Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs(bloomberg.com) |
Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs(bloomberg.com) |
It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.
I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before.
I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.
Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.
I am in some ex-meta groups and people tell they got laid off and in the same sentence ask how/when can they apply again. If someone is laid off for supposed ‘low performance’ and they still want to go back because it pays 10-20% higher than others is just weak. Have some self esteem!
On the topic of recording clicks and keystrokes: they have one of the most extensive surveillance-ware on employee devices since 2015. So its not new. Its posted publicly to avoid some law suits in near future.
On the topic of training ai with this data: where do i even start. Meta is so delusional. NO ONE uses the ai in whatsapp, messenger, facebook, instagram. Many people don’t even try it. So regardless of the quality of the model, no one wants to speak to meta’s ai. Even if they produce a very efficient coworker, why would anyone touch meta’s ai? I wouldn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Does anyone affected by this or that works at Meta would dare speak about it?
Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.
AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.
Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance.
Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.
This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.
Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain.
(I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
This was the big one I remember:
https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-emplo...
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
After the AI race and the large IPOs of 2026, this will be the case. The hiring pipeline will be a lot slower than 2021 and will be more controlled.
Something is seriously flawed here.
Between you and me and the internet, I'm rooting for UBI.
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
As an example, we had to be able to parse most uses b2b bank statements. That means understanding the structure of around 30 different formats, some with very subtle differences within them.
The naive and expensive approach was to train an LLM to do it (after OCR).
Instead we used AI to generate a generalized python parser that is "configurable" for different structures. (And also extracts data from PDFs without OCR, unless they are pure images).
It covers the 99% of the cases. And for that 1% we pass it through AI for immediate solution, and to generate the additional deterministic config to cover it.
But I digress (lol). The point is, there are so many interesting problems that can now be solved. We should have teams of 3 to 5 people doing crazy stuff.
But as the Simpsons' favorite space alien duo observes: "why doesn't the workingclass, the larger of the two, simply eat the rich?"
----
This will seem random, but the advice is: if you're still renting, see if you can pay a few quarters/years ahead. Real estate is locked-up worse than any millenial has ever experienced, rents are stagnant (being generous), and the dollar is quickly losing OPEC-status for obvious reasons. Perhaps this can save you some cash (even negotiate for less?!), and then the landlord class can feed its forever-temporary quest for the_gainz.
I am personally paid two years ahead, to a mom-and-pop local homeowner — at current undermarket rate. I save more money per month than most of my workingclass home-owning neighbors (I would NOT buy a house right now if you can find undermarket rents — increasingly commoner).
-OR- buy some gold1oz/silver10oz
-OR- rent out that 250sqft inlaw suite you thought'd be impossible to [if already house-trapped: it won't sell good rn]... and make both roof's occupant lives better.
----
Just some random thoughts from an absolutely jaded #ElderMillenial
Facebook is kind of a functionally useless product. The feed has always been a mess. You can get banned at any time, there's no account security, and so on and so on
> If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad
> https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...
Single-use zoning makes it illegal to build the places people want to go within walking distance of where they live, so we spend trillions over decades building car infrastructure to allow people to commute. Of course the consequences of commuting by car is more pollution and less exercise, again causing health issues.
The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...
There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.
The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.
It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).
It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in? erlang, tcl and perl?
AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.
Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?
It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.
Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’? They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Sort of.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
Britannica:
> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.
> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.
Wikipedia @ 3:
> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.
Wikipedia @ 2:
> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."
[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook
Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!
Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party.
Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
The hunter Biden laptop story was censored - including in private messages - and Charlie Kirk was shown being shot in the neck to death to children.
There's nothing else to say.
The article even ends with this quote from one of the authors of the study (emphasis added):
“Money is not the secret to happiness, but it can probably help a bit.”
Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." -Mark Zuckerberg
The fact that we are entertaining 50 year mortgages as a "solution" further adds insult to injury.
Nobody talks about how the "cure" was worse than the disease in 2020. Happiness matters and is worth dying for.
But honestly, IMO America has become a joyless, directionless dystopia of soma and bread and circuses in the middle of a geopolitical knife fight to define the 21st century and maybe even hit the singularity. I'm not happy with the current management, but it was the same unhappy bunch talked about here that decided by voting or opting not to vote that gave it a second shot. Kinda deserve this, no? If no, I'm all ears for your one weird trick to fix America, go for it!
Yeah I know, downvotes incoming for such heresy. If you don't pick a side, then what are you even doing?
It absolutely destroyed a ton of very good things, perhaps forever.
"It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"
The evidence for this is rather plain to see at this point in history. ;)
1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?)
2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else.
3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway.
Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:
1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.
So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
I'm not one to invoke "incompetence" willy-nilly, but I'm having a hard time explaining these policies apart from it.
Anyway, I bring this up because it didn't quite fit into your 3.5 rubric.
The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.
That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.
Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.
In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.
If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.
In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.
Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
The sentiment is that the latter is more expensive and less flexible than the former... which seems backwards to me. (AI is expensive, robots are mostly not that adaptable to new tasks, automations only really help the most repetitive tasks and they must be rewritten/updated when the task changes)
At least in the software development front, i really cannot see that happening.. until now we were all understaffed. Now it is the first time that actually with our team we can handle the workload properly.
The days of meta having network effects to defend its position are long gone, and I suspect we'll see the products die when an AI-first UX comes to mobile.
Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.
4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.
Finance is destroying the real economy in search for "optimization" because business value doesn't neatly fit into an excel sheet cell. All these layoffs have been done because of AI washing right from the start.
That said, AI isn't helping.
Promises/hopes of what AI can do, and also execs being misinformed about what their own companies are doing/achieving with AI. I know of one very well known large company where the CEO is in the press preaching about the need to restructure/layoff because of AI, yet in the trenches there is close to zero AI adoption - only contractors claiming on their JIRA close-outs to be using GIT copilot because they have been told to say so.
1. Cut costs
There are multiple reasons companies may need to cut costs. Generally, historically, they are not positive
One of them is that, internally, the business is not doing well or the company believes there are problems on the horizon
Perhaps a company that is healthy and optimistic about the future could at the same time be conducting successive rounds of layoffs
But are there many examples of healthy, shrinking companies from history
Usually company growth is taken as a sign of prosperity. Multiple rounds of layoffs are not. More like survival mode
But of course this time it will be different and the remaining employees after the layoffs have nothing to worry about
No, it's absolutely happening that way.
I work in tech in a senior IC role. I'm now expected to single-handedly do the work that I would previously have led a team of 5-10 people to do. The junior ICs, we aren't really hiring for. This is not specific to my company, it's like this across the board.
This was in 2022... So I cannot imagine how much worse the "automoderation" will probably become.
Given the unironic use of 'woke mind virus' by certain billionaires, there's something to be said about the sudden obsession of building data centres, no expense spared.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
> Goodbyes are always hard, especially when I am the one saying goodbye. Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye...to the entire Nucleus division.
> But make no mistake, though they are the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure. It is my fault, I trusted them to get the job done, but that is the price of leadership.
Mike Judge is a masterful satirist.
What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?
The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
I feel for the those who will hear the bad news, whether meta or other companies, and I hope they will cope and get other roles
6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"
Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip
* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
Text-only, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS on blogger, no geo-blocking, no BS
curl https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/meta-tells-staff-it-will-cut-10-of-jobs-in-push-for-efficiency \
|egrep -o "(type\":\"paragraph)|(type\":\"text\",\"value\":\"[^\"]+)" \
|sed '/Read More:/{N;d;};s/type\":\"paragraph/<p>/;s/.\{22\}//' \
|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmCan you explain what you mean?
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
That would be sad. I've never owned a Quest, but the technology is starting to be very impressive. I would consider buying a new generation one.
Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.
Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.
1) still have a submission form that doesn't require email
2) that they post my email-less submissions from my smaller USA city, too [farily quickly, as well!]
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/sun-microsystems-sign-at-...
Good people are leaving, people who can't, don't. It's hard not too see how it dilutes talent.
One of the consequences of having bean counters run tech companies.
Could probably replace fair few of executives and higher management tho, why pay sycophants six figures when all you need is LLM sub
Levels.fyi is a reasonable starting point for comparison.
And a bunch of yes-men down the lower layers of management funneling these ideas.
In a meeting at my last job, one of the execs was bragging about how a chatbot was reading Jira customer service tickets and calling tools/APIs to solve those tickets, and it "only costs 1.5USD per ticket. How much would a human cost, huh?"
Little did the exec know, but my team was already using a ~600 lines python script to solve the problem with a higher rate of precision. The chatbot-automation thing was largely pushed by my manager when I was out on vacation, just so he could earn his good-boy points with higher ups. Worst manager I've had in my 14 years of career btw.
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.
Different scenarios
That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either
It's completely normal in tech circles to talk about technology.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?
...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.
My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.
If you ask my blue collar friends, the answer is one and however long it takes to drink three beers.
If you ask any married person, the onboarding process (courtship) may last YEARS and consist of many interviews (dates).
As an EM, ive always struggled with this one. Im about to invest some serious coin and brainspace for you, so I tended towards a max of 3-6 total hours and a takehome assignment.
As an IC, I preferred short and sweet. Heres my portfolio (github), heres my resume. Lets make this work. Maybe 1-2 hours; its not like we're getting married.
The happy place has to be in there somewhere. Whats your take?
It worked very well for us, I was a bit surprised with some of the red flags that showed up that I wouldn't have expected to be caught in the hiring rounds done at previous jobs.
What I don’t like about them is how “dry” and mechanical the interview feels
The interviewer was also very hard for me to understand, which made the interview harder than it should have been.
I am ESL too, so this is not about someone’s background. The problem is communication in an interview where both sides need to understand each other clearly.
From what I have seen on Blind, others have had similar experiences.
There is nothing "cowardly" about it.
Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.
I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.
Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.
I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
That said, IMO they are right...
They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.
I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.
The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
Can't we all just be happy?
1. Full carrying cost of an employee is much more then their salary so this math is not as straight forward if you’re just cutting time and salary to account for that time.
2. You should assume most people aren’t counting hours in places like Meta, reducing to a 4 day week imho will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
3. Staying focused 5 days a week for one person probably has better compounding effects for that week than a few people working part time and taking longer to get the work done with longer breaks in between “sessions”. Harder to measure of course but it’s one thing I’d be worried about. Easier to think about if you say each person works 2.5 days a week for half their pay, I’d rather just have one person.
4. Layoffs let you cut by performance.
Like this:
> will start making people think more about counting exact hours they’re working. It’s partially why the “4 10s” concept is also a bad idea that permeates the defense contractors.
Maybe that's a good thing? [1]
I have no doubt that Meta is thinking like your four points and hiding behind "it's the corporation making the decisions, not a bunch of people at high levels", but... Ugh.
[1] Nitpick - I was speaking to a friend about a decade ago regarding their OT/IOT work in the defense industry, and they told me that they had to aggressively track every hour. The feds were punitive when it came to unreported overtime.
If you're doing work on a cost-plus-fixed-fee contract (which many software development efforts are) then you have to count hours anyway because you get paid based on what you bill. The fact that nothing substantial gets done in the additional 1-2 hours a day is immaterial because these arrangements are really just fringe benefits in the form of additional time off for employees. As a practical example: people working "9 hour days" with mid-afternoon on-site customer meetings and a half Friday from home certainly aren't fitting 40 hours of productivity into their week and nobody cares - everybody gets paid, the job gets done (for some value thereof), and millions of Americans stay employed. One might even argue that this is a feature since working less efficiently means more billable hours to the government and a larger economy.
Though the bigger reason is the belief that people who are willing to take a paycut in order to work less are not the people you want on the team. There's still a stigma to not making (or least pretending to make) your job the priority and treating every other part of life as a support role for it.
Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.
Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!
1. Larger acquisitions. IG was $1B for a 13 employee company. WA was $22B. We were all talking about how big those numbers were at the time, but looking back they seem like mid-sized acquisitions. Before, most companies would have looked at these numbers and tried to build it themselves, or underbid, or just not pull the trigger. Blockbuster and Netflix. Yahoo and Google.
2. He meet the user where they were. He made no meaningful and instant change to the apps. There was no rebranding. They still have their own login screens and apps. Many casual users might not notice their major platforms are owned by the same company. Compare this to more old-school tech companies like Oracle buying Sun, or a national cellphone provider buying a regional one, or whatever happens with AOL-Time-Warner-Discovery.
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_.
Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's
Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
Or we could acknowledge that everyone is pathfinding.
There was an old all hands I watched in 2014 where Sheryl talked about how around 8k was the largest they should ever get.
More generally I think that while sales scales linearly, engineering and product should probably be sub linear.
Based on your logic we should make it impossible to fire anybody. That surely will solve our problems, right?
I want a dynamic, innovative economy where anyone can find a job if they work hard. Not because the law says they can't be fired. How depressing.
Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.
Youtube, Gmail, Search, Maps, Android, Devices, Photos and Drive are how they get the data to make money on ads. Cloud, Android & Youtube would be a 2 trillion dollar company even without Google. They don't make money on these, because they don't need to make money on it.
Oh sure, but the MBAs running stuff don’t care about that. Their bonuses are tied to the now, so the system has optimized for that.
> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time
Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.
There's a whole lot of circular funding being passed among the same dozen or so companies right now with very little actual construction or assets to show for it and at some point someone will be holding the bag when actual money is called for, and nobody wants it to be them. The parallels with both 2008 and the '90s S&L crisis are troubling.
There are really just a handful of people from my extended social circles still actively posting to FB/Instagram and that traffic is mostly drowned out by slop content.
Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.
Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.
Maybe Meta missed on those big plays and now there’s too much pressure to make another.
I don’t know if I believe that, but worth considering
if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?
making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?
Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right?
And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them.
I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?
If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.
The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.
So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.
This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.
It's not like Meta has nothing to show for the money it spend, but it seems like they could have spend that money on improving Facebook or Instagram, not that I think Zuckerberg really cares about those product anymore.
Mark is just looking for the next fad.
The real issue is that our systems allow for one person to effectively control hundreds of billions of dollars of capital with absolutely no one to provide any consequences if they make bad decisions with that capital.
If we really are setting this up as a for-profit, publicly-traded company, how does that system of corporate governance enforce any sort of way to make sure that Zuckerberg's ego doesn't get in the way of doing things right? Basically right now it's a sole proprietorship with window dressing.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
You were soooooo close.
Meta is fundamentally a targeted advertising company, not a media company.
The amount of subscription driven media today is relatively a very small part of the industry.
