22 ms·
12,000 Facebook employees, 15% of its workforce, may lose jobs amid quiet layoff
- graderjs 4y agoOuch... you just think like what if there was one choice they could have made differently back then that they would have changed the fate for these 12,000 people, and the rest of their company. But they didn't make it... The total number of layoffs will probably be less than 12,000 for now though
- assttoasstmgr 4y agoYou can't keep paying new college hires > $150k/year with zero experience and not assume the money won't run out some day. That bubble had a slow leak and now they've finally run out of oxygen. I'm surprised it took this long. Zuck losing his goddamn mind with this metaverse nonsense didn't help matters.
- badpun 4y agoMetaverse might have been a clever scam to prop up stock value. It was obvious to everyone that Facebook (the website/app) is a mature business with limited growth potential, so Zuck had to throw a new bone to clueless investors (who, in the age of zero interest rates, were throwing insane amounts of money on anything with a theoretical potential to go big) in order to keep the exponential growth of stock value. In that light, spending a couple billions a year on it doesn't sound too bad. Btw now that zero interest rates are over, this whole sharade makes way less sense. I wonder if there'll be massive cuts to the VR division.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago*charade (yes, weird spelling)
- cudgy 4y agoIt’s Frensh
- hoppyhoppy2 4y agoThey were talking about tricks to prop up the value of Meta's shares, so it could have been an intentional pun.
- checkyoursudo 4y agoFair point.
- threeseed 4y agoApple has invested billions in AR/VR and is building a headset. And almost every crazy bet they've made in the last few decades has paid off e.g. AirPods, Watch.
- civilized 4y agoApple is a proven product innovator. "Meta" is just the same old PHP website it's been since 2005, only with some acquisitions and low-value in-house stuff tacked on.
- badpun 4y agoJobs was a proven product innovator. What did Apple innovate in periods when Jobs wasn't at the helm? Apple Watch?
- theGnuMe 4y agoApple watch is great.. I mean I never really wore watches consistently until I got one especially with the smartphone as I never needed to just check the date and time on a watch anymore.
- phatfish 4y agoSo headphones and watches are "crazy bets" now. Good lord.
- badpun 4y agoApple is kind of a similar story. They've moved from being a high-growth, tech-based stock, into a stable, brand-based stock a couple years ago - about the time when Warren Buffet spotted it and added them to his portfolio. Perhaps they're also looking for a chance to catch some second wind.
- wil421 4y agoApple is easily on their 3rd or 4th wind. The Apple II debuted in 1979 was hugely successful in try 80s and early 90s. They lost their way in the 90s until the iPod pretty much saved them. The iPhone was their greatest achievement and made them the valuable company they are today. They’ve had many winds and innovated over decades.
- telotortium 4y ago> Metaverse might have been a clever scam to prop up stock value. Did that even work though? I know that when I heard about that, it immediately made me discount Facebook's job offer (I was interviewing at the time).
- vkou 4y ago> You can't keep paying new college hires > $150k/year with zero experience and not assume the money won't run out some day. Actually, you can when you make an average of $1.2 million/employee/year in revenue. And an average of $300,000/employee/year in profit. > That bubble had a slow leak and now they've finally run out of oxygen. You seem to be confusing Facebook with a no-profits-in-the-history-of-ever unicorn.
- evancox100 4y agoI don’t get why people keep saying this, it’s like they want companies to pay employees less. No one goes around saying “Investment Banking, now that’s a bubble, no way they can keep paying their employees that much!” (Goldman Sachs revenue / employee over $1.1 million) Presumably the person commenting on HN is in fact an employee and not like Mark Zuckerberg in disguise, though I guess it would make more sense if the people saying this were startup founders angry at having to compete for talent a FAANG wage levels.
- paganel 4y ago>“Investment Banking, now that’s a bubble, no way they can keep paying their employees that much! For what it's worth, and from the other side of the pond, it looks like IB has been on a rediscovery journey since the late 2000s financial crisis. First of all the likes of GS are not regarded anymore as the next coming of the Messiah when it comes to holding a job, or at least that was the general feeling around 2006-2008, even going into the financial crisis years. And second, some formally big IBs are actually on the extinction path, I'm thinking mostly about Credit Suisse's IB division and if I'm not mistaken Deutsche is in the same situation.
