Zuckerbergs 8 billion dollar VR metaverse flop has something to do with this maybe?
Last time I checked AI isn't killing jobs if the other news is to be believed.
Enterprise adoption is definitely not happening as fast as the AI proponents (startups, frontier labs, big tech) would like people to believe (probably the reason why frontier labs are going the FDE/consulting path). So it's unlikely that the impact on productivity is enough to produce the alleged impact.
Also delivery teams have been decreased, as now there is more that can be done with less folks.
Which started with move to cloud, focus on SaaS ready made products instead of custom development, serverless instead of microservices, low code/no code tooling, and now AI agents for SaaS product integrations.
This is the usual meme only happens when it comes to me kind of thing.
Neither was her husband iirc.
Layoffs are usually across teams not "illustrators and translators".
AI isn't killing jobs.
I believe that was an investment into controlling the next platform, so what happened on iOS with could never happen to them again.
What's far crazier and more applicable to the current balance sheet is the $14.3B acqui-hire of Alexandr Wang. But, what do I know?
"a salary of more than $500,000 in her most recent position, as a mid-tier executive at Meta"
I'm sorry, but if you're making over half a million in TC a year, you can have an emergency fund set aside as an overpaid executive.
How many actual tech workers (the ones making under $100k, lol) are facing even harder financial security than the first-world-problems of some Facebook exec who could afford two nannies?
The opening sentence of the article even tacitly admits this - "Susan Smith considered herself a winner in the American economic lottery" - the operative word here is "lottery" and I am not altogether surprised the type of person to coast on Facebook money for decades found themselves hard up after it got cut off.
Seriously. It boggles my mind how people can earn this much money, yet face difficulties when they lose their job. I guess they're people who didn't grow up poor and/or are too hungry for material things.
There's very little I want or need in this world; if I were making $500k, I'd be able to somewhat retire within 2-3 years.
That said, I believe there probably are workers (in the sense of having the same class interests as other workers rather than the owners, like an executive does) in the Bay Area that earn these kinds of numbers. Again, this is something that a proper political education would make very clear, but anything that smacks of a materialist or class-based analysis is now completely verboten at most levels of the education system because it is considered "Marxism," an enemy ideology.
My understanding is that outside the US this dynamic is more common in a variety of industries.
Again, this is basic political education everywhere else in the world. This is what other countries' schoolchildren are learning while ours are learning why it was actually good and necessary to nuke Japan, how "manifest destiny" is also ultimately good and moral, and how the Civil War was mainly about something abstract called "states' rights".
COVID is now ancient history and there have already been several years of big layoffs when every time I hear the attempt of explaining them through COVID over-hiring.
That may have been right a couple of years ago, but since then every company that had over-hired must have already disposed of the surplus.
My impression is that the current trend for layoffs only really began around early 2025. For reference, the layoffs during the dotcom bubble I was told took around 2 years to plateau
If they can't forecast demand or headcount they should be replaced by confident sounding AI.