get some loans”?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that.
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
Of course. It's not about the best move or what looks better. Nobody cares for that.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
The tech industry labor market has been cooling rapidly this year, it's not only ad-tech companies, and certainly not only in companies who might have over-hired due to betting everything on metaverse.
For better or worse (obviously for worse) his relationship with the company is fundamentally different than that of every other employee. He’s a founder and holds a majority of voting equity. That makes him inherently unaccountable in a way that is nearly without precedent in the modern corporate era.
What does that even mean? He won't have to work for a few centuries instead of a millennium? Lol.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
It's not a logical inconsistency to point out that dollars matter a lot less once you have enough.
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
> If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
That wealth is not “immeasurable”. It’s just hard for someone to understand when their point of comparison is personal finances.
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
It has nothing to do with ownership being good or bad. It’s having people with vision and acumen for financially sustainable businesses setting up these projects for success.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Capitalism is just as often not the meritocracy you think it is, but just capital buying up production...
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
Are you trolling? that would be worse for literally everyone involved. Have you held yourself to this standard in your professional life? it seems so absurd
Yeah, in 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. Told my team we'd all be laid off soon. I finished the project I was on first and was the first laid off due to no more work.
The overlords saw they were losing control with people opting to WFH and great resignation … so they said “What audacity … inflict pain and suffering on the mortals”.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Or, the dynamics behind the two events are very similar and there’s only so many different ways to describe it, so you shouldn’t expect significant variation in how they’re described.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
I replied by editing my original comment. I got flagged, so I thought it appropriate to edit my comment to motivate what I posted.
My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment.
I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
I experimented with making a GPT-3 excuse generator for getting out of work/school a while ago^. We can look forward to a future of incredible synergy, as employees dodge work with AI generated notes and are summarily fired by an AI!
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I haven't seen inside very many, but when I was at university I participated in bargaining with the execs there; I've also interacted with execs of the small- and medium-sized companies I've worked at. Regardless of the purpose and scale of the organization, they all seemed to be emitting the same blandishments, always loosely correlated to context...
Exactly. GPT3 for conversations, some humain actor giving enough materials so the C suite can appears in all hands and the likes thought realistic model ( not the meta crap )
Why stop at the c-suite? We may not be close to being ready to disrupt software engineering but the trend is heading in that direction. We already passed a milestone for code generation.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I dare say that once some are out the others look to them and copy what they can if it worked.
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
We must have massively different world views, or at least different definitions to colluding. This doesn't survive Hanlon's Razor. At worst, this is corporate corner-cutting, not collusion.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
They claimed their monthly, daily, and total engagement are all up in this quarters earnings. Ads shown up 17% price per ad down 18%. Doesn’t seem like losing users.
Many large companies have pretty rigid comp review processes and cycles. If you’re a high performing employee who got a stock refresh earlier this year there’s a good chance you’re down 50% or more at many companies. Switch companies and there’s a chance you’ll get a new grant for the original gross value but at the new lower share price.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
I am talking best employees. People who will find good job no matter what. People you need to keep because they are actually the ones who make the show going.
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
Smaller / newer companies with investment money to burn who expect results. Although I can imagine investors are slowing down a bit as well - actually they have done so I believe for the past half decade or so.
well it could be all of the above....what i find odd is that the Facebook CEO already knew that demand for ad revenue would already drop in 2023 and they were still hiring up untill now....they should have started cutting costs earlier
Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."
I think the whole "many predicted" statement that several large tech companies have used to thin out all the pandemic hires is cover for the fact that they boom-hired during the pandemic knowing full well they would very likely have to shed those hires when things went back to pre-pandemic levels and the opportunity for short-term profit was over.
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
That seems a bit unfair. Every successful founder is irrationally optimistic about their own business — that's partly how they became successful in the first place. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that Zuck, Lütke, the Collisons, and many, many others all made the same wrong directional bet and ended up over their skis for perfectly sincere reasons.
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
Who said anything about fair? When has fairness ever factored into business?
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
Most large fast going tech companies "predicited" this but that doesn't mean they really believed it. The alternative at the time was to say..."we grew 100% in the last two years but with covid restrictions limiting etc wr think that growth will be more like 80% and revenue down x%" that would have sent massive shocks to investors and stocks would have dropped overnight as companies like Meta had been setting a long precedent of "beat and raise" with their earnings calls. Essentially everyone was hoping it would continue as they didn't want to see equity and comp and valuations down. What's funny is that it all happened anyway over the course of the year. Believe me from first hand experience there were many people in these companies raising flags late last year that it can't continue but were essentially ignored. Hope is not a strategy!
That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.
The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come).
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
> the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
>the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy.
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
First, while the death rates were highest among the oldest people there are still a ton of people who were not close to death anyway. It’s also not true that losing older people is necessarily neutral - economies do better when money circulates, not when it’s tied up in a lump sum going into someone’s retirement account.
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
> They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
Only a fraction of that $8B in aid was direct cash payments to Ukraine. Much of it went to US defense contractors and was recycled into the domestic economy. Higher fossil fuel prices hurt US consumers, but most of that value is flowing to US energy companies and ultimately to US investors. The vast majority of fossil fuels burned here are also extracted and refined here; we only import a little.
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Yes, I agree, I don't think that $8B is a lot of money for the US, especially in the military context. I was just surprised at the number and shared some back story.
Agreed. It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and that at best the restrictions could just kick the can down the road a while. It was also covered up by printing cash at enormous scale.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
They should blame Xi. All these economic decisions wouldn't have happened had there been no COVID. The Chinese government deliberately released this lab-made bioweapon/virus, to see how it would negatively impact most of the world. From economies struggling, to people getting polarized and more divided, and supply chains getting affected, their move has been a massive intelligence success for them.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
It wasn't blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, especially because it wasn't.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?)
think doing nothing would have been much worse.
> It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease,
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
3 weeks for me to get a remote GP appointment right now. This will be killing more people than Covid ever did, so we are in the red before we even get onto anything else.
Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different:
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.
Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.
In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.
The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course).
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
Allowing access to email until the end of day also seems an improvement over other US companies practices
> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
This is why you need real friends outside your workplace. When you get shoved out the door, at most your get the afternoon to be like "lets keep in touch!"
Ha, it's mostly notifications of updates and comments from either Workplace, Phabricator or Tasks. An email sent to me is going to be drowned in a sea of notification emails and it's very unlikely I would read it.
I'd set up filters to clean up the inbox, but it just so happens that when something of significance happens, it's usually on Workchat or Workplace, so I don't bother with e-mail.
I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave…
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR.
I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company.
I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.
TikTok is a Chinese company bringing in mountains of data on US citizens, including the ability to influence what people in the US see on a daily basis. The Chinese government would never sell that kind of leverage to anyone, let alone to Facebook, which is banned in China.
TikTok is incredibly popular in the US and there isn’t really a huge similar precedent where the US takes a page from China’s playbook and blocks a social media network completely. If banning TikTok was reasonable, and I’m not sure it is, I think it makes a lot of sense to be cautious about setting bad precedence.
Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be.
Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
A lot of apps want to become a social network but Facebook was in a good position to do so. Imagine someone posting a picture of their Brunch. They tagged the location. Some AI matches the picture of the food with the pictures from the menu (google reviews already does this to some degree).
That food looks good, imagine if they partnered with Uber or Grab so you can add to cart right below the picture.
Peer to Peer payments could have also been great, especially if you could check-out at a store by scanning a QR code to pay (think WeChat Pay, FairPrice in Singapore, or even Paypal's version of that).
Or even buying event tickets. They already have events on the platform, and they let you put targeted ads, but what about an integrated experience to purchase tickets right on the platform instead of there being an external link?
They could have done so much but the only major change/addition in recent years was Dating (a huge hit in countries that perceive Tinder as only for hookups) and those avatars that people use everywhere instead of text posts.
Very good lesson here for both Twitter, FB and any other upcoming startup. Never treat your 3rd party developers as shit. Look what WeChat achieved with their superapp and developer ecosystem. Twitter and FB tightened their rules a lot over the years, when they had a potential to become super app for West
Interesting. Is that because payments are much lower margin than ads? Surely investors would be smart enough to see the additional revenue, and likely additional benefit to the ads business, as being worth it?
You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.
It's better to make many small bets and when they start to take off, THEN put the foot on the pedal. Zuck has been notoriously bad at creating new products, so betting the company on that he'll manage it this time seems like a very bad idea.
That's a good point. The principle of proving a simple possible version makes sense. Just pointing out that those "small" steps Tesla took are already a lot bigger than most software projects.
hmm, maybe, but it seems like a golden age for tech where it was hard to fail from a strong starting position. MS, Google, Amazon, Apple, have all done much better than Facebook.
If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity.
They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.
They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.
Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model
FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse.
The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies:
What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint.
If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.
Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
not a ton of market for that. and it changes the risk nature of their own facilities. already plenty of hyperscale datacenters with space to lease. what advantage does meta offer? surely they wont beat on price.
It’s probably not worth the hassle to FB, but it is funny to think about how big of a business this could potentially be. But even a profitable business unit might not make enough profit to actually make it worthwhile.
It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
SMB. They are effectively the webmaster for a vast amount of very small business, but also Meta's ad platform ends up being one of the larger expenses for many businesses. In fact, I doubt there is a single entity on earth that has more billable B2B relationships.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
>If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Why would there be any issue from an FTC standpoint? As far as I can tell, they're in completely separate businesses. I do agree it is a brilliant idea to Microsoft-ize the SMB relationships they already have to sell software services.
I support I feel uncomfortable about it, but maybe such a merger wouldn't raise antitrust flags. CloudFlare has an insane amount centralization. I love their services as a web user, developer, and operator, but WOW do they have a lot of power by nature of their business. I worry about a buyout by a less principled company that could do all manner of wrong with CloudFlare's assets. For example, a Meta Cloudflare could start to delay or block 1.1.1.1 DNS queries to their competition, and do so quietly and selectively. Any service that offers "Protection" ought not be part of a conglomerate.
They don't need to win, they just need to be there as another option. Every business I've worked at has been huge on wanting cloud diversity of some sort, and tons of startups act as middle men on this.
Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
They should have never given up on mobile. Burning a few billion a year on an android fork would have had much better returns than trying to go warp speed on VR.
Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.
You being downvoted just shows even this community prefers emotional projections over simple facts.
There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere.
Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe).
There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
Financially twitter is in a rough spot. They were not really making money. Now they have loans to pay too. It isn't in meltdown but certainly there are things to look at there. Sure, Elon can keep it going for as long as he'd like. But he's a fickle personality. I mean he went back and forth several times just with buying the company. Who knows if he'll lose interest.
You're right, but Twitter basically has been in continuous financial trouble since eternity. In 2016 they almost went bankrupt. They tried to sell then but nobody wanted it. Just before Musk they were also in financial catastrophe mode. Under Musk, that will likely continue for at least a year. It's a fundamentally unhealthy businesses.
I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served".
Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back.
Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.
Yup, they are worse off in some ways, and better in others. There is a lot of upsides with having a single person like this calling all the shots, and love him or hate him Musk has been successful in the past.
The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.
Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse.
Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.
No, earnings have been going down because Apple fucked Meta with Apple's policy change on asking for consent to be tracked. Meta has even stated as much in various earnings calls since this happened.
This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.
The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.
Revenue has slowed from the Apple change, but the drop in Q3 profits can almost entirely be pinned on RL as staff and other investments has accelerated.
> company’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the quarter.
> Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022.
The effects from the Apple changes are mostly in the rear view mirror at this point. You could attributed a 4% revenue hit to them, but those can also be attributed to a general slowing economy.
Earnings down 4% in bad macro conditions for advertising and compared to a pandemic when people spent more time on the internet. I don't think facebook revenue is going anywhere soon, a decade from now though who knows.
Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
I don't think Mark saying "we're going to focus on the metaverse instead of making money for a few years" is a meltdown. They're still making money, their earnings are still sky high, they're just spending more than they need to.
Zuck is doing first ever mass layoffs for a company he started from his dorm room 18 years ago and grew to a ~trillion dollar valuation.
Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.
They managed with 7,000 in 2013. But a lot of things changed.
