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Meta Is Preparing to Notify Employees of Large-Scale Layoffs This Week
- seibelj 4y agoI have it from a trusted friend that a big Google layoff is coming soon as well. Stay safe out there
- brundolf 4y agoWondering how the displaced engineers will impact the rest of the job market
- seibelj 4y agoProbably they will be absorbed at lower salaries / equity. But SF real estate, holy shit. Dump it now if you have any
- adam_arthur 4y agoYes, tech comp is about to come down greatly across the board. We’ve barely seen the start of layoffs yet, and the Fed is pedal to the metal on engineering a recession. Tech falls first due to highest discount rate sensitivity
- paganel 4y ago> tech comp is about to come down greatly across the board. To be honest the total comps for some FAANG companies had gone into the crazy territory, there was no way for a up and coming startup to compete against comps of 500-600k (or so I had read) that decent engineers were getting. I mean, there was a way, but in exchange those start-ups had to promise the world and then some, which was not ideal, to say the least. That's how we got lots of "fake" unicorns, which only now are beginning to get back to Earth.
- bluedino 4y agoNo more $150k DevOps engineers that don't know how disk partitions or Python actually work?
- autotune 4y agoI just landed a $175k full time base gig that didn't ask about either of those, just terraform and kubernetes and AWS all day long. Also, my resume is riddled with nothing but short term stints since the start of the pandemic, but doesn't seem to have effected my prospects. Now to be fair, I do actually know both python and linux essentials, and can google and troubleshoot my way through most common infra issues. I would say I am at least mediocre enough to get most of the work done in a reasonable time frame at this point.
- paxys 4y agoDisagree with "across the board". Tech still has a lot of difficult problems and a crazy amount of money to be made, so premium talent will continue to command premium salaries. It's just that a "staff engineer" 4 years out of college won't be able to sleep their way into $500K in salary + stock.
- adam_arthur 4y agoComp is dictated by labor market dynamics, not by profitability of the product. If you have 10 engineers of roughly equal skill competing for the same role, the company has more leverage to offer lower comp than if there’s just 1, or less than one. Profitability just sets a cap on what can be paid. That being said, I do agree that the best of the best will likely be able to maintain mid 6 figure comps. But it won’t be the norm as it has been. There’s also theory vs practice. In practice very few companies have a high level of confidence about being able to quantify how much one engineer is worth vs another. Which is why 10x engineers can’t capture significantly higher comp than the median, even in the current (recent) market
- steviesands 4y agoDoes this logic work for lawyers? "Biglaw" firms are similar to FAANG in that it is a handful of companies that offer very high comp (235k for first year). There is a deluge of folks that apply from all universities to biglaw but generally they primarily hire from top tier law schools and even then not all make it. Similar for Big 3 consulting firms (BCG, Bain, McKinsey) in that there is a huge application pool for positions but they are difficult to get and provide high pay.
- adam_arthur 4y agoYeah, for sure. But in those cases the number of jobs is much more limited than was the case in tech in recent years. Finance is a similar example. Bankers get paid a lot, but the number of them has been pretty static.
- 4y ago
- atomicnumber3 4y agoJust my 2c: I know friends who work at other companies paying similar wages who immediately try to get ahold of the lists of laid off staff from these layoffs hoping to hire top talent when they're otherwise not even going to hear they're looking. So I don't know how much this will really change comp levels? Especially with how frequently software people change jobs anyway.
- EMM_386 4y ago> Wondering how the displaced engineers will impact the rest of the job market That dream of making local (San Francisco) pay while living wherever you want will quickly evaporate. I survived as a software engineer through the dot-com crash. This isn't even a crash, this is just seems like a minor correction to "normal" for most of these companies with head-counts through the roof. But SV salaries were abnormal, and that should be taken into account. There are a lot of us, doing a lot of the same stuff, for a lot less pay out there. Why? For all sorts of various reasons. And this is now rapidly taking into account the entire globe.
- klohto 4y agoI have it from a good friend that this is bullshit
- deeptote 4y agothey were literally trying to recruit me last week
- keepquestioning 4y agoyou may get an offer but not a job...
- eddsh1994 4y agoMeta, Amazon, hell even Twitter have reached out to me and my neighbors recently (my friend has an interview at Twitter next week). I believe even during hiring freezes these companies carry on recruitment because they're slow and can wait for the ideal role to appear in the future even if there's nothing available right now. So basically you'll get an offer without a job.