- mejutoco 4y agoCredit Suisse seems not to be doing great lately, after a few years of scandals.
- revolutukr 4y agoThe next 5 years are going to be a blood bath for junior, mid-level and just average developers. Everybody I know who is not a rockstar is going back to train for a new career, often outside of technology. Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoQuite the opposite where I live. Many older developers are shortly before retiring and companies have difficulties to get and train successors. Those that are not into development go into IT, which currently takes anyone. If you are a bum with a network cable, you will get hired. I just think that companies like Facebook are a special case. Here it can be very true, and Meta certainly might consolidate their product lineup. High stakes and generous compensation, but these developments can mean that your position gets cancelled. If it weren't for TikTok and some other competitors, they probably would have kept their jobs. But the market changes quickly. Facebook is now a network for parents and their children will look elsewhere naturally.
- revolutukr 4y agoVery interesting. In my retirement I've spent the past five years helping refugees get their foot in the door (mostly Syrian and Afghan students/recent grads, but about 20% have a lot of experience). This year has been brutal, we shut down in August because everything dried up. We worked mostly with lingering start-ups who failed to launch, mid-tier companies, and small companies. It all dried up, or the requirements shifted a tier (before mid-level was 3-5 years, now 5-7. Senior positions are basically looking for people with Principle / Staff engineering credentials). Of course, YMMV, we were navigating very specific situations which worked out well for people who are otherwise discriminated against / out of luck for finding work. Also, anecdotally, the salaries attached to the stream of recruiter spam I receive in my personal e-mail have plummeted. Maybe this is good, smaller companies will be able to hire more staff since salary expectations are lower?
- 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thisarticle 4y ago15% isn’t very quiet.
- smt88 4y agoIt is if you don't announce it to the press or even your employees.
- KptMarchewa 4y agoHow is this legal? Seems that even USA provides some guarantees that it won't be quiet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
- lazyasciiart 4y agoBy categorizing all employees leaving as "discharge for cause, voluntary departure, or retirement", which are explicitly listed as 'not a layoff' in the WARN Act https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/100/s2527/text https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/100/s2527/text
- KptMarchewa 4y agoI don't think they would be able to justify firing 12000 people for that, but sure, anything can happen under American law.
- telotortium 4y agoI can't imagine Meta winning in the end in California - the courts there are quite employee-friendly in such matters, and FAANG employees can generally afford lawyers.
- anm89 4y agoAdding quiet onto the beginning of every trend relating to employment is beyond annoying
- smt88 4y agoQuiet layoffs are a real thing. Companies often announce layoffs for various self-serving reasons. Facebook isn't doing that in this case.
- gumby 4y agoThey have to spread them around if they are to avoid getting in trouble. The US has notification laws for large layoffs (laws intended for factory towns, but applicable to any company of size).
- coffeeblack 4y agoOnly the second time I noticed it. Maybe its a quiet trend.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoIf only we could get Quiet Journalism
- mclightning 4y agoYou can actually! Just move to N.Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia. It is pretty quiet there.
- LAC-Tech 4y agohttp://www.pyongyangtimes.com.kp/ http://www.pyongyangtimes.com.kp/ http://alriyadhdaily.com/ http://alriyadhdaily.com/ https://sputniknews.com/ https://sputniknews.com/ Doesn't seem quiet!
- mclightning 4y ago
- wodenokoto 4y agoCan someone elaborate on the quiet part of quiet layoff?
- simonswords82 4y agoBusiness Insider’s journos are low quality. They will have heard about the quiet quitting movement and now the word quiet is in vogue and they’re applying it to all articles because they think it sounds good. The reality is all layoffs are made quietly. It’s not something companies like to shout about
- raydiatian 4y agoQuietgate is coming can you feel it
- simonswords82 4y agoHeh. I wonder what else we’ll all be subjected to quietly in the coming years.
- raydiatian 4y agoHopefully not IRL ‘a quiet place.’
- vasco 4y agoOnline newspapers quietly dying due to nobody paying to get past paywalls would be my bet.
- twic 4y agoLoudcels are not ready to take the quietpill.