To continue to grow they needed to buy Facebook and Instagram. They scaled up their infrastructure - lots of system administrators. They needed more sales people and corporate campaign managers to get advertising in. More moderation, because governments started passing internet content laws. Spam detection. Customer support. Automated content blocking. More legal teams, because they are constantly under legal attack. Don't forget all these laws and what is acceptable or not changes by country - so they need a team in every country to handle that. Then there's VR, Meta AI, the 'Metaverse', and their whole R&D division.
I left Facebook in March after having worked there for seven years.
It was always a struggle to hire enough engineers to accomplish my team's goals, and it only got worse as time went on. We didn't have a terrible on-call or terrible team morale, we just tended to lose out to teams working on more visible projects. We could have doubled our headcount and still had a backlog of impactful work we couldn't get to.
When you realize that WhatsApp had 450 million monthly active users and only 55 employees at the time of its acquisition by Facebook in 2014, you start to think that those tens of thousands of employees might be more needed for Meta's ad business.
It's not just that they wrote some very optimized code -- though it's true they did. They also designed the app in a way that requires very little server infrastructure compared to other chat apps, especially in the per-acquisition days.
For example, they didn't store contacts/images/messages server-side as you see in Telegram, Google ChatAppOfTheWeek, FB messenger, Twitter, IG, etc. All the infrastructure and the folks required to develop and maintain it, simply didn't exist. Similar with the limited amount of data collection they did at the time -- if you don't log it you there is no reason to have a team of people to analyze it. If you don't have ads you don't need an ad sales team. Etc.
Facebook has become the local town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere.
Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?
No they aren't. Because of [censored] algorithmic timeline you only see posts Facebook decided are relevant for you, and usually they aren't the ones you are most interested to see.
They are indeed investing into groups, but ultimately the marginal gain there is marginal. The metaverse stuff also complements (i.e. it isn't a complete pivoting away from traditional social networking) all of the other connectivity (e.g. imagine a unique and persistent VRChat instance per group; you can have a meta-localverse) but also gives Meta its own platform. Mark is obviously incredibly pissed at the amount of leverage Apple has over him.
Because FB missed owning the smartphone platform with their FB phone (apple + google), and so they want to own the next one in their opinion (VR-Oculus).
The Localverse isn't defendable in anyway. People don't use Facebook pages/groups because it's "Facebook". They use it because it's adjacent to something else they do.
16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance and everything else, looks like a decent severance package at least. This seems better handled than Twitter's layoffs.
That is really generous. But man, I'm sitting here really hoping my sibling who works at Meta is not getting axed.
He took the job because of the money, after our parents had to declare a medical bankruptcy. The increase in salary allowed him to pay for their housing which they cannot afford on SS benefits.
Even under those circumstances he still would not take the job until he got my super-anti-Zuck butt on-board with the idea.
I hope people realize that reasons for working at Meta may be more complicated than it might seem on the surface.
Of course layoffs are never pleasant and I hope and wish no one ever has to face them. But in the capitalist world we live in, they are inevitable. I am glad your brother has his job. Another sad thing about the uber capitalist society that US is, are the medical bankruptcies. In a developed country like the US, people shouldn't go bankrupt trying to avail healthcare. But that's a completely different discussion and let's not go there.
Musk only authorized 3 months' severance to substantiate the 90 days needed to prevent being sued into oblivion. The man is going to do the bare minimum for his employees to recoup his loss in making the acquisition.
I've read several times in those comments that this is a "decent" severance package.
I'm not that familiar with the US legalities and practices, what's considered a "good" and "very good" severance package over there, if 16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance (for the employees and their families btw) is only "decent"? Is it common to get way better? From abroad we think that the severance packages in the US are at the will of the employers and so are usually very bad.
My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too.
Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.
Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.
Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.
They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.
In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
"Managing" wasn't meant to imply "direct reports." I don't think I've ever met anyone with 100 direct reports (although I can see completely routine roles where that might happen -- Uber/Turk/etc. can exist with zero human management).
Yes that's what my comment was. Often it's 100 people below them. The % of time managing any of these people is low.
FYI twitter seems to be moving to a low manager high employee count. Musk himself said that a ratio of 1 manager per 10 coders is way too high. I suspect he wants it at 10x that amounts.
My current manager has 31 direct reports.
Sorry if this is confusing it's a hard subject to describe over text and I think there is a lot of nuisance lost over text here.
Kinda. Here's the problem. Let's say I'm managing a business with $1B in revenues and $1.1B in expenses. Am I doing well?
On one hand, those are astronomically high revenues. Great! On the other hand, I'm losing $100M per year. Suck! But I was brought in to fix things up after some idiot who ran things into the ground. I'm doing great! But it's a growth market; maybe it's because of that? Suck! But in fact, I'm bleeding money for growth. Great!
... and so on.
So all those other things can be spun. It's nearly impossible to objectively evaluate executive performance.
They definitely show up on OKRs and similar, which can be managed by setting low objectives.
Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.
Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.
Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.
Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.
That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.
When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive.
Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.
Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.
People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don't see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.
Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
Been there, done that. It turns out throwing money at problems doesn't generally solve them. People will be motivated to keep getting paid obscene salaries. Keep their boss happy isn't the same as being aligned and focused on a common vision.
Indeed, in most cases, when people are aligned around a common vision, you don't need to pay them very much. People seem to do best when they're paid enough in order to not have financial stress so they can focus on work (with the caveat that the pay ought to be stable), but where the financial motivation doesn't replace intrinsic motivation. That's a rare scenario you only see in a few settings (e.g. sixties-era academia).
If throwing money at people worked to keep them aligned, FAANG would have hyper-aligned work forces. You can look at any of them.
Saying that Google has "thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades" visualizes this very nicely. Throwing people at problems and having people solve problems working together productively are two very different things. If I (or anyone else) could solve the latter problem -- making large numbers of people work together, aligned, and productively, I'd be richer than any tech mogul.
Throwing people at problems results in a lot of very fun play, though!
> Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy.
Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it.
A few fallacies:
- Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive.
- Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus.
- Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt.
If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
While your comment is sarcastic, it is correct. It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
I think you're misunderstanding my point here so I'll be clear:
I think you and those truckloads of people you're referencing may be overestimating your technical prowess. If you were truly capable of the feats you claimed, someone would find an operator and CEO to handle all the messy parts for you and wait for their 10000x returns in 5 years.
> It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
... ah yes, if only they trust everyone who claimed this and gave them the money. Truckloads of trillion dollar companies.
Edit:
> When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
There are hard technical problems. Autonomous self-driving cars, for example. Waymo would love to hire you to deliver this in 5 years with a handful of friends.
VR headsets that are lightweight, wireless, and can drive high fidelity experiences is another example. Meta would love to get in touch.
Drones that can safely deliver packages at scale while following US regulations is interesting. Amazon would love to hire you or buy your startup.
I don't discount how hard operating is. I know though the long leash you have if you're truly exceptional.
I understand your point. As I said, I would have made the same point when I was half my age. I understand it all too well. Younger me would not have believed older me either.
I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well.
What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures.
And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity.
You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard.
I think you're saying "if somebody gives me <something that is essentially non-existent>, I can do something really cool."
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.
Yep seen the same thing. In terms of 10 people I'd go further give me 1-2 fantastic "unicorn" devs and enough time, I could build you just about anything.
It just so happens no one in any org gets that time and keeping those unicorn devs focused is very hard. Very small annoyances can cause them to leave and that's what they do.
I have seen people single handily build amazing stuff but it never lasts. Eventually someone gets left with the half built system and then a team needs to take over and bloat and ...
>Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed.
Is this unique to you, or can others do the same with the same 10 people?
If not unique to you, how come 7 billion people on the planet have not been able to do this over the past 25 years? Certainly this many people of that caliber get together often enough to do this, right?
If unique to you, then you really need to just find one person in that 7 billion to fund you so we can see another trillion dollar company get built in 5 years by 10 people.
Or, third option, this isn't reality, and you're missing some understanding of the issues involved.
No, that's the point. The people do exist, and aren't even uncommon. What doesn't exist -- at least replicably -- are the organizational structures around those people.
That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.
A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.
I wonder why the two biggest recent layoffs were by the two largest (US-based) social networks, is this the end of an era? And where is all that advertisement money going now?
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
I think it was mostly a bubble and it finally has popped. The big social networks were funded blindly because they were growing on the market. But of course it wouldn't be eternal
The ios privacy change hurt Meta but honestly most financial reports I've seen from tech (Alphabet, Amazon etc) don't look great. It has to do with the macro environment we're in.
Which tech stocks had a stellar year? Not that many.
> Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.
I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).
It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)
Ok, his rich family gave him some money to invest and got lucky with paypal. Then he became a hypeman for Tesla and routinely lied about full self driving in order to keep Tesla from bankruptcy and produced unsafe and poorly built cars. Then lied about trucks, roadsters, and solar roofs. He's speed running the history of tunnels and trains and will find out that, yes, putting independent cars in a tunnel is a dumb idea. Hyperloops? Seriously? Buying twitter blue checkmarks only to introduce another checkmark for verificaiton. Hm..Space-X is sorta futuristic? He hasn't proven reusable rockets have saved orders of magnitude of money.
and Zuckerberg is somehow real and authentic? First time i've ever heard that one.
Realistically this cut was probably done in time to offer a decent severance without hurting things on the corporate side -- to compare this to Twitter's post-Elon crash-plan is disingenuous, and i'm not even a Musk fan.
I laughed so hard at this comment, thank you for a little bit of humor in these ominous times.
Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.
i would never trust Elon's word and he has some big flaws as a person but his goals are so ambitious and risky, small thinking VC's would never invest in those , all VC's want are relatively safe software (SAAS) companies.
If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot. I know its a "cry me a river", "worlds smallest violin" type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people's livelihoods. I'm not implying Zuck has or doesn't have empathy, I don't know him. I'm just saying this likely has an impact. It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well. Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some? We'll know in a couple quarters.
Those people knowingly didn't escape the sinking boat and decided to work at Meta. We can say this for every social media platform company and their employees. I'd work at microsoft but not at snapchat or facebook. These apps are just trends and they go away in 10-15 years. They past maturity phase and in decline for the last 5 years already.
My english is non-native but I would expect when someone says "I take accountability and responsibility" to means exactly that and I have a hard time figuring out what else it could mean.
The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
Accountability to me, means that your actions have consequences. Saying "I'm accountable" but it not having any material affect based on the outcome of your actions feels unfair to most people. Especially when it's really 11,000 people who are the ones to actually feel the consequences.
Zuck's net worth dropping from one unfathomable level of wealth, to another unfathomable level of wealth, isn't really a consequence here.
So each time someone makes a mistake there should be a material consequence to the person?
Would this not create an atmosphere of fear and drive society towards a fixed mindset where everyone would in case of mistake try to hide their mistake?
AFAIK the biggest upgrade to global aviation safety happened when mistakes were de-penalized, and all stakeholders could honestly discuss what went wrong and how to improve things in the future.
IMO, the biggest issues is not punishment, but understanding that a mistake was made, and an honest attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
If a perpetrator fails to honestly see the harm in their actions, and perpetuate the same mistake repeatedly, then yes, they should probably face secondary consequences to make it understandable to every stakeholder that such behaviour is not acceptable. The reasoning here, however, is not some sense of global justice, but to simply de-normalize the pathological behaviour (if you repeat something without consequences it becomes 'accepted way of working').
Even "perpetrator" is harsh - overhiring is a business mistake, not some ethical or legal violation. It's part of the deal - you get hired, and you can get laid off later. It sucks for the employees to go through but they aren't victims.
I think you're dishonestly trying to equate a CEO having to fire 11,000 people due to his decisions, to something like an engineer wiping out a DB and having to restore from backups.
If suddenly, 11,000 people died today in airplane crashes in a single company's air fleet, you're be sure that their CEO would be under question. I'm not saying this is a fair analogy - but just as similar, your one wasn't either.
I suppose it boils down to how serious is the mistake of the CEO from the point of view of society, Facebook owners and other stakeholders.
I could imagine Facebook doing things that would indeed merit the sacking of CEO. For instance, doing something that leads to the death of 11k people would warrant severe consequences. I have no idea how Facebook could do that, but on the same par. They have all the data to do tons of nasty things.