If companies stuck to fewer projects, money would be invested in other companies focusing on specific products, you get a lot of companies and not the market concentration you got today (which is responsible according to few economists to a lot of the us labor market dysfunctions it is currently experiencing)
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
You calculate the cutoffs as savings for this years while imagining that the future payments are payments only for this year. At the same time the commitments are for 5-20 years ahead and the laid off people would be off the payroll for the same multiple years ahead.
That SNL skit never happened, but the market was so hot it could have.
The latter are pretty grueling, especially when conducted on-site. Apple recommends you show up 1-2 hours ahead so you have enough time to get through security, for example.
I just eject from the interview process when I hear it's going to be so many rounds because I know there will be another company that's just as good that will get it done with less.
Didn’t get the job. Got the vibe they were full of crap anyway. The salary range was never given. The business model, extremely easy to replicate.
The job I’m at now had a single 30 minute chat. Verbal offer 2 days later. And my co workers and boss are awesome.
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
From the customer perspective, it works. The main problem is price competition for access to audiences. That's why fb revenues are what they are. The ads work, largely because ofntracmjng/targeting.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
This is the most incredibly apt description of Horizon Worlds possible. How is it that I've missed this joke until now? Thank you!
(◞ิ౪◟ิ)
They're a suicidal bet, because they assume cloud LLMs are efficient and inevitable.
Neither of those is true, or even likely, and we're going to see the consequences by the end of the decade.
And while FB marketplace search kinda sucks the algorithm is supremely effective at surfacing listings based on your searches and activity.
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
I'm not saying people with odd backgrounds can't ever make it. But let's be clear, these are not usually hot shots who can simply get any vaguely technical job they want. They get into software because it is traditionally very accepting of uncredentialled or non-mainstream individuals. The framing you put forward makes it sound like the people committed to software are chumps who have to take what they're given, and these interlopers are the real geniuses who leave for greener pastures with ease. That simply isn't true.
This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.
All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
At least 3 tiers: the FAANG level, the mid-size tech companies, then all the developers working for non-tech companies/administration or in IT service companies.
Even in those categories, workers aren't swappables.
I happen to think workers with minimum qualifications like a CS degree can be fairly swappable, at least more than FAANG types would have us believe. But they're very elitist when it comes to hiring. I have practically given up on being hired at FAANG companies, and these days I think their jobs are overrated too. Sign up to bust your ass 50 hours per week with backstabbing snobs, till you get laid off unceremoniously. I'd rather not.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China.
Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip.
Oh, and Europe can only do this stuff because of the USA military, by the way.
They make products, sure, but output isn't the same as innovation.
>But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip
Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company
America poisons the world with pollution (eg pulling out of Paris Agreement), misinformation, promoting discord as 'engagement', unnecessary military engagements and screwing up the rest of the world.
And really, abdicating 'leadership' was already done by America by voting for Trump.
The 2022 RSUs at Meta have more than doubled since the grant price, and are mostly vested out now, ending Feb 2027, after which there will be a steep TC decline for people employed since 2022, especially those on an initial grant or with very good performance for that refresher. There are a good portion of people sitting on either FIRE or at least extended funemployment amounts of money that the severance is looking mighty tempting to.
That is a standard package and no way a FIRE or at least extended funemployment if they have children or a mortgage.
But crazy level of sycophancy on your part
E5s making $900k, $E6s making 1.5m… quite common.
More or less? The vast majority of his personal net worth is tied up in FB stock.
As to the other questions -- the severance package is pretty generous.
I dunno what you expect, everyone wants to avoid the negative consequences of their actions, should we be surprised that the rich and powerful can actually do it?
I mainly call them problems because hugely scaling your org up and down on a whim is extremely inefficient when your recruiting and onboarding costs are high. Surely it’s more wise to repurpose the people you already have unless you have no time horizon on appropriate new areas of R&D.
Software engineering is unique among engineering fields in that it accepts people without the right credentials, and sometimes without any credentials. Other engineering fields not only require matching credentials but also have professional certifications. I don't think I would enjoy taking those very much, but after seeing some of the crap that people get away with I have fantasized about having such a process to filter people out.
Or to stop stretching metaphors.. The investors should be mad that the layoffs were even necessary.
Investors are mad to a certain degree for a mishap, but then investors are also happy about something else.
To continue analogy, Zuck has made $10,000 for shareholders and had a mishap of $1000.
How much should Zuck be punished here? I don't have a good answer but it is certainly not firing himself for it.
Also, Zuck controls 61% of the vote for Meta. Investors knew that it was his show when they invested
The cleaner isn't the problem with respect to the cleaning itself, but what about the culpability in exploiting someone who has lost their mind? In this case Zuckerberg is willing to accept the exploitation that occurred in the past simply for what it is, but now that he has had a moment of clarity he also cannot let it continue.
You have the pool but now want to get rid of the pool.
You thought you liked the pool but you don't. It was your own mistake for wanting the pool and changing your mind.
Would you fire yourself from the house? You did make a mistake.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.
Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
And yeah, this approach to layoffs is sound. Been there, done that.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
Blood test, background check including all prior training records that are reported to the FAA.
Not a lot of work for the candidate in the interview, but it's easy to fail one too many training events or accumulate a violation and become radioactive.
The person who is the most important to you on the worst day of your life is the emt. The interview was literally "do you have a drivers license, and are you grossed out by stuff?" The rest you learned on the job.
Weird how doctors are vetted but prehospital folk are not.
edit yes there is training, but it happens after hire
The reason why EMT have such hiring practices are because many people can do the job, and there are many willing to do it.
It’s not weird if you think of in market terms.
Software development is neither exhaustively certified, nor narrow, nor perfectly transposable.
Developers want a 15 minutes interview, but also scream "Would you ask a builder if he has experience with blue hammers specifically?" when they get denied an interview because they do not have experience with the exact tech stack of a company.
Because that's how pilots and doctors work. They not only need to have experience with a blue hammer specifically, but it needs to be exact same make and model.
Imagine if a GP claimed to be neurosurgeon because they cured a headache. Developers get to call themselves fullstack the day they modify an API route.
If the interview is for becoming a partner at a practice, it's a two way courtship that's more reminiscent of other businesses looking for a co-owner.
Doctors also tend to hear about each other. Even in decent sized metro areas, they can often know who to avoid.
(This process isn't perfect, but it's still way different than for software.)
Rigorous formal education, multiple rigorous exams, then years of shadowing and training. I went through this process, and tech interviews are a breeze by comparison.
But they are bad for society, it's not for no reason that a lot of countries are trying to ban them for the younger generations now, similar to smoking.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
I wonder if that's still the case.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.
Cool exciting and meaningful science job: 200k
Big Tech surveillance capitalism job: 800k (at the low end)
The calculus has only been about affording housing and providing for the family.
“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
1 employee doing the work of 3 is I think is a stretch
but 1 employee doing the work of 1.1 employees from a year ago I think is almost certainly true - at least, me and everyone i work with is _at least_ 10% more productive, and using AI extensively
In my 20 year career I’ve rarely been on a team with more than 3-5 people on a team or within region on a team.
So at that scale it’s not really reducing a team member on a given team still. But you get more productive which is notoriously hard to measure in SWE, so yeah. It’s possible that translates to iterating faster or closing tickets further down the backlog which is useful but not per-se staff reducing.
Maybe in mag7 where you have massive engineering orgs the 10% can impact a given team more..
and how many of them are totally wrong, or right about it!
[1] and how it might be changing with new generations of models
For all the hype about the 1X vs 10X distinction the real stumbling block is how many 0Xes there are out there and how frequently they tend to make it through hiring.
If you go by the measure of LoC per employee, then your number is probably even higher, somewhere between 10-20x per employee. The problem being, producing 10.000 lines of AI-slop per day is not a good productivity measure - all it does is create more technical debt and issues that now nobody is reviewing because a) people get fatigued and at some point just wave the AI-slop through b) there is not enough manpower because people got laid off because of "AI" c) People are generally feeling irritated by being asked to review and correct AI slop. There is a societal pushback brewing and it won't be nice for the so-called AI in the end. Think about the fact that most people who are exhilirated by the "AI" are either incompetent or incompetent and old. Most of the young folks, even those not in the technical domains, firmly reject AI. When did you ever hear of a revolutionary new tech that was actively hated on by the young people?
> Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.
Maybe in the world of WP-plugins/typo3 and other simple work, though even those are fairly complex in their own ways which the retard-LLMs will trip on fair amount of times. Not if you are doing anything remotely complex. The retard-LLMs will still either put your secrets in plain text, suggest the laziest f*ing implementation of a problem etc. It's just a shitshow nowadays, compounded by the LLM companies trying to keep the costs low (and therefore keep the "users" hooked), which they currently accomplish by shortchanging you and dumbing the LLMs down - because otherwise they'd have to charge for true cost - upwards of tens of thousands of dollars per seat - which would render their initial value proposition completely useless. Something has to give.
Now not all the extra code is necessarily useless (you can imagine some refactoring or perf improvements) but clearly a lot of it is.
We still aren’t very good at knowing how to use AI judiciously.
This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago but it’s absurd now. I’m not going to convince you - but you really should give it a try.
That's cute, I hope you enjoy that high, it's really impressive at first - fyi -I've been using GH Copilot since early days (invited to early access) AND paying it for my entire company ever since MS published the first commercial plan. All the way to the latest entshittification drama with Opus 4.6 being pulled away and Opus 4.7 taxed at 7.5x rate. Yeah, its great for quick tryouts or similar. But using it in wider scope, with complex reqs and dynamic environment? Complete shitshow.
> This was a reasonable position to hold 9 months ago
Browse my comment history. There were people just like you, 6, 9 or 12 months ago telling me exactly the same. Some also threatening that I would "be the first to go away". Like I said, cute actually :) You know in January Dario Amodei announced again, AI would write ALL code in 6 months. Do you see it happening?