- shawabawa3 4y agoThat's not true, mass layoffs are usually announced and get a lot of press The difference here is the "layoffs" are that they are changing performance targets so more people get fired over the year instead of laying off a bunch of people at once
- bArray 4y agoThis global recession will be ruthless. I'm hearing of mass lay-offs even outside of tech now. I suspect people in the tech industry can expect to stay out of work for 6+ months. The US for example is in a predicament economically with no clear way out, other than a hard recession. And that's without mentioning the energy crisis still to hit there and the food crisis that is slowly unfolding.
- raydiatian 4y agoApocalypses really make you stop and think the worst, but eventually you say to yourself, “No, Armageddon with my life.”
- rlawson 4y agoI see what you did there. Well done!
- yellow_lead 4y agoReading this comment takes me back to covid era rumors
- moviewatcher333 4y agoCovid was a pretty awful 2 years for a lot of people. Plenty died and plenty have odd lingering symptoms. A substantial number of people are still dealing with economic nightmares as a consequence of it. The global economy as a whole is.
- rpigab 4y agoAnd the crisis crisis, that happens when there are so many crises that it becomes a crisis.
- danrocks 4y agoReminds of that Xzibit meme "yo dog, we put a crisis in your crisis so you can despair while you despair"
- mrweasel 4y agoNot all of those 12.000 people are going to be in technology, my guess is that most of them won't be. The article is also poorly written. The author clearly know that Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook? Given that Meta, not Facebook, have 83.000 employees (which seems like a lot to be honest), the 12.000 is across all Meta owned companies. That could mean that Meta is dropping a bunch of projects that doesn't make money, firing the people working on them, while those working in profit centers a safe, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if moderations is going to take a big hit. As others pointed out "quiet layoff" is a weird term to use, that could mean that initially they won't rehire, at least not externally, when people quit.
- phpisthebest 4y agoPrevious news was that managers at Meta were told to put some percentage of their reports on PIP's, the thought at that time was they were preping for layoffs, and the PIP's are a prelude to get people to quit on their own accord
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook This is the cost of idiotic name changes. Nobody I know refers to Google the mothership as Alphabet. Meta took more hold, but it’s still fairly common to call the whole thing Facebook.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoStrong feeling the WFH cull is starting and the economic downturn is a good excuse for them to clear house. They didn’t build all those huge HQs for them to sit empty.
- rajman187 4y agoHuh, WFH cull? Zuck himself works from home (or his Hawaiian island compound) half the year now and the company expanded the WFH option to the majority of employees and may even consider shrinking offices (or certainly stopping real estate expansion) and adopting hot desk policies https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-remote-work-working-from-home-pandemic-hybrid-2021-6?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-rem... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57425636.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57425636.amp https://seekingalpha.com/news/3888616-meta-platforms-working-to-shrink-offices-amid-ongoing-work-from-home-wsj https://seekingalpha.com/news/3888616-meta-platforms-working...
- bamboozled 4y agoDoesn’t seem like an effective management strategy ? Working from the Hawaiian compound…
- threeseed 4y agoMany people have found themselves to be more productive working from home. Not sure why you think Zuckerberg would be any different.
- phpisthebest 4y ago>>Zuck himself works from home yes because it is unheard of that execs would do one thing for themselves and require something else for people that work for them.....
- cmsonger 4y agoUntil Meta gives up on the Metaverse, I don't think we will see a cull that's WFH oriented. Surely if Meta can't find a way to work in the Metaverse, no one ever will. Now other big companies that continue to invest in HQs: I wonder.
- bradlys 4y agoIt’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” The people I know who joined FAANG in the last five years are some of the hardest working people you’ll meet. There are some who get lucky and manage to coast but overall - the quality and tenacity of the IC folks is generally quite high. I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.
- imdsm 4y ago> grinded the fuck out of leetcode What is leetcode?
- zoover2020 4y agoIf not bait: a website to test competitive programming skills by algorithmic and data structure design questions. The difficulty levels vary and FAANG is well-known to ask such questions (in the harder difficulty spectrum) intech interviews
- imdsm 4y agoAh, thanks. Wasn't bait, I'm just a bit too old in the tooth to be involved in modern-day interview culture. (The interviews I conduct are far more relaxed, personal, and practical.)