I would view accidentally hiring 11k people from the point of view of the above interested parties indeed on the level of an engineer wiping db via accident (not negligence).
I imagine the mistake would be something like, you look at the market, you see it skyrocketing, you feed the numbers to your trusty excel sheet that has served you years and say, hey, we need more people. Only when market conditions normalize you realize the mistake.
Honestly, I really can't see the harm done here. People lose their jobs all the time. Corporation hire and fire. Why would this be any worse than standard practice in corporate america? (Of course it sucks to be laid off)
as i said in another comment, for 90% of the world's population, the level of wealth fo the average facebook employee is unfathomable too. so it's hard to play the "oh he's wealthy so there are no real consequences" card just for zuckerberg
He's not my favorite person, but he did use language that said he, personally, predicted the business conditions wrong, overhired, etc. You don't have to look far to find layoff messages that blame covid or other outside forces and don't take any blame.
It means nothing especially with 50% voting shares. The funny thing about these layoffs is how they just go by the C-Suites without even denting their value.
Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?
When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.
I mean, if you get into a minor car accident, taking responsibility basically means paying for damage to the car. To me it seems like taking responsibility for hiring too many people by ensuring a nice severance package and paying for access to external hiring consultants for people who want it, is pretty analogous to how ordinary people take responsibility when they accidentally do something that wrongs someone else i.e. They try and fix the effects of the wrong.
Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.
Does it matter as long as he is the cause of them getting compensated?
Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.
To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?
Why? He is making a correct decision from the business point of view, it is unclear who will be the replacement CEO, and there are similar layoffs across other tech companies. The board has zero incentive of changing the CEO now.
It's evidently clear now, his "correct decision from a business point of view" to increase investments during Covid was wrong as they resulted in these 11,000 people being let go. I think the same could be said for the increased investment in metaverse, which I imagine is predicated on the prior large growth of people moving online during Covid, which is now returning to the mean.
I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?
(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)
This decision is correct, given all the incorrect strategic decisions he made leading up to it. The markets have clearly lost a lot of confidence in his leadership, and I would have to imagine the remaining employees have too. Stepping down would be a drastic step, but merely stating “I take responsibility” is unlikely on its own to restore confidence in his ability to right the ship either.
if we're going down that road, being fired is pretty inconsequential for a silicon valley software engineer. whoever your next employer is, relative to 90% of the world's population you'll still have a richer and more comfortable life than they could ever dream of
I have a stupid question. Perhaps someone can explain.
What is the link between Apple introducing new rules to nerf tracking and Meta making less money?
I guess less tracking means less relevant ads. Are Meta's customers able to somehow evaluate this and are they now unwilling to spend as much money on advertising with them? Or is it that Meta now has lower click-through rates on iOS? Is there something else?
> What I think makes ATT a tempting scapegoat is that it creates a great story. Apple enacted a change in the name of privacy and that change has adversely affected both Facebook and small businesses that relied on Facebook. That’s a dramatic, captivating storyline, with two rivals, both corporate behemoths, on opposing sides.
(The footnote on this blog is a great explanation as to why FB's adTech was considered so bananas and why its no longer as much.)
Imagine FB can report that its ads are driving 60% of sales at a lower ROI than other channels. That’s a great incentive for companies to spend more on FB.
Due to the iOS privacy consent form, FB can’t provide these kinds of reports anymore. There hasn’t been a decent replacement which drives companies to spend money with Facebook. That’s why revenues are down.
This is also why VR is such an important investment. If Meta will own the VR platform, other companies such as Google and Apple wont be able to block Meta’s attribution.
Meta is burning $10B/yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E stack development will cost about half. Developing entire smartphone hardware and OS from scratch would cost about a third of that money. Moon worthy space rocket development will cost a tenth of this budget. One can do so much with $10B that it is absolutely mind blowing.
I watched a presentation in which it was explained that they got Microsoft to create a version of Office for their metaverse and other companies to do similar things. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft is not doing this for free, so generally speaking I think their expenses include all the spending related to this kind of partnerships, which can add up to quite a lot when you have a whole ecosystem to build. This is not just software and hardware engineering. With this in mind, the $10bn figure looks much more reasonable and even disciplined for the goal pursued. Whether or not this goal is the right one is another question. I personally think Meta is misguided here and this aventure will fail miserably.
This is completely incorrect. They took on ~$10B in debt recently for stock buybacks when debt was cheap. They make around $28B in profit after metaverse spending and have $40B cash on hand.
I have very similar thoughts, especially when I compare the Metaverse spots to the products that video game companies make for way less money that are comparably much better. I guess video game companies have a reputation for over-working and under-paying their employees though.
Google's ad network is pretty ubiquitous since it spans almost all the known web. Facebook is pretty big too but relies mostly on its own platform (FB, Inst etc.). For sure Google is affected, but I imagine the impact is less.
Also one thing that shouldn't be missed: Google controls Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world (except US maybe) so it wasn't affected as strongly by Apple's clampdown.
The lesson to Zuck is clear: he absolutely needs to own the next digital platform, and in his mind its the metaverse so he's going all in. I question the decisions he makes but the reasoning seems pretty solid at least (unlike a certain Electric Car maker)
That's a version of this which doesn't stress out employees so the best ones don't jump the ship at first occasion.
Our org went through something similar some 6 year ago, and it was a stark contrast with previous frequent firing rounds when nobody would be secure, sometimes even best within given team were let go (ie due to current allocation issues).
But this can replace small firing ie up to 10%, not when you are doing stuff musk-style.
Genuinely curious why Meta (other big companies) hired so much during the pandemic? Did one companies make a strategic business decision to hire more based on project needs, and other companies followed on in a copy cat way? I guess maybe meta was thinking “VR will take off during pandemic and folks won’t be able to put the goggles back down ever”. I could see some companies copying it just to hedge against other companies over-recruiting and snatching some of their employees. Seems almost like a similar copy cat effort is happening now, unless they are all just admitting they over-hired.
Lots of over-hiring. It was a competition for scarce talent with a thinking that talented head count is a prime metric. I think it is, but it only works if that talent is contributing to the bottom line.
Poor HR management plays a big role too. I believe that capitalism requires ongoing "culling of the herd" - like 5% every year. This happens in many other businesses. Perhaps tech will now follow suit.
For those wondering what "accountability" and "responsibility" should look like:
They do not need to mean punishment, they can just mean "clear, concrete intent for remediation and improvement".
The remediation part is implemented by the severance package.
The intent for improvement, is nowhere to be seen.
When somebody makes a mistake, punishing on its own is meaningless. The point is to remedy the mistake (eg pay money if the mistake incurred a financial loss) and prevent further future mistakes. No, the CEO should not resign, they should just identify why things went SO wrong and show a clear plan on how to prevent such mistakes from the future.
If someone deletes a database, I don't expect them to resign, I expect them to restore it from a backup, and find a way to prevent such mistakes from the future (eg run migrations in a reversible transaction)
Is anyone else thinking this is very similar to Stripe CEO layoff letter(1)? Sure all lay-off letters have some similarity but I’m pretty sure any automated plagiarism detection system would flag this.
I work here and wasn't affected. But that's how I saw the severance. Anyone who doesn't have visa issues could literally pursue their ideas for the next 6 months.
more like 6 years, unless you're a new grad with no savings, or unless you somehow managed to burn through your 200K/yr salary every year. Probably decades if you migrate to an LCOL.
Edit: oh, you meant 6 months on the severance alone. Yep
What is the composition of roles that are getting fired?
I naturally tend to think about programmers but Meta
(and the other big tech companies that have had big firings)
have roles all over the place
> While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
Corporations are like schools of fishes. They all swim in one direction until suddenly they swim in a different direction.
So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.
Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.
I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.
My opinion here is that tech companies are generally a lot more data driven and quicker to move. So I see these layoffs as them taking the possibility of a recession seriously and being well prepared for it when it does happen.
This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).
Volume scale is too different. US workers might churn at .5%/month - that’s maybe 500k job losses. Even if Facebook pays 10x average, that’d be equivalent $ to ~3 days of normal churn.
11,000 people is around 0.003% of the US population. These layoffs alone will not meaningfully impact the US economy. Of course, these layoffs are not in isolation, and the economy is obviously cooling. But, alone, no, it is not a mechanically meaningful factor.
FB alone certainly not. Even if these 11k people would be earning on average 300k/year, their combined income would be only around 3B/year. The US national income is around 25.000B/year.
Im really curious how severance in non-US jurisdictions works in these cases. Both stripe and Facebook are offering WAY more than required by UK law for example. Do they offer similar packages to any UK staff laid off? Or do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?
> do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?
If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to 'get away' with anything like that? They could 'get away' with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn't. Maybe they don't want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn't also apply in other national jurisdictions.
Sad but completely unsurprising. People should realise by now that when a company starts a massive hiring boom, it will inevitably bust. Why? Because as many have said already, if you have tonnes of cash, it is easier to hire loads of people rather than hire appropriate and effective people.
The fact that we are talking about such an enormous number just shows how many people are part of the hive but probably not really contributing much to the company overall.
The worst part is that some people who are really effective will get caught up in the layoffs paying for the inefficiency of corporate structures.
Where are tech jobs heading in the United States and globally?
Who (or what industry) is absorbing all these folks? I think the current landscape merits one of these prediction style threads on HN.
Still mostly staying in Silicon Valley. Plenty of companies are still hiring. Laid off Meta employees with good skills will not have problems finding another job in the same area.
It's amazing how similar this whole thing is to Stripe's layoff letter, down to the exact ordering of severance, PTO, RSU, career services, immigration details and the thing about everyone losing access immediately due to sensitive information but also keeping email access for 24 hours and the bit about recruiting being most affected. It's almost a verbatim copy.
It's wild to me that a CEO can simultaneously take responsibility for the decision to over hire, and also suffer none of the financial consequences. In fact, META stock is up 7% on this news, so Zuck has made money on this decision.
I think that's a major inefficiency in modern corporations. Executives are the last to face consequences when they make a bad decision.
if you think stock up means zuck made money for this (good) decision, then you've got to admit stock being down 50% during the last year was zuck loosing money based on his previous (bad) decisions..
? No coffee yet this morning, but isn’t 5 years 26 weeks of pay for severance? And depending on how the severance contract is written, you might not be able to work elsewhere during part or all of this. Perhaps just 60 days due to WARN (in the us) where you are “working” for meta before the money is unencumbered. Read closely. If you have a lawyer friend, ask their opinion.
I suspect OP may have been going for a variation on the old "Programmer returns with zero eggs and 12 gallons of milk after having been asked to get one gallon of milk and if they have eggs to buy a dozen"-joke, but it falls flat in this instance since it relies on an interpretation bordering on deliberate misconstrual (i.e. applying the modifier "for each year of service" to the whole phrase "16 weeks plus two additional weeks" rather than just to the latter fragment "two additional weeks").
All these companies and guys just began feeling very rich and wanted to corner the market by hiring more. This is the reason every company hired more and more people. Mark was probably very bullish on VR given covid and remote work taking off. Musk felt similarly rich and bought Twitter.
Like with all lay offs, the move to cut discretionary spending and perks may also impact employee morale and motivation, and the decision to extend the hiring freeze may also limit potential growth within the company... it's going to get worse before getting better
Absolutely. The Meta campus is sad right now. Philz closed. The woodshop closed. Some of the perks from before the pandemic are gone. People are getting paid a lot less. Unless you actually believe in building the metaverse or can't find something comparable that's not sinking, there just isn't much reason to stay.
I initially passed on the offer because I couldn't work remotely from my country of choice. They later contacted me when that'd changed, but I'd found another job by then that I was happy with. (Plus, the whole "do I want to work for them?" thing.)
Probably would've been let go, because less tenure + nonstandard working arrangement + mass firings is not a good combo.
I explicitly asked them to put me on a blacklist because there's no way in hell I'm working for Facebook. They may not be directly culpable, but they allowed their platform to be used in ways to subvert democratic norms and institutions (West), promote and coordinate Genocide (Muslims in India and Myanmar) etc.
I honestly consider it better to work for Raytheon; at least the weapons they make are regulated and subject to stronger scrutiny.
> I’ve decided to...let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.