What world do you live in? Suicide? Crazy talk.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
But it doesn’t fit your ideological narrative of how innovation functions so…
But irregardless I can hand you the point that you are making and then say that yours is a very tight standard that would not pass most of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley.
The point I'm trying to make for the initial poster is that they are confusing "technological innovation" for money making. And yes you don't have a money printing machine in the EU, but you have A LOT of technological innovation that eventually goes to market through SV.
I'll wait for your answer.
> Would you fire yourself from the house?
You keep pushing this false framing/binary for some reason. You made a bad call, you lost the money, that's a given (a passive if you will). Where's the active "taking responsibility" part? That's the main critique.
But what is the implication of taking full responsibility? What actions would he be taking for "taking full responsibility"?
I don't think you meant you merely wanted the performative sound of "I take full responsibility for this situation" to come out of his mouth.
Without actions, the words mean nothing.
So, what would be the actions you were looking for here? I don't quite get it.
100% agree, and that's precisely the critique towards Mark as those words presumably came out of his mouth.
> So, what would be the actions you were looking for here?
Claw back his executive compensation, forfeit bonuses for the fiscal year and use that to fund better severance / transition support? There's smarter people than me who can answer this, I am merely pointing out and ridiculing this fake accountability and moral theater.
What kind of smug asshole says something like this?
If you think early days of GH Copilot are remotely relevant to what is happening now, we do not live in the same world.
Let's learn some English grammar, I had said: "I've been using GH Copilot since early days" . Translated from plain English: "have been using..." = *an action or state starting in the past AND continuing UP TO the present time*. I did not say "I used it only during the early days and never again". Plus my team. Honestly - and it's only a hypothesis at this point in time I cannot prove, but I meet more and more people whose usage of LLMs seems to be seriously impacting their reading comprehension and writing skills. Do some LLM-detox, I mean this without any kind of disrespect.
> What kind of smug asshole says something like this?
I've also noticed over the years, the folks who get this offended are usually those who are uncertain about their opinion. I simply found your statement cute, that's all. You are obviously in the early stages of using it and I am assuming using it to alleviate your own little, relatively simple tasks in your job which otherwise would have been overburdening for you. It's only human to try and do so, but it hardly describes "productivity" the way you seem to think it does.
I am not. You do not have any knowledge about what I've done or for how long. The arrogance is truly breathtaking. You should work on it.
I've also used GH Copilot since early days, ChatGPT since launch. I did not start using agentic systems (mostly Cursor) until about a year ago, and found them to be of little help in generating code in our large, long-lived and sprawling code base. Something fundamentally changed with Opus 4.5 but I didn't notice it for quite awhile because I had already constrained my usage patterns to what I thought I knew to be their limits.
> little, relatively simple tasks in your job which otherwise would have been overburdening for you
I have done that, and many other things. You do not know anything at all about what I have done with AI. You are projecting your ignorance in a way that makes sense to you, but it is still nothing but ignorance.
If you are actually interested in my recent observations I posted this in another thread recently.
Ultimately, regardless of whether the severance is generous or just a calculated ploy to keep former employees quiet, it comes out of shareholders' pockets.
On severance: > the reality is that severance payments are just as much about protecting employers as they are about helping employees. In today’s complex labor landscape, employers are acutely aware of the risks associated with employment disputes and potential lawsuits. By offering severance payments, employers aim to minimize their exposure to legal claims, maintain compliance with labor laws, and safeguard their reputation in the marketplace. This practice is not just about goodwill—it’s a calculated move within the broader context of employment law and labor regulations, designed to manage risk and maintain control over the employment relationship. Understanding the real motivations behind severance payments is essential for both employees and employers navigating the ever-evolving world of employment.
https://capclaw.com/employers-pay-severance-out-of-fear-of-g...
This is actually very problematic that a company can claw back compensation that wasn't previously agreed upon (with the exception of crimes).
Companies could have put this clause in the job offer. Yet they don't. Why? Because no respectable person would have signed such contract.
You wouldn't sign such contract either.
> fund better severance / transition support?
To continue the analogy of the cleaners, you don't provide severance nor transition support either.
In FB, the severance of 4-month minimum seems good.
> Forfeit bonuses for the fiscal year
100% agree! If the company's or their performance is bad, they absolutely don't get bonuses. This is coded in their performance/compensation review criteria.
If your employee makes 10 successful things and fails 1 thing, how much would you punish that person? probably none.
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.
> 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring
> 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets
Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?
> speculative bets that never went anywhere ... think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself
Organizations make speculative bets all the time. Is there an accounting of the profitability of Alexa/Nest etc.?
> end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects
if you plug in the years 2020-2026 in the Fed Rate - Unemployment chart here at [1], it shows that from 2020 - 2022, rates were near zero while unemployment spiked during Covid and then fell. From 2022 through 2023, rates rose sharply while unemployment stayed relatively low. 2024-2025 the labor market softened. You can add the Federal Funds Effective Rate and the Unemployment Rate easily through the menu.