- lotophage 4y agoDuring freezes there's often exceptions for teams who've lost people, especially for critical roles. i.e. you can't increase count but you can keep it the same.
- raydev 4y agoAnd? Recruiters are usually operating on weeks old info. They never find out when the freezes/cuts are coming until the day of, because any changes would tip off employees and lead to rumors/lower morale and productivity.
- kyawzazaw 4y agoI think both can be true at the same time but it is unlikely for the first
- sushid 4y ago
- amyamyamy2 4y agoDo you have any information about the size of the layoff / when it will be? I'm a new grad who started two months ago and is very anxious about this.
- GlickWick 4y agoThere likely won’t be one. They have other ways of reducing headcount.
- firstfewshells 4y agoDon't speculate. And what does "stay safe" even mean? Unless you mean stay safe from folks making baseless insinuations.
- GlickWick 4y agoYou’d be wrong about that.
- dontbenebby 4y ago
- briandear 4y agoImagine that. Literally to be announced the day after Election Day. Some coincidence.
- vandleyindust 4y agoWhat are you implying?
- pepperonipizza 4y agoProbably that it will be more unnoticed because of it
- haney 4y agoIt could be a total coincidence, could be designed to take advantage of a news cycle that's already full, could be that it has taken them this long to put a plan together since their stock started dropping. If your theory is that there's a political motivation there are a couple of simpler explanations before we jump to that conclusion.
- stephc_int13 4y agoI wonder if this is directly or indirectly related to what Elon Musk did at Twitter.
- mc32 4y agoDoubt it. Quite a few tech cos have been announcing freezes as well as RIFs. Most are trimming fat because of market conditions (economic slowdown) Twitter because they were management heavy and they were bought out and needed to trim some excess weight.
- strangattractor 4y agoPossibly indirectly in the sense most people are going to be consumed with the Twitter debacle and won't really pay much attention to what is going on at Meduh.
- drpgq 4y agoIf Musk hadn't made a Twitter offer, where would their stock be today? Probably low enough that big layoffs were inevitable.
- hongtona 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497290 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497290
- EMM_386 4y ago
- chris_wot 4y agoMan, if this is the end of social media, then it can’t come too soon.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoTikTok next please!
- spike021 4y agoSocial media isn't inherently bad, if you can learn how to self-curate. I've made pen pal friends on international trips who I stay in contact with on Instagram and Twitter because it doesn't make sense to exchange phone numbers. I use lists and muted words/phrases on Twitter to only see tweets from people I care about reading, on topics I mostly am fine with. I guess for people who still browse Facebook and Twitter like they did 15 years ago, then social media should get buried. But there are some pretty effective ways to curb its toxicity and reap benefit from it these days.
- cmsonger 4y ago"Social media isn't inherently bad, if people across the world can learn how to self-curate." Is equivalent to "Social media is bad" IMO. There are always going to be "enough" people who can't self-curate that social media will be harmful.
- spike021 4y agoBut you could say the same thing about nearly everything. Sure there are millions upon millions of books. Someone who enjoys reading won't elect to read books they know are a waste of time or something that will be offensive to them. Same can be said for consuming newspapers (anyone else just skip the front page and go right to a special section you actually care about, like sports or business instead of politics?), TV, movies, video games? Music? So are all things bad because some people are incapable of deciding for themselves how to consume said things?
- 4y ago
- jgalt212 4y agoThese things tend to correlate. If A is laying off, I can do so as well without taking a too much PR flack and/or singling our firm out as one navigating firm-specific uncertain market conditions.
- stephc_int13 4y agoThis is a good thing, overall, in the same way that the dotcom crash was a good thing to clear the field of all the frauds. I have the feeling that a few of those large companies are in need of a wake-up call.
- adam_arthur 4y agoYup The delusional amount of overhiring at these companies was really something. Guess it was too ingrained in their DNA.
- stephc_int13 4y agoI was there during the dot-com bubble. Everything that looked like bullshit turned out to be bullshit. And I've seen a lot of delusional bullshit during the last few years, the wort of those coming from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
- cplusplusfellow 4y agoElon Musk advertised as a feature that he would cut Twitter staff to bring the revenue per employee in line with industry standards. But I’m curious - What ideas of Elon do you find to be delusional bullshit?