It's phrased as if those 11,000 were itching to go away all this time. Then Mark, in his infinite benevolence, "let" them finally "go." He hath freed the birds from their golden cages.
It's possible that some percentage of people would change their vote in retaliation to being fired just before an election, and probably from "status quo" to "burn it all down with fire".
Even if it statistically would have no effect, it avoids being blamed for it.
I'm still having trouble following your train of thought. I work at Meta and vote for red team, after being laid off I vote for blue team because... that'll show 'em?
Assuming most of these people are in the bay and even if everyone was in one county, none of the elections would have even flipped (except for districts which are already tiny such that 13k would dwarf the entire voting population). Trying to flip any of the bay is like pissing into the wind.
I used to think that, but recently tried some AR glasses that filled my whole usable field of view with an editable PowerPoint slide with clear text… yeah, the tech seems like a big deal for this new digital world
> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.
There was similar wording to this in the recent Shopify announcement. I must admit, I was frustrated by it then, and I'm frustrated by it now.
"Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration?" Yeah, sure, many people who don't understand the concept of regression to the mean predicted a permanent acceleration. But here's the thing: if you thought that after months of being cooped up most people were just going to carry on sitting round their houses playing Runescape and jacking off, or never visit the shops again, you are an idiot. Now, I will grant you, there were some silver linings to the pandemic, and some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a lot of people crawling the walls who couldn't wait to be let off the leash again. Just look at what's happened with the travel industry and holiday chaos this past summer, at least here in the UK.
I saw Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan recently. I've got quite a lot of hostility for Meta, due to the societal damage, and personal cost to individuals, for which it's responsible, but Mark Zuckerberg is an intelligent and interesting guy. Definitely worth listening to, not least of which because he actually comes across as a human being in this podcast episode rather than some sort of odd robot.
I'm incredibly disappointed that he got taken in by this idea of a permanent off trend shift to online and beyond him - and beyond Shopify - this kind of, "hurr durr, we got it wrong, wut you gunna do <<shrugs>>," justification for layoffs is going to get really old really quickly.
There's something really wrong with corporate governance that can look at an unprecedented situation like COVID and then jump to the conclusion that it's going to permanently change human behaviour in the round, disregarding all previous trends: humans are, after all, still human.
Meanwhile all you hear on the mainstream news is "Labor shortage" "No one wants to work" "Companies are having trouble finding talent". This smells like 2008 all over again. Housing market is tanking, MSM is lying about employment numbers. Companies are lying about how many people they are actually hiring. I went through all this back in 08. you'd put in applications and never hear anything back, then the next day you'd see the exact position you applied for listed on the job board again.
87000 people is working at meta just now. What are all those people doing? Why is so many needed? How many are developer, manager, marketers, seller, anti spam/desinformation stuff etc etc?
> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.
That's... Wrong ? Who predicted that the growth would continue ? To me and from a lot of reading I did, it was obvious by the end of 2020 that a lot of those tech companies took several years of growth in advance, not that it would continue...
Perhaps a strong, independent board of directors could have mitigated this fiasco. The meta-verse never looked like a good idea especially after previous failures like "Second Life." YMMV
You can't really predict the future like that.. there were lots of mp3 players, tablets, smart phones, smart watches etc. before the ones that "hit it off" and made a lot of money. I'd think the theory is Meta has the money to invest for the long term as the market is building and become a leader.
Walkmans were big hits 50 years ago. Blackberry phones 20 years ago. I wouldn't exactly say music players and smart phones had a track record of failures.
A lot of people are spouting doom and gloom for the entire industry, but I feel like Facebook had this coming. Especially since they lost billions in Meta.
It seems to me that there are a lot of software jobs out there, and companies can’t seem to find enough people. But that said, I’m sure the story is probably different in Silicon Valley
Fantastic. I just got laid off from my (non-Meta) job, and now I have to compete with thousands of other software engineers.
I suppose I knew that the cushy absurd-salary-days of software engineering had to come to a close at some point, but I guess I was just hoping it would happening after I retired.
> We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.
Conviction for Metaverse is unwavering. Hope some good comes out of it in future.
I assumed that not every Facebook employee is a senior software engineer in California, but that they must have a lot of lower wage employees in non-tech jobs on other continents as well (e.g. for content moderation).
The fact that the company is still investing in the development of the metaverse, while letting go of thousands of employees, may not sit well with some... this could be just "I was wrong, part 1"
Zuck made it very clear in the last earnings call that he's committed to the metaverse. The stock price is up a lot of the layoffs, but I don't think it's sunk in that that they cut elsewhere.
We’re probably going to see a decline in market comp / offer competitiveness as the flood of big tech layoffs hits the job market and startups feed on the offerings from big companies.
> > I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
He's not taking responsibility.
Taking responsibility would look like him saying "And I'm going to personally give 1% of my shares to those who are leaving spread equally". Responsibility means being willing to sacrifice something personal to make it right (or less wrong).
Zuck owns 13.6% of 2.687B shares, at a $104 a piece that 1% share would be about $30k per exiting employee. And basically no skin off his back.
He was worth $130B. Now, $34B. Hasn't sold any significant piece of it while he knew there are risks with changing the direction of the company. That should count for something.
Severance is a distributed load that all shareholders + employees bear. Taking personal responsibility means personal action to resolve. Not making a decision to use the resources of others for one's own guilt. (at least this is my own ethical framework)
If we assume that during the last 20 to 30 years that there has been no gain in actual real production efficiency increases(real reason for inequality is non-investments in actual production efficiencies by VCs and hedge funds); where is
the call to re-align in VCs and hedge funds to investing in production efficiencies directly (I say directly as investing in climate green energy is an indirect production efficiency play)?
Seriously, what exactly does “I take responsibility for this” mean? Is Mark Zuckerberg going to resign as CEO or step down from the board or go with no pay for a year or two (including bonuses)? He says he’s accountable, but how exactly does this move hit him hard (except for a punch to his ego)?
If there are no consequences of significance for him, what’s the meaning of those words? What do the people who aren’t laid off to trust anymore?
Wow so they increased their head count by more than double? How do you even onboard 44.6k people in 3 years? No wonder that they weren't very productive.
> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
E-mail address still working for the day?
Is this the standard way to layoff employees in the US?
Even though laid-off employees will lose access to Meta internal systems today, they are welcome to utilize Facebook services to stay connected to former colleagues, friends, and family members around the world. After all, it is Facebook’s mission to create a more connected world - and that will never change.
I just want to reassure everyone that while some things are changing, Facebook’s commitment to creating a more connected world is not going away. If anything, these changes will help Facebook reach that goal more effectively- and that’s something we can all be proud of. After all, as we continue to develop new features and products to better connect people from around the world, there are always going to be challenges but if we can stay more connected we will be able to handle them in a very connected way, I believe.
I recently left my well paying job in a startup to pursue my hobbies for a few months. Now I am looking for a job again. I wonder how will I find a job with so many Meta and Twitter engineers flooding the market :/
PS: I have only worked with startups including a YC startup.
Mark's statement has a fineprint at the end about future uncertainty and "forward-looking" statements. I guess that's the new way to state your point and at the same time change the meaning of it in the fineprint.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if 11,000 employees is 13% of Meta's workforce, that implies they employ close to 100,000 people? Excuse me while I involuntarily spit my coffee over my keyboard.
"Desk sharing"... I wonder with the cost-cutting appeal of smaller real estate footprints and remote work if the huge campus era is actually drawing to a close.
When these big tech layoffs happen, I always wonder what proportion of those laid off are software engineers. I would not be surprised if that figure is small.
I agree. He doesn't win me over because of this, but he deserves credit. I think many executives need to learn this from him.
Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don't think he's less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.
I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he's nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he's not superior in anyway... Etc.
The CEO is told they need to layoff by the CFO. The CEO agrees, then the corporate strategy team devise a strategy with the PR team. After the strategy is devised, the severance and headcount numbers are sent to the CFO for approval. The CFO should be the final go/nogo. Off course, the CEO can come in and change his mind, but that wouldn't be wise since the CFO has the best understanding of the economic situation and company's financial health.
I don't think it's a ridiculous idea that he penned it. Zuck is known for being very hands on at Facebook/Meta. No doubt a PR team and legal council etc... Looked it over before release but I have no problem believing Mark wrote this.
Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you're no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.
This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn't think Elon's mini submarine idea wouldn't work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.
Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.
Let's start talk about all Zuckerberg, Mcafee, Steve Jobs, and any other unfair acts committed by any tech millionaire? Let's talk how Jack Dorsey influenced the whole political engagement for the democrats (including the moderation process) at Twitter? Or maybe we can simply agree that people do questionable things when they have money, power and influence?
I think Dorsey, based on his politics view influenced how twitter (and who worked on twitter doing that) does moderation and per consequence lead to this discussion about how good the "censorship for good" is. I think highly controversy somebody that donated a lot of money to the Democrats to control the public discourse. In that matters, I think Musk - foreigner and genius - much less connected and skeptical with any side (red or blue)[1] than Dorsey or any other twitter leader before Musk.
All I know is we now have a guy in control of Twitter who:
- is calling his 100m or so followers to vote for GOP
- is repeating Putin's talking points
- Seems to be quite the vindictive narcissist, who doesn't really care about people or the environment quite frankly (e.g. trying to cancel a high speed rail project
Someone with that kind of power and ideology is not good for democracy - esp now that we have more people in the GOP that are actively trying to limit people's freedom.
It would be truly horrible if someone in the "life's achievement" position of Zuckerberg would layoff with communication similar to what as a hostile takeover daredevil would do, and it would be truly pretentious if a hostile takeover daredevil like Musk would layoff with communication mimicking that of a "life's achievement" builder. Both are avoiding the worst options.
From the immigration H1b PoV looks of it a few months of severance and then there is 60 days when the clock starts ticking to find a job. Not bad.
From what I understand the people where the WARN act is active they have to give atleast 60 day notice in case of mass layoffs(this is different from the 60 day grace period for H1bs to transfer status).
FB still making 4Billion in profit, all the comments here dont seem to talk about that Twitter wasnt profitable, FB is and laid off 4x the amount of employees, Zuck just saw Musk do it and thought itd be a perfect time while the attention is on Musk and Twitter, that letter Zuck wrote is sick and sounds like its written by a sad emotionless robot he brags about how profitable Meta is in that letter its pathetic, reminds me of the 70s and Reagan and neoliberalism making changes to laws to allow capital flight from New York to the south and firing all the well paid factory workers in the Bronx 10,000 families now without a breadwinner over night Zuck blew through billions on his VR research that no ones buying and just saw the perfect opening to sharpen his technocrat knives and surgically remove 11,000 employees even though they all contributed to making Meta be 4B in profit and it was Zuck who blew billions he needs his stock to bounce back so he can continue buying the rest of Hawaii
All these layoffs seem to follow the same format of "we're sad to have to let you all go even though business is booming and we're pulling in more money than ever!"
I assume it's for the shareholders. A plain "we're laying people off" letter without the asterisk of how good they're doing is just asking for people to cash out.
While I truly feel the best outcome for humanity is Facebook/Meta shutting down, I will give due credit to the PR and HR teams for managing to make Zuck look human in this moment.
meta hiring bar was ridiculous compared to the quality of their code. i passed the bullshit interview, standards was higher than Google, and then joined and saw some of the worst code/designs i've ever seen. at least Google code quality was fantastic.
fuck mark and his 1000 acres he stole on Kauai. karma is a bitch.
I am making assumptions, but whether I'm patronizing is just mental gymnastics from your side. You posted an opinion that you don't want to justify. There's really no other action to take except what I wrote.
The same 4m people didn't post a comment such as yours, without reading the text first. Your logic is nonexistent, just like the point you're making. I believe you're a joy to talk to in real life. Thanks for the polite exchange, keep it up.
At best, you skimmed it and then posted a useless reply that you couldn't even justify. Zero contribution to anything, but hey - I gave you a bit of that attention that you used in a negative way. You didn't understand a thing.
I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.
We can condone the good behaviors and condemn the bad ones. It is important to do both because if all we do is condemn then there is no pressure to do the right thing. If all you can do is evil then you'll only ever be evil and criticism will fall upon deaf ears.