Unemployment stayed low through the rise in rates for almost two years prior to 2024. Given that companies operate on a quarterly reporting basis and program/project decisions are at least on that cadence, I don't think that the line you're suggesting that Rates-Go-Up -> Projects-Get-Killed -> Layoffs-Increase quite lines up with the economy-wide data in this exceptional case of 2022-2023.
We may have to look elsewhere for the reasons behind the current labor market weakness ... cough..*economy*..*trade walls*..cough...*structural re-alignment* [2]...cough...
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1duFv
[2] 6% employment decline in 22-25 year old workers https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/11/Cana...
Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution
Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
Folks from those companies will have to speak up, but my understanding is that yes, internally these large tech orgs use the Agile Methodology, as opposed to the 'traditional' 'Waterfall' development methods.
I think it is hard to overstate the effect that Waymo will have.
2. If it captures most of the transportation market. That's debatable because self-driving tech works even better for trains, trams, subways, buses, etc. And that's before we go into other self-driving car companies.
3. If it becomes truly production ready within the next 10 years or so. By "truly production ready" I mean a Uber/taxi competitor in at least 20 alpha global cities outside of the US. Otherwise yeah, it's going to be a great tech but with a 30+ years ROI.
But waymo created the category by showing it is possible.
Alexa devices had so much potential, if they'd only practised customer obsession like Amazon used to (still?) preach, and not stuff their products with ads.
That means that a large number of high ranking people in these companies projected they would need these people in the coming years, and then some.
I think it may be darker than that, and the overhiring was a tentative measure to build up a charge, like electrons in a capacitor, to release a shock to the market that would achieve two aims:
1) drive salaries down through fear and contest
2) reduce the bargaining power of employees (software engineers were starting to look to unionizing in the past 5 years especially and that has gone deathly quiet even though working conditions have worsened and demands have increased on 'ICs')
Any objection as to whether these companies executive teams were collaborating should be seen as very empty by now, given we know they are all deeply circularly invested in each other and thus are bound to each other's success or failure.
On the long term, prolonged stress kills innovation and engagement.
There also no financial reason to lay off people. The revenue and profit for employee is already way better than per 2020 levels.
I suspect it really is to pour more money into AI capex.
I don’t think Apple is an exception. I think they have also over hired but they are also scaling, albeit slower than they used to. The scaling elsewhere is not happening, especially meta where they are trying to extract money from every corner they can find out of desperation, and so the books need to become lighter.
For Apple, hiring more than they need can be soaked into the books because their sales and profits keep increasing, though the rate of growth has slowed. However, if it’s an expense that can be avoided, then it’s an expense that should be avoided.
But also, while there have been layoffs in engineering teams, Ive seen a lot of "support staff" get absolutely obliterated. Things like "agile coaches", "technical project managers", UX testers, marketing roles, etc. etc. While I've seen most of my laid off soft engineer friends find new jobs relatively quickly, I've seen lots of folks in these other roles suffer long bouts of unemployment, and often leave tech entirely. It's these folks I feel the most for. A lot of them were making low 6 figures 10-15 years ago, and now many of them have no hope of making that much in their careers again because companies have vastly reduced the number of those roles.
Lot of these companies are bloated from having way too many Engineers anyway. Once you have mature software that brings in bagfuls of money, you don’t need that many people to keep the ship steady. I have seen this first hand at MSFT, we started a new team back in 2019 and it probably had ~40 people full time across US and India. By 2024 when I left, we had about 20 people in India who could easily run the service, the US team was dissolved and they moved to other teams in MSFT. The fact was that new features were few and the team was in KTLO mode. I have seen the reverse happen too, the team I was working on was dissolved and we were moved to different teams and everything moved to the US last year, managers were converted to ICs and a few folks were probably fired but it was a ~10 year old service that didn’t need that many people to run, even more so after AI tools became big last year.
I moved to the Seattle area during the dotcom boom.
Within 18 months I was unemployed.
There was DEFINITELY a feeling, like the whole “internet” thing might have been a bubble. I helped a friend move to Pleasanton CA and there were so many empty office buildings, it looked like a zombie movie.
But it all came back, and more.
It can be argued that the demand for graduates in other industries might have stagnated or even dropped, and it's "spread over" many different industries, so it's not really that seriously felt.
But if you were hiring in the software industry during the covid peak years, you would seriously feel the shortage. I used to interview candidates in a FAANG, and at some point it was more likely than not that a candidate that we liked and prepared to make an offer would tell us they already accepted an offer from another FAANG...
Post-2015 and accelerated during Covid, many east coast techies I knew that didn’t go to the right school, get a 4.0 and take the “right path” suddenly started popping up on my LinkedIn ad having joined a mag7.
And then everyone else lower on the food chain got even less picky.
And then we had the whole PM / DS / etc new job path fads that pulled in non-CS and sometimes non-STEM people who did a bootcamp.