- blinding-streak 4y agohttps://archive.ph/BuNHQ https://archive.ph/BuNHQ
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoIs this a Tech/Social Media bust in the making with Twitter's latest woes as well? Or is the more a sign of many companies taking an opportunity to pull back on ad/marketing spending? Collectively that would impact social media and search platforms the most since that is their only real revenue source.
- pjc50 4y agoThe stock market downturn has hit a lot of tech companies hard, and since that affects their ability to pay cheaply (in stock) and/or run at a loss made up by investors, they're cutting staff bills.
- subradios 4y agoAdtech here, spending is increasing in all things. However premium content like Hulu etc are taking up more budget than "web apps" of late because the data shows its more effective
- caminante 4y ago> Adtech here, spending is increasing in all things. This is misleading. Increasing? Yes. Increasing relative to view a couple months ago? No. [0] META's valuation has gotten hammered recently due to reduced ad forecasts on top of AAPL locking down iPhone privacy. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/less-growth-seen-for-2023-u-s-ad-spending-11664456402?st=1jydtn89ukoj9is&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink https://www.wsj.com/articles/less-growth-seen-for-2023-u-s-a...
- cavisne 4y agoOn top of AAPL growing their advertising business at the expense of their competitors is more accurate.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ZiiS 4y agoOvertly or not a lot of their staff were employed to "don't let Twitter overtake us", that dose start to look a bit redundant.
- paganel 4y agoTheir share price is 73% down since the start of the year, certainly at some point their CEO and the person taking the actual decisions should take responsibility for it all, no?
- miohtama 4y agoBecause Zuckerberg has controlling shares, it is hard to force him out. I would expect bitter shareholders to sue him for breaching fiduciary duty or similar, but IANAL.
- Macha 4y agoGood luck taking action against the person with all the voting shares.
- sgu999 4y agoNo, employees take responsibility when the stock is down. Decision makers only take responsibility when it's up. :D
- colechristensen 4y agoWhat does "taking responsibility" look like? A meaningless public post "I take responsibility"?
- paganel 4y agoStepping aside or closing/killing-off the project that is haemorrhaging money and is bringing down the share valuation.
- qeternity 4y agoI’ve seen this posted a lot, and I’m not really sure I understand what the point is. Yes, Zuck has an unusual amount of power as CEO. In another company, the CEO might be fired and the new CEO would come in and do the mass layoffs and course correction. But the only difference is in that one person’s job security. It makes no difference to the rank and file: the company over hired and there’s only one remedy for that, irrespective of CEO accountability. When you say the CEO should take responsibility for it all, what exactly do you mean?
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y agoI still, after all these years, hold the belief that facebook failed to innovate because the engineering interview is based on memorization. Having worked with those types of engineers, they can absolutely build exactly what is needed. But abstract and engaging product vision does not come easily with them. Outsourcing that capability to an attractive and charismatic product manager can never close that gap.
- notart666 4y agoAlgorithm interviews never worked it was just a filtering mechanism so they could access cheaper labor. The reality is you have no idea if someone is qualified for their job until you hire them. Everything else are just signals. Fuzzy at best.
- s1k3 4y agoI don’t think it’s cheapening the labor… it’s a way to filter the pool at the cost of missing some gems. Basically it will filter more bad than good but it will still filter good.
- notart666 4y agoIt's a poor filter and well tech salaries are artificially high the reality is most companies can afford to hire tens of thousands of developers to work on projects but instead then only hire the bare minimum.
- paxys 4y agoGoogle, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Tesla, NVidia and the vast majority of tech companies of all sizes that have been using this exact same interview process for decades are managing to innovate just fine. Facebook's problem has never been engineering. Blame its leadership and the product decisions they made (like dumping $4B a quarter into a "metaverse" that nobody wants).
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
- sys_64738 4y ago> It added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021, and added an additional 15,344 in the first nine months of this year—about a fourth of that in the most recent quarter. So it basically doubled employee count in the last three years. Insanity.
