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It's a little difficult with this article, to clearly understand the chain of responsibility. Does meta employ the vendor that employs the service staff? If so,

It's a little difficult with this article, to clearly understand the chain of responsibility. Does meta employ the vendor that employs the service staff? If so, who really decided to make staff cuts? And how does the union intersect with this? Unrelated, there are approximately 200 service people cut, making approximately $20/hr. That's roughly $8M a year. Certainly that's a lot of money, but I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers? Or is this related to fewer people being in the offices now, so there's literally less work? It seems like a compassionate capitalism approach, wherein there's a bit more preference for preserving the jobs for the lower economic class would be worth considering here.

IMTDb 4y ago
> I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers? It’s likely that meta sees less issue with removing janitors than engineers. One question they probably asked themselves is: would those missing janitors have any impact on any project or revenue stream ? Would it be hard ton re-hire and re-train them if we need to ? With engineers, they would probably have to answer « yes » to the impact question and « no » to the re-staff question, while it is really hard to even notice few missing janitors and re-hiring them is trivial.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- caprock 4y ago
  That sounds like a reasonable point, from a purist business perspective. I have a tendency to assume the big players like meta have many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, and that many projects aren't very important (or even negative) to the bottom line. Maybe that's not true. It still sounds like they are taking a low friction path, and a little more effort here might result in a decision that has better social outcome. There's not enough info to say that with real certainty though.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, This is assumed. The hard part is finding them.
- jleyank 4y ago
  Unless the offices are empty, their kitchen areas are going to get rather grody if nobody is cleaning them up. And I can’t see the admins (if any are left) doing this, nor the engineers. Penny wise and pound foolish.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Sure. That is also why we don't have secretaries no more. So instead Facebook will have programmers fixing shelves and yanky doors.
dixie_land 4y ago
> That's roughly $8M a year. So instead of finding anywhere between one E6 or a dozen or so E5s that are simply coasting, they decided to cut 200 who does actual work.
- askafriend 4y ago
  Many employees are WFH. There's simply less janitorial work needed as a result. Why would you keep paying people to do a job that doesn't need to be done?
iusuallylurk 4y ago
I think a lot of people who have never run a company view business this way. If the discussion was purely about cost (and I assume it's at least partially), then you'd be right that laying off 20 engineers would provide the same impact to the cost bucket. However, how much revenue is generated on average by each facebook engineer? I can't find an exact amount, [disclaimer: fuzzy math ahead] but looking at their q2 2022 earnings (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Meta-06.30.2022-Exhibit-99.1-Final.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...) they employed 83,553 people and had a total revenue of $28,822,000,000 for q2. Presumably each of those employees contribute in some way to the revenue, on average resulting in $344,954 in revenue per employee per quarter assuming that's static (it's not) that's $1.379mm in revenue per employee per year. How much revenue do janitors cleaning empty offices generate for Meta? Roughly $0, there might be some extrapolated value to a clean office you can indirectly attribute. But regardless, they're an $8mm/year cost with no revenue directly attributed. So laying off 20 engineers you'd net $8mm/year in cost savings, but lose $27.58mm/year in revenue (hypothetically), leaving you with a $19.58mm net loss compared to laying off 200 janitors with $0 revenue lost. Obviously it doesn't work out 100% this way, but hopefully you this helps you to understand what math the accountants at Meta are doing. I'm not suggesting that this is the right way to run a company, but it is the way public companies are run. I'm surprised no one in the comment threads so far has considered this, so I felt it necessary to at least mention it.

IMTDb 4y ago

> I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers? It’s likely that meta sees less issue with removing janitors than engineers. One question they probably asked themselves is: would those missing janitors have any impact on any project or revenue stream ? Would it be hard ton re-hire and re-train them if we need to ? With engineers, they would probably have to answer « yes » to the impact question and « no » to the re-staff question, while it is really hard to even notice few missing janitors and re-hiring them is trivial.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
caprock 4y ago
That sounds like a reasonable point, from a purist business perspective. I have a tendency to assume the big players like meta have many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, and that many projects aren't very important (or even negative) to the bottom line. Maybe that's not true. It still sounds like they are taking a low friction path, and a little more effort here might result in a decision that has better social outcome. There's not enough info to say that with real certainty though.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, This is assumed. The hard part is finding them.
jleyank 4y ago
Unless the offices are empty, their kitchen areas are going to get rather grody if nobody is cleaning them up. And I can’t see the admins (if any are left) doing this, nor the engineers. Penny wise and pound foolish.
rightbyte 4y ago
Sure. That is also why we don't have secretaries no more. So instead Facebook will have programmers fixing shelves and yanky doors.

dixie_land 4y ago

> That's roughly $8M a year. So instead of finding anywhere between one E6 or a dozen or so E5s that are simply coasting, they decided to cut 200 who does actual work.

askafriend 4y ago
Many employees are WFH. There's simply less janitorial work needed as a result. Why would you keep paying people to do a job that doesn't need to be done?

iusuallylurk 4y ago

I think a lot of people who have never run a company view business this way. If the discussion was purely about cost (and I assume it's at least partially), then you'd be right that laying off 20 engineers would provide the same impact to the cost bucket. However, how much revenue is generated on average by each facebook engineer? I can't find an exact amount, [disclaimer: fuzzy math ahead] but looking at their q2 2022 earnings (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Meta-06.30.2022-Exhibit-99.1-Final.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...) they employed 83,553 people and had a total revenue of $28,822,000,000 for q2. Presumably each of those employees contribute in some way to the revenue, on average resulting in $344,954 in revenue per employee per quarter assuming that's static (it's not) that's $1.379mm in revenue per employee per year. How much revenue do janitors cleaning empty offices generate for Meta? Roughly $0, there might be some extrapolated value to a clean office you can indirectly attribute. But regardless, they're an $8mm/year cost with no revenue directly attributed. So laying off 20 engineers you'd net $8mm/year in cost savings, but lose $27.58mm/year in revenue (hypothetically), leaving you with a $19.58mm net loss compared to laying off 200 janitors with $0 revenue lost. Obviously it doesn't work out 100% this way, but hopefully you this helps you to understand what math the accountants at Meta are doing. I'm not suggesting that this is the right way to run a company, but it is the way public companies are run. I'm surprised no one in the comment threads so far has considered this, so I felt it necessary to at least mention it.