A lot of people here agree with you about Meta's faults, even me. But that doesn't mean we can't appreciate the good they've done. Even if it isn't much and even if it is vastly outweighed by the bad. We should still use positive reinforcement to pressure companies to do the right thing.
I agree. Thanks for bringing that to the discussion. The risk is that it creates a false equilibrium where the perception is the good equals, outweighs or justifies the bad.
But you are totally right. We must celebrate with he good in others and life or our critical observations lose all merit.
Yeah I think we just have to recognize that complexity exists in the world around us. I think a lot of problems we face today are directly related to this issue. We're sold simple solutions which fall short. Our brains weren't designed to think in complicated manners and we want simplicity. But as a species we need to move beyond this. After all, one of the unique qualities of humans is being able to override our instinctual behavior (easier said than done).
Well yes, but a good fraction the good they've done would have been done by other companies if they weren't around.
What's frustrating is that they currently have a near-monopoly on friend-to-friend publishing, yet unlike about 5 years ago, they now gatekeep a lot of those communications -- many times I post something on my Facebook or Instagram that I want friends to see, and Meta doesn't show that content to my friends, just because it isn't a "Reel". Friends in my age range (+/-10) who grew up in North America tend to use only Meta's products, so I basically feel like I'm talking to a wall most of the time.
Not saying it makes it okay, but every company in existence does this to some extent. Everyone does A/B testing with the intent to alter user behavior (aka psychology) to increase their profits.
And without A/B testing, every product you use would be worse. Not only would it be less profitable, but it would also be harder to use, less useful, and less productive.
A/B testing isn't a new thing - I'm sure the inventor of the wheel experimented with different shapes, and the buyer of the hexagonal wheel probably didn't have the best user experience.
Multiply that by the number of people in the world and the number of products people use, and A/B testing is really up there as possibly one of the most beneficial ideas ever.
I really don't understand those who claim it should be banned - I see no way that testing two different versions of a website with people who desire to use that website can bring sufficient harm to outweigh those massive benefits.
I'm sorry, you could make this case about some kinds of telemetry, but specifically not A/B testing. Speaking from work experience: A/B testing doesn't look into the nuances of usability or productivity, it looks at easy-to-quantify metrics like conversion rates and money spent. These metrics rarely align with a better experience for the user (outside of like, prettier buttons and stuff), and instead tend to result in less-informative, less-agentic software (information and choice often distract from conversions!)
This is complete BS. I run hundreds of a/b tests each quarter and I specifically refuse to run the types of experiments you allude to. My a/b testing is all about helping users achieve the things (the outcomes) that they want to achieve by using our product in the first place. If we can help them do that, with more ease, then we are creating a better experience.
Perhaps you should just agree that, "not all a/b testing is the same".
Did you even read my whole comment? It's BS because he/she/they blanketed it without taking any nuance which i tried to do with my comment + an example!
Quote - "Speaking from work experience: A/B testing doesn't look into the nuances of usability or productivity, it looks at easy-to-quantify metrics like conversion rates and money spent"
This is an interesting example, and perhaps pushes part of the blame and dislike for A/B testing onto tech companies' incentives.
If you're building a tool to make life easier for the user, something that gives them a better experience is your optimal outcome. This seems like a scenario where A/B can produce a good outcome.
The challenge is when you throw in an ad-based revenue model, and the A/B testing is then optimized for the opposite (eyeball-hours, linear metres scrolled per session, ad spots passed, ads clicked) - engagement-based business models end up (I'd argue) A/B optimizing for the opposite of what their users want, to get them to spend longer doing a task they could have done quicker.
> The challenge is when you throw in an ad-based revenue model
The funny thing is - the ad-based revenue model is not the only possible variant. Last time I’ve checked Facebook’s profits per user were $7 per quarter, that is $28 a year. At the same time I am paying LiveJournal $25 a year for the ad-free version. Just taking my money looks like a much better model in many respects:
- less overhead: a lot of people doing these studies how to force me to look at something I do not want to look at will be free to do something more useful to the society;
- streamlined relationship between me and my publisher: in this model there is no advertiser who can say “I do not like these texts, no revenue for you”.
That’s why I prefer to pay for some Substack authors, like Matt Taibbi and Glen Greenwald, than to try to fish their texts for free amid some sea of “clever” advertising (hey AI testers, I bought this thing already, what’s the point of forcing it on me again and again?).
I kinda wish that Brave model (my money distributed between sites I visited) got more traction. It looks much more healthy.
There are much better methodologies for speeding up worker productivity than A/B testing. A/B testing is designed to extract information from people you can’t do more complicated tests such as eye tracking or motion studies with.
The major issue with A/B testing in the workplace is it causes confusion and slows people down when you change things. Which makes these tests really expensive even if they are seemingly easy to preform. So, I would call it useful but flawed.
As someone who’s run literally hundreds of A/B tests, many of them on the backs of UX research with users in the field, people have no idea what they want. The anecdata is a place to investigate, but never the end of the journey.
The fear with direct user research is that, unless you have a team and budget for getting enough of a sample, one-on-ones might not only be unhelpful but actively harmful if you implement something that solves that customers' problem but otherwise gets in the way for other customers.
I'm having a difficult time imagining a situation where people's actual productivity using a piece of software can be so easily measured. I'm sure it happens, but I think it's safe to say this is the exception to the rule when it comes to A/B testing
The specific test that did it for me, is that Facebook ran this experiment where they logged users out and then wouldn't let them log them back in despite the correct password, just to toy with them to see how long/hard they would keep trying to login, in order to see how addicted they were to Facebook.
I was in the "B" group, and felt so humiliated at how many times I tried to reset my password to get into Facebook.
Wow. That is insanely user hostile and borderline gaslighting/psychological torture. That is truly one of the most insane experiments I've ever hard of someone running.
It was a footnote in the wake of the main psychological experiments facebook ran on its users back in 2014*, which is overshadowing my searches for this particular detail.
I had this happen to me I think, and another case where half my links/screenshots would randomly get censored. Not just like random blogs/tweets/forums but even to super mainstream stuff like wikipedia/cnn/bbc.
We can look at the different demographics of people who tried to log in less than others, and try determine why they aren't as hooked as others, and work to rectify by improving their experience!
There's also a neat sleight of hand here. Your inventor of the wheel surely tested multiple variants to optimize for the utility of his invention to the user. The A/B testing that's problematic is about optimizing taking advantage of the user. That doesn't lead to better experience, but the opposite. This is what's increasingly popular, and this is what people complain about or want to see banned.
Related: attention economy is predicated on bad user experience, because it makes money from friction.
There's a reason Tristan Harris called upon SV to avoid "A/B testing ourselves into the 'gradient descent of mankind'".
My qualms are not so much with the method as the morals that guide it. It's agnostic but when operationalized in a faulty moral framework can definitely lead to bad results.
> And without A/B testing, every product you use would be worse.
The primary goal of A/B testing is to see what's more profitable.
If that happens to result in better UI that's a side effect.
In fact, it could result in less usability (relevant to this conversation, it probably resulted in the frustrating "algorithm-based" timeline at FB/Twitter/etc).
> > The primary goal of A/B testing is to see what's more profitable.
Well, I think I'll provide a disagreeing opinion. :)
I assume this opinion probably comes from your past experiences, and I believe it is true in many cases. Since I'm not American and have never worked in an American corporate environment, I can't say what is true over there... but my experience in EU and Canada with A/A/B, A/B/C and typical A/B testing (as well as building such testing tools for others) was not like that.
For example, when building tutorials for users, profitability is far from being the primary objective. Same goes for building documentation, programming languages, open-source software, internal tooling and other such things.
Of course, I get that in the end, profitability is the primary goal of the company (with some exceptions). But I maintain that not all A/B tests have profitability as their primary goal, which makes the previous statement an incorrect generalization IMO.
A/B testing lead to the development of effective "dark patterns" in UI that trick users into doing things they don't want or don't understand, and then making it difficult to undo.
My thinking is that in this alternate universe where pi=3, circles (with diameter 2 * pi * r) will look like hexagons (which have diameter 2 * 3 * r), so wheels would have to be hexagonal.
Certainly, because it probably never existed as a function for wheel. Do you have any evidence that the "well duh" criteria wasn't used, and hex wheels show up in the archeological record?
> A/B testing isn't a new thing - I'm sure the inventor of the wheel experimented with different shapes, and the buyer of the hexagonal wheel probably didn't have the best user experience.
Consider yourself that inventor, would you A/B test hexagonal vs round?
That sounds like a clear no, you already know the answer to the hypothesized A/B test.
As for the other aspects they sound like great targets for testing within different use-cases, but I'm not sure why that'd be an A/B test as we think of them now.
> And without A/B testing, every product you use would be worse. Not only would it be less profitable, but it would also be harder to use, less useful, and less productive.
Do we live in the same universe? As far as I can tell, software keeps trending worse. Usability is terrible, options and settings keep getting moved around and hidden, software is less responsive than it used to be...
You are free to keep using MS-DOS for your computing needs...
But the majority of people choose to use a modern computer, presumably because they find it overall more useful than their old MS DOS computer and software.
Sure - there are gripes, but they must be outweighed by something pretty big for 99.99% of people to choose a new computer over a 30 year old one.
>And without A/B testing, every product you use would be worse.
Worse for whom? I feel like a lot of the A/B testing results in more revenue, a more addictive app, and less user satisfaction, because they're not testing for anything beneficial to the user, because at least with FB, you're not the customer, their advertisers are the customer.
This is so wrong in its conclusion, that its hard to know where to start. First, we should be clear that we are talking about involuntary, undisclosed A/B testing.
I have not experienced a product become better for the user as a result of involuntary A/B testing in my entire adult life.
Producers and consumer have both an adversarial relationship and a mutually beneficial relationship, and the distinction between these two is essentially the split between voluntary A/B tests and involuntary ones. In the adversarial component, the producer is trying to figure out how to extract more money from the consumer, without improving the product. Alternatively, (and equivalently), how to make the product cheaper, but also worse, in a way that yhe customer doesnt notice (with their wallet). A proactive version of the "market for lemons".
For instance, if you A/B test your cancellation process to minimize the number of people who cancel their subscriptions, you will almost certainly do something that makes you some additional money, and is also unambiguously evil.
Any A/B testing that is mutual benefit to consumers and producers can be done with consent, by volunteers. And the miniscule amount of scientific rigor you would lose by doing so is not worth the tremendous sacrifice we have seen in quality of consumables in the past 2 decades (probably longer, but i do not have the personal experience to go longer)
You might be compelled to describe involuntary A/B testing as a strategy for maximizing evil subject to the constraint that it be legal, but it often dips its toes into seeing what is illegal but still profitable, and is capable of fundamentally undermining our legal system and even our political system.
The technology has grown more powerful. The addition of computers that can optimize essentially arbitrary objective functions has serious existential implications for humanity.
A blanket ban on the practice, incurring the total dissolution of any corporate entity found guilty of the practice of involuntary A/B testing, would be a start.
well, for starters, there would have to have been a product that improved at all. Those are already rare enough that I can enumerate them, and in each of those instances involuntary A/B testing can be ruled out for other reasons.
When craigslist added the map that shows you where all of the people are offering the thing you are interested in. That was a very good change, but thats pretty far from how craigslist operates.
When dominos stopped serving hot glue on cardboard, its pretty easy to see how that didnt come about by furtive A/B testing. They were pretty confident people would like the new pizza more than the old pizza. So they told them about it. Boy did that work for dominos.
That actually speaks more generally to my point. If you're making a change that you think people will like, you tell them about it, because even if it turns out that they dont like it more, the fact that they thought they would and you did it generates quite a lot of good will for them.
UX is orthogonal to the thing most web-based software companies optimise for. Unless users are paying for the service, what the company cares about is user engagement, not user experience. It's not that every software company ever doesn't know what they're doing, it's just that what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX. It is clearly not in the user's best interest that they feel compelled to check Facebook frequently throughout the day, or spend hours scrolling through their feed. You can spin that as the company just improving the experience so that people want to keep using it, but fundamentally it is intentional psychological manipulation.
Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
> what they're doing is _at best_ tangentially related to improving UX . . . You can spin that as the company just improving the experience so that people want to keep using it, but fundamentally it is intentional psychological manipulation.
So we agree that ab testing is good for optimizing toward a numerical objective. You then seem to think that either:
A) There are simply no numerical objectives that correlate with good ux or
B) Every software company ever is optimizing toward perverse incentives by which they take more money from their users while making their products worse
It’s probably B that you believe, and this is such a myopic and paternalistic view. There are a couple cases where it’s a problem, eg cancellation flows. But this problem is orthogonal to AB testing (try cancelling your newspaper subscription in 1994). AB testing is mostly just trying to improve the rate at which people sign up or buy something, and in this case, your objection hinges on the hidden premise that people are idiots.
> Within a university, research with human subjects is required to pass an ethical review before it is allowed to proceed. Given the scale and impact of the research conducted by Facebook on its users, it is entirely reasonable to hold them to the same standard.
obviously "A/B testing" is not "hiring psychologists", because one is in the category of experimental methods the other one is about human resources
yet there are obvious connections. A/B testing is used to increase "conversion", which is profitability. which is the same fuckin' thing as addictiveness in case of a site where you pay with your eyeballs
That doesn't make any sense. You decide what they read. You would want to know if it's harming their mental state. Closing your eyes to the impact you have does not negate the impact
It isn’t just the one thing, it is a pattern where when given a choice between respected a sense of ethics and decency or taking more money, Facebook as an org has at every instance that is publically known, has taken the money. The high salaries seem to be justified not by their technical skill but their willingness to do what they are told for momey without regard to conscience.
Read the whistle blower report, witness the evolution from seeing content from your friends posted in less addictive chronological feed to addictive content your friends like in the internet sorted by addictive news. Hell, the site started as a PHP hack to creep on pretty women. They sold a bunch of data to foreign adversaries. For years, they let people sell ads to Nazis. They don’t give the people faced with the psychologically brutal jobs of moderation get benefits. They have been a platform for genocide and government surveillance.
I might be missing some examples of them missing some money to do the right thing, but nothing comes to mind.
A/B testing (which is getting users to respond/react to a UX event, and choosing which outcome is more suited to the business) is considerably different from "can we manipulate users up front, to perceive or react to things assertively and programmatically, even if against their interests?"
You have a good point. But let's not forget that the Nazi's and the Japanese used to do incredibly invasive medical tests on human beings in the name of "science". (Even the Americans have done political and medical experiments on their citizens, using the CIA, on African Americans and criminals). All these are condemned today by the scientific community because of it caused great harm (or even death) to the subjects who never gave their consent to such experiments. The psychological experiments conducted by FB on its users was equally bad because it looked to trigger emotions in the users (a useful feature for an advertising platform), some of which could cause users to go into depression. I don't know if the FB people conducting those experiments are aware that even mild depression causes great stress on an individual, and serious depression triggers suicidal impulses.
(This is not an attack on you or your otherwise valid point. Just a reminder that people should be mindful of their ethical obligations to get informed consent and not cause harm to others with their experiments).
I doubt that the mentioned 'psychological experiments' are just A/B testing. There is a very strong case to be made that Trump and Brexit would not have happened without Facebook, and those are just two examples.
That is such a poor reason to not like Meta, among many, many reasons. All meta did was publish their results. The backlash ensured that no other companies shared results—but AB testing is bigger than ever across the industry.
Now if you had said “fuck meta because my feed is filled with an unintelligible mix of baby photos and political screeds,” I’d totally follow.
"On 6 December 2021, approximately a hundred Rohingya refugees launched a $150 billion lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that it did not do enough to prevent the proliferation of anti-Rohingya hate speech because it was interested in prioritizing engagement."
I'm sorry, but the "A/B" responses to this sentiment are some of the worst euphemistic cope I've ever seen. You all really need to get out of your "tech" shells and take seriously this idea that "running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.
I am interested in this line of logic, but I'm not sure I would go so far.
I feel engaging in commerce in any way at all is impossible without being "evil" under this definition.
Aren't advertisements at their core unconsented psychological manipulation? What about retail store design? Is providing customer service altogether just manipulation?
I think I take issue with the word "evil." It seems to imply a certain malice or intent to harm, which just isn't logical, given the context.
> Aren't advertisements at their core unconsented psychological manipulation?
Yes. 100% yes.
> What about retail store design?
Also yes.
Advertising exists to try and make you purchase product “x”, regardless of whether you need it, or it meets your requirements. Even “harmless” display advertising exists to gently push to mind into forming the desired emotional association with a product.
Store layouts are well documented for being deliberately anti-efficient: they make you walk past everything else to find the things you need, with the goal of exposing you to more advertising and product placement. Combine that with strategies like putting sweets and other “low friction” products at the checkout, where you’re more likely to make a spur of the moment emotional decision under pressure, or be hassled by your children for sweets, and you have something that is inherently exploitative and morally questionable at a minimum.
Evil is probably too high-modality, but unethical and exploitative are definitely suitable.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you were kind enough to share. You even elaborate on the things which I was to lazy to expand on myself. So I think we're on the same page.
I only took issue with the choice of "evil" because I am working on curbing my own hyperbole and sweeping generalizations.
I don't care much what the word (or any word) means, I care what it does.
Nothing wrong with calling "Facebook" evil. It's not a person, it's an artificial entity. It can take it. (I too would be more reluctant when it comes to people)
That's a really bad and useless definition of evil, and we should have figured that out a long time ago. Can't just say "we were following orders," or "that's just business."
And no, I can't give you a clear brightline test right now to determine this. It takes homework.
But.
If you want to A/B test whether people prefer blue chewing-gum to green, be my guest.
If you want to A/B test for literal depression and sell stuff to people based on that, you're probably evil.
The line's somewhere in between there. Now we know where Meta has chosen to go on some of this; and again, this is from WHAT IS KNOWN TO BE PUBLIC.
The safest thing is to assume the worst, then. May they rot.
Thanks for the clarification, specifically the examples. I agree with the spirit of your conclusion, but it's far outside my expertise (psychology) and experience (haven't used FB since about 2012).
"They" is unnecessarily vague I guess. It's not fair to write off the entire population of Facebook staff... There are surely a substantial chunk of employees who were entirely unaware of these tactics.
It's easy to claim an organization is evil. Less so for individuals, and with good reason. There's something to be said for remembering to humanize people, even those most "undeserving."
But it doesn't have to be outside of your expertise to criticize it anyway, that's the point I want to make.
There is no harm in me saying out loud "Facebook is an evil company" even if I'm completely wrong, because they are so powerful. It would valuable for everyone to scream at Facebook at being evil because that would force them to show and prove that they are not.
We shouldn't get stuck on being "accurate." Throwing rocks is not just okay, it's a good idea if it forces the powerful party to act/respond.
As for the individuals -- it's their job to defend the company. If that hurts their feelings or whatever, too bad. I don't care and neither should you (presuming that Facebook is potentially very harmful.)
That's not a psychological experiment - it's barely even an experiment. If someone chooses one over the other, what have they learnt? Are they controlling or even measuring any other variables? It's also not non-consensual. If you go to a store you expect to have options of things to buy - that's the entire point of a store. It's not even an A/B test! Everyone sees both options and makes an informed choice.
I'll cede no ground to anyone on loathing the corporate world, to the extent that I've all but abandoned work and the cash economy (at the cost of considerable personal privation).
But humans are complex beings, and it's just realistic to view us all with some nuance rather than casually tossing everyone into good/evil baskets. The gp outlined an example of decent behaviour, and it remains just that regardless of our attitudes on other grounds towards Zuckersnuffles and/or Meta. Even murderers can be kind and decent people given in some contexts (witnessed at first hand).
I understand the sentiment. I agree there should be accountability.
With that in mind, I'd like to point out root merely expressed an anecdote about above and beyond humane treatment of employees from the CEO. Parent described the hacker-friendly culture. Those appear to be first hand accounts.
How does your comment relate contribute to that discussion?
Further, how does over the top and genericized outrage and harm wishing on a cohort of innocent people advance society in any meaningful ways?
Your argument is essentially that the company treated its employees well, so who cares what it did to users. Who gave you the right to decide the discussion is framed around how Meta treats employees rather than what it does for the entire world?
I made no such argument. It is counter productive and disengenous state otherwise.
I asked a question, no conclusions drawn. If I had a point, it's that the comment was off topic with regard to the comment it replied to, and warrants its own tree of discussion. It was a rant; There wasn't even an attempt at a segue or good faith effort to provide contrast.
What "gives me the right to decide how the discussion is framed" are the hn guidelines (which you violated yourself by presenting a strawman).
But is it compulsory to be so Manichaean? Have you really never seen someone (or group of people, or company) behave well in one context, and badly in another?
I understand perfectly well that they are both depending on context.
All I'm saying is that the harm they inflict on billions of people outside the company outweighs the good they do for thousands inside. Just because there's both good and bad doesn't mean the degree of each cannot be weighed at all.
Your redoubled insistence on a clearly irrelevant totalising good/bad judgement as a purported response to a quite specific comment about labour practices is more than a tad onanistic.
Not sure I really intended it as a burn, though you're right I do love words, sometimes to a fault! That was a generous response on your part anyway. Not one of my better days. Thanks.
Work culture and values both matter. I found @Leires comment insightful because it jarred me to the reality that while we are appreciating the good in someone, we shouldn't forget their capability to be bad. Can a Gandhian be comfortable working at Hitler's gas chamber? Both had amazing leadership qualities. What attracts us to either of them are the values we think they represent.
The comments were specifically about Zuckerberg's character. The replies should be about Zuckerberg's character. The reply in question didn't even mention him.
So, Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has been used as a source of electioneering data for years before that. See for example Eitan Hersh's testimony. In fact, I've read articles bragging about how inventive the political technology using social networking profiles is, for a couple of electoral cycles before that - they may still be somewhere in HN archives even. And of course, selling the very same data to advertisers, maybe repackaged a bit differently but the same source and same data set, is the whole business model of Facebook. And it somehow never bothered anyone until Cambridge Analytica. Why is that?
Most don't have a problem uploading address books and contacts into these platforms. I think it depends which team it is. Companies? Cool! Political Party you agree with, sure! They mined the social graph and Zuck reached out to them and said they're on the same team and didn't restrict access while they mined 50 million people. Don't forget Zygna!
Yet bigger concern is the government blatantly violating the constitution by instructing Facebook to do that, and nobody stopping them. At least Facebook's bad behavior is within the law. The supreme law of the land explicitly prohibits the government from restricting the speech based on their politics. They do it anyway, and no consequences whatsoever. I think it's concerning.
It's naive of you to think that this is a Meta problem. Just by surfing the internet you're subject to all the same psyops by organizations that are arguably even worse than CA.
You seem very sure of what you know, and very confident about how the people working at Meta think and act. Do you have any direct experience? Or know anyone who works there?
I never stop being amused by lazy oversimplification.
I never stop being amazed by the level of trust some have in lazily oversimplified media.
Meta is a city, not a person.
They gave specific examples of negative things that Facebook has done. This is a pretty shallow dismissal of their criticism, even if their comment is a bit heavy-handed.
I won't rehash the A/B discussion, there's plenty of other people talking about it.
The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections. Facebook was dumb to allow partner apps access to so much data and rely on those partners to follow Facebook's policies, but they recognized the mistake and probably overcorrected.
All the other coverage probably serves to reinforce and amplify negative sentiments about Facebook, and a ton of it wasn't deserved. People cite the Rohingya, I remember also a news cycle about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
Those things happened, but Facebook had also built probably the most expensive and effective hate speech filtering operation in the world. That it be 100% effective is not a reasonable goal. With billions of pieces of content even 99.999% effectiveness will result in examples that the press can point to reinforce a narrative about Facebook profiting from hate speech.
I doubt there ever was any profit in serving hate speech. The ad revenue from filter misses would not have been big enough to pay for the filtering operation itself.
> The Cambridge Analytica thing probably didn't have a meaningful impact on the elections.
That's a pretty big claim to make without evidence. At the very least I think we can agree that political parties wouldn't be investing so much money into social media campaigns (analytics, marketing, etc.) if they didn't think it was impactful.