- harveywi 4y agoIt's a scheme that (1) provides a busywork/proof-of-work barrier to entry to FAANG companies, and (2) fools engineers into believing that they are Robert Tarjan when in fact they can't wipe their own asses.
- wildrhythms 4y agoCanned programming interview questions that teach aspiring young people to memorize and recite a function line-for-line rather than actually be able to discuss implementations with the interviewer like a human being. (I blame lazy, clueless hiring managers and hiring practices for enabling this)
- kwhitefoot 4y agoThat means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for? There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.
- hnbad 4y agoFacebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB. In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
- tazjin 4y ago"allows for redundancy in development" is an incredible euphemism for "is unable to coordinate cross-team work"
- Frost1x 4y agoEh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here. If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
- jmyeet 4y agoReading through the comments I see a couple of recurring themes. For what a quiet layoff means, that's easy. All these companies have a performance review system. Employees are effectively stack ranked. Facebook in particular has a target of 10-15% in subpar ratings. These are ratings below MA (Meets All Expectations) including MM (Meets Most), MN (Meets None) and NRL (Non-Regrettable Loss ie an employee who quits that they don't want back). This is the tech equivalent of IBM or GE firing the bottom 10% of staff every year. So all you do is you get aggressive about PIPs and forcing those subpar ratings out. That's how a quiet layoff will work here. The second theme is who will this affect. It's naive to think the answer is "low performers". I don't think the young will bear the brunt of this either. Young workers are as a general rule cheaper. Diversity will inevitably enter the picture. jAs a whole, people who good for whatever diversity metrics the company cares about will be forced out less often than those who aren't. It's actually older workers who will bear the brunt of this as age (ie in the US being over 40 is a protected classs by law) is not a diversity metric I've seen any tech company cares about. Don't bleieve me? Go look at your company's diversity policy. It'll mention specific protected classes. See if age is one of them. As always, leaf nodes in the org chart and some low level managers will pay the price for poor leadership right up to the executive level. Nobody cares about the metaverse. It's a strategy from a company that has no idea what it should be doing.
- rickspencer3 4y agoI assume that some percentage of these employees are developers, engineering managers, etc... I assume that a large percentage of those have high salaries and are based in the Bay Area. I wonder if they will all be absorbed into the local job market, or if some will have to take lower salaries at remote companies, and perhaps even move to more affordable places?
- seibelj 4y agoMy sincere belief is that there are a large number of employees whose total comp is over $400k and they provide far less value than that. But the arms race between FAANG drove up salaries to illogical levels. As people are pushed out they will not be able to hop to another FAANG. While total comp at startups might be similar but the equity isn’t liquid like FAANG is. Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup. It will be a psychological shock to go from a FAANG environment to a small company. In summary I think there will be some hard life lessons for some previously extremely well compensated tech folks. I hope they saved a lot of their past salaries.
- yodsanklai 4y ago> whose total comp is over $400k People with high comp aren't there by chance, and don't keep their job if they don't perform consistently at their level. > Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup I worked in both environments, and it was quite similar to me. But FAANG was more stressful than the startup (which had investor cash to burn, and no angry customers). Also management is always behind your back and pushing you to your limits, in an environment were almost everyone is good and hard working.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoNo, maybe 20%-30% didn't make it by chance, they made it by straight up cheating on the leetcode part of their "virtual on-sites". Blind has been salty about this for years, especially since now many of the FAANG cheaters are getting promoted...