If an engineering graduate has a chance to make $0.8X at a US company that makes hobby drones, $0.9X at a US company that develops 3D printers, $1X at a US carmaker that's struggling to develop a good EV, or $1.5X at a US adtech company - you can imagine where they end up.
Well, unique other than Amazon I guess.
But I suppose that doesn't count because Winklevii "never would have come up with anything anyway"
These were supposed to be farsighted geniuses who took credit for their stock performance. But they made the most obvious blunder: opening a Pandora’s box that they can’t close.
In 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 (13%)
In 2023, Meta did two layoffs, one of 10,000 (another 13.6%), one of 600
In 2024, Meta did a layoff (layoffs.fyi doesn't list the number)
In 2025, Meta did three layoffs, one of 3,600 (5%), 100 and 600 people
In 2026, Meta has done two layoffs, one of 200, and one of 8,000 (10%).
If you can't correct overhiring in 4 years as a CEO, you've failed. If you repeatedly have to do >10% layoffs every year for 4 years you've failed (if it's to correct for a one time hiring spree).
Meta's employment didn't skyrocket during the pandemic making this argument even more bullshit. Between 2012 and 2018 Meta averaged an employee count growth of 40% YoY. In 2020, they grew by 31%, 2021 22% and 20% in 2022. Meta slowed their growth during the pandemic.
This "pandemic overhiring" is bullshit.
In 2018, 35,500.
From 2019 to 2022, 44k to 86k.
2026, as of now, 70k, 26k higher than 2019.
Using relative comparison is not appropriate for a software company, which is incredibly scalable by nature. Yoy is not the appropriate metric here. These are not workers on the line in a widget factory.
I do agree with your point about overhiring, its been way to long and this continues to be an excuse without any real evidence to back it up.
replacing SRE-4s with AI is the point
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
> Excepting for trivial-size, freshly formed startups, companies cannot be "Agile", because finance and legal and HR and even marketing have constrains setting the tempo - you cannot just drive them with a sprint as if it was a clock signal.
Implementations of Agile at different companies can be an issue, yes. But that is to be expected in any large organization, simply because of scale. It doesn't change the fact that the on-the-ground teams at agile orgs work to a different cadence and approach than historically traditionally structured companies.
There are a few different ways to manage interfacing with parts of the org that need to march to a different beat. That always creates friction, and has to be managed properly. Any large org can suffer from hubris, middling management skills and capacity, wasted effort. Problems of scale, I guess.
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
Nobody else has this targeted focus.
Do we really need to discuss this? He tried to screw another founder - the Brazilian - who got a pay off and now has a reported net worth in the billions.
>I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.
I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
Google bought Android before it had released products.
Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?
This is before Google.
“Move fast with stable infrastructure” as they say.
"Agile" can go and die in a hellfire for all I care.
But good technical project managers aka "bridges between the higher-up beancounters and the workers" are worth their weight in gold.
Yeah but it's not easy do distinguish those from the snake oil salesmen who are just good at smooth talking during the interviews.
I am skeptical of Doctorow's theory because it looks like LLMs will continue to improve enough over the near term to be able to handle issues caused by AI-written code from the past few years.
I have this theory that the bloat will follow to the full extent possible. OpenClaw has this, the OpenEye or whatever that comes on another day, with better models, will have 3 million lines of code. All of the possibilities that you mention will not come to fruition the way you'd like to, because speed is preferred over building better things, and to hell with maintainability.
Eventually these things will become a ton of black boxes, and the only option will be to write them from scratch with another next gen LLM. Lots of costly busywork, and it will all take time.
But just wanted to correct for the historical record:
> Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Where 2 did not have a product, successful or not. They were an unreleased demo looking for investors and luckily got into a room with Larry Page of 2004.
Meta has not shown the second part.
You said
> buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade.
Meta bought already successful companies.
Google has purchased successful businesses, but they also purchased companies that weren't and managed to get them into massive money makers.
Beyond that though, there's the probation period. If they can't do the job, they're supposed to be let go before they become permanent.
Trouble I see from most interviewers is a tendency of asking questions with a "right" answer. Those tend to be a lot easier to game. They then fallback on sorting applicants by pedigree - the old, "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM" method.
Then, they come back and rant about how PM's are trash, and Agile is trash, etc. etc.
The remaining piece is to speak with some personal references to verify they did some real work.
Not a thing where I am. You can BS your way in these jobs and so many people did.
There's no LEETCODE for management positions, just bullshitting smooth-talk and using your connections (nepotism).
There are real differences in the knowledge and work behavior of great PMs and the bullshitters, and it's usually not that hard to tease out the bullshit in an interview if you know what you're doing.
I was talking about a country, not a workplace, and franky, so what? I can't change that. What I can do, is tell you how it is, and how the system gets exploited.
If you live in some magic utopia where things are different(the US maybe?), good for you, but this information doesn't change anything for me where I live.
Best I can do is adapt and exploit the system in my favor as well if I can the same the rest do, otherwise I get left behind by the unscrupulous clueless scammers who do.