There is ample evidence that CA had no impact. They were charlatans trying to sell snake oil; IIRC the underlying algorithm was based on a simple factorization of a User x Likes matrix that did not have substantial predictive value.
There is plenty to lay at the feet of Meta, but I've always thought the CA scandal was an overreaction.
> Sumpter analyzed the accuracy of Cambridge Analytica’s regression models in his book ‘Outnumbered.’ He used a publicly available dataset created by Michal Kosinski and his colleagues, a psychologist, who created an anonymized database of 20,000 Facebook users. Of the 20,000 Facebook users 19,742 were US-based, and of that amount 4,744 had registered their preferred political party Democratic or Republican, and had also liked over 50 Facebook pages. Sumpter first aimed to test the accuracy of regression models in general, and so created a model which predicted political party allegiance based on Facebook page likes. He concluded that the regression model worked “very well for hardcore Democrats and Republicans” but “does not reveal anything about the 76 percent of users who did not put their political allegiance on Facebook” (Sumpter, pg. 52–53). He also describes how just because the model may have revealed, for instance, that Democrats tend to like Harry Potter, it does not necessarily mean that other Harry Potter fans like Democrats. Therefore, a strategy employed by Democrats to aim to get Harry Potter fans to vote, may not necessarily benefit them.
You'd probably have better spent your money by using party-owned voter databases to create custom audiences based on email addresses. Everything I've seen points to Cambridge Analytica being mainly an operation to grift campaign dollars. From the same article:
> CEO Alexander Nix himself corroborates these results. He claimed in his testimony to members of the British parliament’s ‘Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee,’. He contended that Kogan’s dataset wasn’t very useful and that made up a tiny part of their overall strategy for the 2016 United States presidential election. How do we resonate this admission, with his presentation at the Concordia summit, in which Nix openly bragged about the ability to wield Facebook data to tune an incredibly powerful instrument that significantly impacts elections? The answer to that came from Nix himself in his testimony, claiming that he has in the past used hyperbole when pitching his company to potential clients. This view is corroborated by Kogan who mentions how “Nix is trying to promote (the personality algorithm) because he has a strong financial incentive to tell a story about how Cambridge Analytica have a secret weapon” (Sumpter, pg. 54).
Billions of people use the service for "free". As long as everyone knows they are what's for sale, the rest makes sense. Any company of this size is going to sway discourse so it's time to accept that. I for one do not and thus deleted our family accounts long ago.
Take my downvote. "Psychological experiments" on users is what every company; user and market research. Enabling "psyops" is simply building a platform; this isn't the first platform that his been misused or scraped for other purposes. You get spam robo dialers? It wasn't from meta... etc. etc. etc.
Its much much worse than just psychological experiments. Meta currently stands accused as an enabler of a genocide in Myanmar [1], and provides a platform to spread massive hate against Muslims in India and elsewhere [2,3,4,5]. For folks trying to do bothsidesism here and bring out how great they've been, I am sorry but there is no excuse for enablers of Fascism.
Conducting “psychological” experiments without “consent” is the only way to do science. Perhaps in this instance the knowledge gained is used in the ad industry and not benefiting society, but the nature of the research is to be admired and replicated.
either they charge for social media or they attempt to grow by ad targeting, or social media is maybe banned through regulation to stop what you describe.
I think maybe your beef is with the nature of technology today and/or our current culture that enables/glorifies it's mass use. What's the solution?
This statement is a false equivalency.[0] The Obama 2012 campaign did not violate the Facebook TOS, and received permission to acess the data from users.
Please stop trying to use what-aboutism to fuel a partisan divide.
Yes, however, Obama campaign was very different from CA.
>The Obama campaign collected data with its own campaign app, complied with Facebook’s terms of service and, most important in my view, received permission from users before using the data.
>And numerous other developers, including the makers of such games as FarmVille and the dating app Tinder, also used the same Facebook developer tool that Cambridge Analytica used.
>Like all app developers, Kogan requested and gained access to information from people after they chose to download his app. His app, “thisisyourdigitallife,” offered a personality prediction, and billed itself on Facebook as “a research app used by psychologists.” Approximately 270,000 people downloaded the app. In so doing, they gave their consent for Kogan to access information such as the city they set on their profile, or content they had liked, as well as more limited information about friends who had their privacy settings set to allow it.
>Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules. By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.
I have this (maybe wrong) opinion that Meta can't be the one to bring an actual VR/Metaverse project because they are too "on the radar" of medias. Adoption of new technologies is always done by more fringe members and then picked up by critical mass. You can't successfully build a metaverse without accepting the kind of weird deviant stuff that goes on in VRChat and Meta can't accept the weird deviant stuff because they will immediately get called out for it.
So you get "Horizon" and its assortment of low-quality games that feel more like a tech demo than an actual world that you could lose yourself in.
iPhone was speculated about as an Apple product for years by the media before it came out. Newsweek even did a cover story about it.
Also, the initial launch of iPhone didn’t support apps or Flash (i.e. no porno videos on the web!), and the App Store has never supported deviant communities. Apple’s policies probably precipitated Tumblr’s no nudity moderation.
Versus "windows phone" in its fifty billion iterations which was exactly what OP talked about.
If Facebook had quietly (and they were for the longest time!) continued to work on Oculus and done some internal skunkworks projects, instead of a big PR push and a company rename, maybe they could pull an iPhone.
Personally, I think they drank the meta verse koolaid to get everyone to stop talking about election interference and other things that were being blamed on them, and I think it mostly worked.
I guarantee it's going to be some furry working on VRChat stuff who finds its policies or technology too limiting and sets off to do something better. It's already sort of happened. I don't know that Frooxius started NeosVR for that reason, but it came after VRChat and is one of the major competitors.
- The "public" Internet, although since I used the word "deviant" people might not like me giving it as an example.
- Social media in general, which again not necessarily deviant, but before it reached critical mass a lot of people just found it weird and privacy invasive. I distinctly remember my family making fun of people posting their thoughts on early Twitter.
- eCommerce, was considered strange as you would put your CC information on some random website.
- Video games were for nerds and losers, now most people have an Xbox/Playstation.
- Drone/RC plane community was much more weird before the likes of DJI which lowered the bar significantly.
- More recently remote work was usually for a small portion of workers and people commonly said you had to be a certain type of person for it to work at all. Fast forward a pandemic and remote meetings are common and even requested by would-be employees.
I feel like there a fallacy somewhere in my arguments for sure, but there definitely seems to be a trend where things are weird, dumb and strange until they just aren't by reaching critical mass. Strapping a screen to your face to play video games and chat with people is definitely one of those until it isn't and I'd bet that within 10 years it will be already much more common.
The foundations of the post-2007/2008 smartphone were forged on the keyboards and screens of the Blackberry/Palmpilot-obsessed professional manager type person. Fringe statistically if not culturally.
They've lost $10b on the metaverse so far; you'd think you could design a phone at least SOMEWHAT decent for that price, and at least get a TINY foothold back into the market.
Wow, can't believe it's almost been a decade since that was a thing. Back when HTC was still around making some of the best phones at the time too, I miss my HTC One.
Also, same thing happened when Amazon tried releasing the Fire Phone. I think a combination of being carrier exclusive and using sub-optimal hardware was a big contributing factor to both their demise.
Facebook making a phone would have had similar problems as VR: what would be the draw of a Facebook phone? If it's an Android phone it's just an Android phone with Facebook branding. They can't deliver exclusive features to only Facebook Fone owners as their money comes from ads so they need the broadest reach for features.
If they rolled their own OS they'd have to spend a lot of effort building and maintaining that platform. If Microsoft and Amazon can't will a third phone platform into existence Facebook definitely can't.
Their $10B metaverse spend is a waste but I think it would have been a waste on a phone as well.
I detest the Meta metaverse as much as the next Hacker News user. But there is one use case where I could see it luring me in. Virtual meetings. Really virtual social events or happy hours. Professional ones mainly with my remote distributed team. This would be the killer app in my view.
The key to me it seems would be in the audio. Like if I turn to face someone, the audio adjusts so everything else in virtual room get quieter (but still audible). I can have a conversation with the person I'm facing. Multiple conversations can go on at once. Just like in a real room!
Anybody know if this is something that current state of the metaverse supports? Is this something being actively researched and developed?
HN and Reddit always get it wrong about the future, the Metaverse is still an on-going under development ecosystem and Facebook bad image gives it a negative perspective.
I'm sure there are lots of competent people putting a lot of effort in "Metaverse", but to me it looks really just yet another VR world. Does anyone know what is the concrete new thing it would make successful?
Why? If I were working there and on that tech, I’d stay.
It’s a cool project and I like working on cool projects while being able to live a comfortable life.
What are you working on that’s more fascinating than VR?
VR is cool. I didn’t mean to say that Meta VR engineers deserve to feel guilty, but I imagine it would be strange to be working in a massive cost center (which may eventually spell Meta’s downfall), while seeing coworkers dismissed. Definitely don’t think my job is any more fascinating to than VR (although I personally am more interested in my work).
That wasn’t me, they were just quoting my bio. I wasn’t trying to compare my field to VR. I enjoying working on code knowing that it will (hopefully) be sitting in orbit soon, but there are more than enough negatives to turn one away (relatively low pay, ancient tooling, dated management practices and general industry inertia).
Anyone who says that to him will get fired, and that makes sense: In his mind, if you don't believe the vision that he's going all in in, then you're just detracting.
Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two
additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.
PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.
RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November
15, 2022 vesting.
Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for
people and their families for six months.
Career services. We’ll provide three months of career
support with an external vendor, including early access to
unpublished job leads.
Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult
if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before
termination and some visa grace periods, which means
everyone will have time to make plans and work through
their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration
specialists to help guide you based on what you and your
family need.
Is it if you are not a home owner still? The problem with not being a home owner is that you have very high burn rate because the market was able to optimize for housing profit extraction - that is, significant portion of the compensation of high earners ended up in the pocket of property owners.
Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).
I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.
Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.
There are a lot of people doing room share to take the cost of rent down or commute long distance. You can definitely balance between price, commute, comfort, privacy, grownupship and self respect. No surprise that many people really, really want to fully work from home so that they can better optimize.
9K is exaggeration of course, that would be quite irresponsible but it would be also the only way to put you in a lifestyle of a person who makes 5K a month.
Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.
But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.
Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.
This is quite good even by European standards. If you were paid 4.5 months because the law said so then it isn't harmonized, because in my EU country it is only 3 months notice afaik.
Also not sure if the Meta severance applies to contractors as well, but many engineers work as contractors by which they of course opt out of worker protections.
4 months of severance + 2 extra weeks for every year of service i.e. 20 weeks (~5 months) if you've been there for the last 10 years. So ~9 months paid holiday in total. Not bad at all.
The world runs on certain types of software. I doesn't run on social media, or video streaming, or "AI/ML", or search. So it doesn't actually run on FAANG companies. It is no surprise they are shedding workers when the free money runs out. But if you are willing to work on "boring software" that provides actual economic value - logistics, HR/Payroll, or really anything people actually pay to use because it boosts their productivity - I wouldn't worry too much.
This was true during the .com bust, 2008 dip, and it will be true now.
Facebook (and Google Search) are the most widely used software on Earth, ~3-4B MAUs each. I don't know what else something needs to do to qualify for "world runs on [it]".
What are those 3B people doing? Spreading conspiracy theories, looking at cat pics, and searching for porn. Whenever someone is on FB or google they are less productive, not more. Sure, a small fraction of those people are using FB or google for "work", but their work is usually just finding ways to get more people to waste more time on google or FB, or some other nonproductive activity people get paid for.
There's way, way more software that exists. All that boring enterprise Java and Spring stuff HN loves to ridicule represents the dark matter of the software engineering universe. There's tons of money in it and armies of developers working away without the praise or adulation of their Bay Area betters, but they're making good money and putting food on the table.
both are highly valuable - to every business that advertises on them, and to users who find information (Google) or connection (Facebook) via those platforms.
Facebook disappearing tomorrow would cause a bit of a kerfuffle but life would go on.
Same for Google search.
But if VISA disappeared, there'd be hell to pay.
In reality none of these companies will disappear overnight, but they could get remaindered pretty quickly, because they're not that "important" per se.