- gregdoesit 4y agoI cover what's happening inside Facebook for software engineers, and I have confirmed that the 15% needs improvement target was not set as guideline for engineering teams, based on talking with several engineering managers within the company. However, this article is making its round amongst software engineers as well, creating lots of fear and uncertainty. Right now, for engineering, what is happening is the revamped performance review process running its course. As with every year, the target for "needs improvement" is 10%, which is not new. Those going on "needs improvement", in the past, did not all go on PIPs. Also, PIPs at Facebook have not been nearly as draconian as at Amazon. With all these details, I find it a very strong stretch to say that "15% of Facebook's workforce may lose jobs." Originally I wrote in a lot more detail about all of this - and why the Business Insider article likely doesn't apply to engineering - behind a paywall. Seeing this trending on Hacker News, which article I find misleading - an article referencing a public Blind post! - I un-paywalled my reflection, and my own analysis on the situation at Facebook. I personally doubt there is a need for layoffs at Meta, and I'm surprised no other publication points this out. Analyzing the financials gives a very different picture on whether or not any form of layoffs would be needed. My response / reflection: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/meta-layoffs/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/meta-layoffs/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluedevilzn 4y agoEngineering managers and even directors have no knowledge of large changes like this until the very last minute. These sort of information is strictly VP+/SVP+. Unless you have talked to a few VPs, your prediction is as good as reading tea leaves.
- gregdoesit 4y agoThe original Business Insider article - referenced by the article linked on this post - writes [1] "Executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as 'needs support' in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said." So, as per Insider - and the article this post is about -, this information should be below the VP-level now, at director levels, and widespread in the organization as per Insider's reporting. I talked with people who supposedly should have been told about this 15% target. In engineering, I could not find any sources (including at director-level people). We'll see soon enough if the Business Insider article is right, as the article claims: "Several employees told Insider that as much as 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks." Let's check back mid-November to see if this did happen by then. If it would, there will be plenty of news on it. I would not see the business sense. It does not mean that I am right. I offer my analysis, and I cannot predict what will happen, beyond assigning likelihoods to events. I assign a low likelihood of engineering layoffs happening at Meta the coming months. I see an even lower likelihood when considering that right now Business Insider reported about the performance review touchpoint happening - as previously planned - which tends to not be a trigger for letting people go, at least not in bulk. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-quiet-layoffs-will-impact-thousands-of-jobs-employees-say-2022-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-quiet-layoffs-will-...
- yodsanklai 4y ago> 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks > some 12,000 employees could be out of jobs soon. > "It might look like they are moving on, but the reality is they are being forced out," If Meta is going to fire 15% of their staff within the next few weeks, it's not going to be quiet. The way they usually fire under performers isn't abrupt. People get consistent bad evaluations over a couple of halves, then go to a performance improvement programs. I'd assume that this type of things is a legal requirement in Europe. Not sure how this is going to work.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI assume whole teams will be let go. That would be a lot more expedient and less prone to discriminatory accusations than the more extended method you describe.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoI think they aren't firing people, they are laying off people. The difference is one has cause (not doing work up to standard, performance, behavior probs) the other is just giant corporation randomness of cancelling products, teams and managers being approached with "give me 15% of your team" types of requests. They need to file legal paperwork for layoffs of this size so "quiet" isn't really a good description. This many people is like $1.2B annually in savings if every person averages to $100k (which is conservative). They have stated they are leaning into AR/VR and their quarterly reports show other businesses are flat or shrinking. Its okay to have a business division that has a known profit margin and market share and not invest in furthering to expand it.
- Aeolun 4y agoHow can you find a new position internally if there is a hiring freeze?
- derwiki 4y agoCatch 22?
- boopboopbadoop 4y ago“It’ll just work itself out naturally.” - Bob Slydell
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saos 4y agoI’m assuming it’s those engineers on high 6 figure salary?
- sisu2022 4y agoThe number of employees they have is mind boggeling. All for two websites, a messenger and a very long tail of stuff nobody knows or cares about. And facebook is currently crashing and burning. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what these 100k very well paid people are doing all day. I am very grateful to facebook because without it our business would not exist. But meta is killing their golden goose. People are leaving, advertising is barely worth it and every week there is a new glitch in core functionality. Just recently they moved the message inbox for pages from fb.com/page/inbox to some completely new URL. The old URL just shows a generic error. It's a small thing but it shows how they operate without any regard for their users.
- macintux 4y agoPrevious discussions: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122417 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104679 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087097
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- steele 4y agoHopefully not via metaverse meetings
- cududa 4y agoTurns out they didn't actually give all the VR devs VR headsets and no one had the guts to say "Uhhh hey Mark? We actually never put together a procedure for giving all the VR engineers and designers a VR headset"
- aj7 4y agoFacebook has 75,000 employees? Doing what?
- bagacrap 4y agoplaying second life