That's not to say the companies don't do things and people don't find value, but Facebook disappearing is an entire different class of thing from Exxon-Mobil shuttering.
You are grossly underestimating how many business rely on Google and Facebook.
A small example: a ton of delivery companies depend on Google maps API for localization and route planning - think Doordash, Uber, etc. Not just that, lots of transit agencies and freight companies use Google API for planning and optimization. Half of the work force probably can't reach their destination without Google maps.
I'm pretty sure many critical components of Exxon-Mobil depend on some tools provided by Google.
It'd probably be more straightforward than that. Your bank would switch over their cards to Mastercard, and send you a new one in the mail. I don't even think it's inconceivable that the Mastercard card # range is salvaged and you can retain the same card number.
To regular users, yeah, the impact would be tough but materially trivial (maybe?). But to the small businesses for which FB, Instagram, and Google advertising are their primary sources of customers? Devastating.
Disagree, a lot of businesses do use GSuite and also a lot of people in the world do definitely use youtube/gmail/gmaps. Samething with apple, people will still use iPhones and a lot of people in the first world at least will still use macs. Only companies your comments apply to are Facebook and Netflix, and even then Whatsapp is basically an essential app to have if you're not form North America
I would certainly make a case the the world runs on the two As and the G of FAANG. The world runs a fair amount on Amazon deliveries and aws. The world runs a fair amount on gmail and google searches. And the world runs on a fair amount of Apple products.
Sure, FAANG may make a lot of frivolous stuff (Metaverse, anyone?) but also a lot of boring software that the world really does run on now days. Google especially.
Sure - as does amazon and apple - I doubt you'll see layoffs in those specific departments at those companies. I suppose I shouldn't have said FAANG as most of them have some core business that makes sense, Meta being the exception.
I would say that any software that has 4 billion MAU quite reasonably can be classified as "the world runs on it"-tier software.
If I had to guess, what I think you're doing is you're letting your opinion about the morality of FAANG-like software (ads, tracking, mal-influencing, etc.) be a judge on it's utility.
FAANG-like software is like fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, like much of FAANG-software, have many immoral aspects, yet they have utility to the point of "the world runs on it".
Google, DDG etc. connected the internet. Facebook, twitter etc. connected people on the internet. I'de say that's something of a big deal.
The world doesn't run on "AI/ML" or search? You must inhabit a different world than me. Do you run to the library every time you can't find some information?
I don’t agree at all. These companies are all super important and provide valuable services. If they vanish suddenly tomorrow that hole will be felt by every single human one way or the other. You are going back to 1970s for your comparison but that is not where we are
I'll grant you that for the AAG part of FAANG, but I can't think of a single useful product from FB. If FB itself vanished overnight people would just go back to sharing their cat pictures with family over sms (as they are doing anyway), and all the dusty unused Occulus headsets in drawers would stop receiving updates. Otherwise....
I don’t agree. As much as I don’t like FB, I have to admit that they provided a lot of value. People found joy in their products. Facebook before it became this cesspool attracted tons of people. WhatsApp is still hugely popular and useful. Instagram made countless people lots of money and create new means of livelihood.
If your bar for "important company" is "no competitive alternative or reasonable substitute exists for this one companies product", I'd struggle to think of a single "important company" in the entire world.
Many small businesses use their FB page exclusively because they aren't big enough to bother with a real website. There will be a lot of pain for many small employers and their employees if FB software were to go away.
Also I expect video streaming (of some format, whether it's "traditional living room content" like Netflix/Disney or mobile-first like Youtube or TikTok) to maintain its entertainment dominance during a recession. People like their cheap escapes from the real world. It's been shown time and again that during recessions cheap entertainment like cinema (or these days, video streaming) doesn't die off.
> The world runs on certain types of software. I doesn't run on social media, or video streaming, or "AI/ML", or search. So it doesn't actually run on FAANG companies.
To the extent that the world runs on energy and industrials, you're right.
To the extent that tech soaks up human attention, directs spending and emotions, and now serves as the basis for communication and once manual mental tasks, I think you're wrong.
We're seeing that this is cyclical and that access to cheap debt has perturbed the sentiment.
Plenty of businesses have Facebook or another Facebook property (i.e. IG) as one of or the only way to get in touch with them. Plenty of individuals use Whatsapp or Facebook as their primary contact database and messaging platform.
The "post news articles on a feed" is probably not essential to too many people, but the messaging and communication features are in a lot of cases.
>It is no surprise they are shedding workers when the free money runs out.
Free money hasn't run out, it's simply stopped growing as quickly. Then again it grew massively during COVID so FAANG is still ahead of where they'd have been if not for COVID. Meta revenue is DOUBLE what it was 3 years ago.
It absolutely has. 8 months ago the Fed Funds rate was effectively 0% and now it's 4% and headed higher. That may not mean anything to you, but it means everything to VCs, banks, investors, and the market overall.
tens of thousands if not millions of small, single proprietor or only slightly larger businesses are run entirely through facebook. it's the only way to learn about them, their hours, or contact them, and often the only way to buy things from them online.
Facebook ("Meta") made $46.7 Billion in Profit in 2021. They have $42 Billion in cash. If the average engineer is paid $150k then these 11k people would cost the company 150,000 x 11,000 = 1,650,000,000 ($1.6 Billion/year) Mark Zuckerberg could _easily_ afford to keep these people employed and focus their efforts towards improving the safety of the platform e.g: stopping Human Trafficking, Drug Dealing and Child Abuse all documented extensively in the Facebook Papers. They are failing to protect the most vulnerable people in society while sitting on a _mountain_ of cash. Shame on you Mark.
They don’t have enough and the compensation isn’t low enough to bring down the average anywhere near this. Within the US, only base salary is adjusted up to 10-15% which is less than 10% of total comp. Internationally they pay significantly higher than local labor market, in all looking similar to US numbers.
When doing "how much staff costs" calculations, you typically have to add on ~30-50% on top of salary for employer's share of taxes, and benefits (health insurance in USA is very non-trivial), and other assorted overhead.
I'm not really sure what the point of the layoffs here are. Are they realizing that they had no idea how to effectively put 11.000 people to work? What are they trying to achieve?
Its been mentioned in other places but to summarize:
* this is a cost cutting measure and not primarily driven by the need to cull "low performing" employees.
* point of the company is not to guarantee employment or even keep the lights on; its to maximize the stock price (at least according to the prevailing worldview, which I disagree with). Investors use the stock price as a proxy for their belief in a company's future. If the stock price is high, company invests and expands, if its low, it contracts until the investors/markets believe it can generate value.
* layoffs scare the employees that remain into working harder. The sad truth is that unless you're really exceptional, this doesn't really matter. But they will likely see a productivity boost for a little while. Again, this is pretty short term.
Which seems bizarre to me. Cutting costs just leads to hollowing out your expertise and institutional knowledge (see Intel) to the point where it eventually becomes far more difficult or even impossible to grow. This is the time to reorganize, restrategize, reprioritize and solve long-standing cultural/organisational issues, not fire people who could potentially help the company through tough times.
Oh well. It's FB, I'm okay with it if they sink the ship.
If Mark Zuckerberg had any shame at all, he wouldn’t be around with Meta and all the companies it owns/runs. But he has good company among many other CEOs who’d rather cut the workforce and earn more bonuses for themselves.
Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail.
Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term "software engineer". I like to think and hope that things will be fine for those laid off.
Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, they all have very good businesses with very concrete productivity bonuses and real world advantages that they give to people, you can't make those things disappear.
They also don't have good foreign competitors, like Chrysler and so on had in Japan.
There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.
I think these layoffs are more an example of just how crazy short-term we are thinking in the world. Everyone thought coal was going to go away, remote work was the future, tech jobs were the future!
In reality we need more productivity, less labor demand, and for our smartest people to be out working on those problems, not on delivering people advertisements.
All of these lay off people may end up out more distributed in the country working no boring jobs that ultimately free up butts and seats so that those butts can go take other seats for they are more necessary and important and productive.
> There are Chinese companies, but those companies largely exist thanks to their state barring competition from the outside, and I don't see it being super likely that that is a real threat, especially because if Chinese companies really start taking off the United States government will clamp down on them hard.
TikTok is a Chinese company and is major competition for Facebook
You criticized Chinese tech companies for being incubated in a walled garden but then criticize TikTok for being subject to US government regulations in the American market? Shouldn't you also give Facebook the same criticism? The only place where Facebook is still experiencing substantial growth is India where their government banned TikTok. It seems to me like TikTok is the real international competitor.
American companies today don't need the protection. They are better companies.
With China now using state imbalances to fund their tech sector, restrictions will be needed. You can't compete with free stuff backed by a foreign state.
What makes you believe that the US companies are fundamentally better? Tictoc seems to outcompete US social media companies lately and Tesla said themselves their only competition comes from China. I don't think Bytedance has a huge burn rate or at least higher than could be funded on the public markets, no need for state backing.
Facebook? Sure, people can live without that. But Microsoft, Google, i'd argue even Amazon are integral parts of the economy. Trying building a modern business without the business software Microsoft maintains. Try doing work without Google. Amazon is a part of our modern shopping habits.
Do they need to be as big as they were? Probably some room to go down, but they're an essential part of the economy now.
Microsoft is not FAANG, at least not part of the acronym i was strictly referring to.
The world needs a search engine, but the moment a new, competent, one pops up all you need to do is switch a URL and you are done with google. All other services google provides are replaceable.
Amazon is a cool marketplace, infested by scams and low quality products, an alibaba of the west. It is an integral part of the economy by I manage to do just fine without it. AWS is a wake up call away from trending out of fashion.
Microsoft isn't FAANG because they generally pay a bit lower. But they're still a worldwide powerhouse. Windows is extremely popular, and so is their office suite. You just can't license osx on non-apple machines and linux options are just not as popular yet.
Microsoft, even if i don't much like their products, are a grown-up company. That's probably why they haven't gone crazy with pay, which is still decent.
It's great for the area they're located in. If you keep getting step raises and stock refreshers every year you can actually end up doing quite well. Your initial comp isn't going going to be super impressive though.
All social media companies hire too many folks and now cutting expenses to meet their target for shareholders. Yet, only Twitter seems to get lots of backslashes compared to other FANGS. Why? I wonder if this relates to Elon Musks' ongoing outbursts on Twitter regarding his political and other conservative views. I believe I answered my own questions. Ha!
I don't think you're looking at this objectively. The way Musk handled the layoffs was reckless and without much thought other than "reduce cost immediately", the proof is they backtracked and tried to hire people back after realizing what a poopy mess they've created. That alone is ridiculous and warrants the backlash Musk/Twitter received.
From the looks of it, Zuckerberg handled this better than what anyone was expecting. Talk about under promising and over delivering
Since you insist on tooting your own horn, I think you should put a timeline on your predictions, as well as specifics on how this "crash" differs from periodic layoffs that happen every decade or even more often than that.
Anyone can predict that things will be bad at some point in the future.
While many are commenting that these layoffs are sensible given the situation, I am fearful that laying off approximately 13% of Meta employees will lead to a less connected world. I don’t think people fully understand the magnitude of step-backwards it will be in terms of people connecting in this world. Does Zuckerberg take responsibility for what this will mean to people who simply need to connect more through great products developed by Facebook and future technologies being developed by Meta?
To the people downvoting my post- would you care to explain what possible alternatives could exist that would fulfill Facebook’s mission - “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”?
I sense a deeply cynical and dismissive tone from many commenters and I sincerely wonder how many of you have given any honest thought to Facebook’s mission- or the many great products and features that support that mission. Given the importance of the mission, I find it hard to believe that cutting the workforce by 13% will have anything but dire consequences . Akin to the Middle Ages, or AI winter, humans will almost certainly suffer from being less connected. But what I haven’t heard is calls governments or ngos stepping in to provide funding to lighten the shockwaves of this disruption to connectivity. Surely, this must be considered. When comparing Meta’s mission to that of- say- automakers, or financial lending institutions- isn’t it clear that creating a more connected world should take priority?
Do you think that Meta could be worth 273 billion, and yet promulgate a false, inaccurate or misleading mission statement? Perhaps, but it would not seem like it would instill much confidence in the company leadership.
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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.