- bushbaba 4y agoOnly crazy as growth stalled. If it kept pace with prior years they’d of had doubled revenue in that time frame
- rossdavidh 4y agoPerhaps, but once you're as big as FB, you should be able to guess that your growth rate will inevitably slow. No company that big keeps growing at the same rate, or they'd take over the entire economy in short order. AT&T, GE, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, all had their growth rate slow as they got big. If FB was hiring on the assumption that it wouldn't happen to them, they were foolish to do so.
- JamesianP 4y agoIt's also a way to take advantage of high-priced stock while they can. Of course that doesn't mean they should hire recklessly and pay through the nose for people to do VR research or whatever that won't pay off this decade.
- rossdavidh 4y agoIn some organizations, you want to hire big going into the hiring freeze, so that once the layoffs start (and you get told from higher up, "cut x%), you can keep the people you actually care about. Insanity from the point of view of the organization, but rational from the point of view of the mid-level manager. Don't know if this is what happened at FB, but it happens in some places.
- bhawks 4y agoAmazon actually has an 'unregretted attrition rate' metric that it holds managers to. Essentially they are expected to shed a percentage of employees annually. This metric gets gamed as "hire to fire" to keep your core team intact. https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to-fire-practice-reveals-a-brutal-truth-about-management.html https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
- datalopers 4y agoHousing in SF/SV is in trouble. Last week alone we had Twitter (3700), Stripe (1000), Lyft (700), Opendoor (550), and now FB (probably 5000). Obviously not every employee resides in that region but it's a good ~40% of the workforce [edit: of these companies].
- paxys 4y agoOne can only hope, but Bay Area housing survived the 2008 bubble and whatever is happening now is peanuts compared to that so far.
- adam_arthur 4y agoTech wasn’t hit very hard in 08, nor was it nearly as large a part of the economy. CA housing was hit hard though. Yes. LA was one of the worst hit
- sahila 4y agoYeah but prices have dramatically increased since 2008, I want to say 2-4x or more based on my anecdotal data.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rr808 4y agoTrue, but balance that with people coming back to the office. I'd think AirBnBs in Tahoe are definitely in trouble!
- omnimus 4y agoAre you saying about 10 000 are 40% of the workforce of SF/SV? So workforce in SF/SV is 25 000?
- dividefuel 4y agoI think they are saying 40% of those laid off are in SF/SV.
- ispo 4y agoAs we say in Spanish "as I have limited time left in the Convent, I will shit inside". I am very surprised to see all these polite colleagues behaving like angels while being treated like office clips. Good luck to all of us.
- rchaud 4y agoI wonder if we'll see the outpouring of barely disguised schadenfreude that accompanied the Twitter layoffs. Then again Zuckerberg seems like a boring drone of a person, whereas Musk has the sub-Trumpian "I alone can fix this" aura that seems to attract so many.
- mysecretaccount 4y agoArticle is paywalled - is there an estimate of how many will be laid off?
- gundmc 4y agoNothing more specific than "many thousands".
- mzs 4y agojournalist's thread: https://twitter.com/JeffHorwitz/status/1589365495702360064 https://twitter.com/JeffHorwitz/status/1589365495702360064 >We aren’t in a position to confirm the exact size of the cuts, but this is likely going to be the biggest round of tech layoffs to date by a margin. Many thousands of people will be getting laid off.
- heavyset_go 4y agoReminder that earlier this year the Fed implored corporate leaders to initiate hiring freezes and layoffs in order to lower inflation that they blamed on "high wages", and big tech companies were some of the first to line up to gleefully fall on that sword.
- dividefuel 4y agoHow do large companies typically decide who gets laid off? Do they set a target, then pass it down proportionately throughout the org tree? Do they often chop specific areas entirely and leave others unaffected? A mix of both? Something else?
- pcurve 4y agoDepends on the size of org impacted within the large companies, but typically directors and up are involved. (unless they're the one being cut)
- firstfewshells 4y agoUsually they retain the top performing employees. If the entire org is shelved, such employees are moved to another org.
- mythhouse 4y agothere was blog post on teamblind that laid out this process. Have blind on banned list on my computer but you should be able to find it.
- clusterhacks 4y agoI have seen organization-level layoffs and more targeted layoffs. In the (only) organization level layoff I saw, someone stuck a pin in an org chart at a pretty high level. Everybody (and I mean everybody) in the tree underneath that point lost their job. Longtime employees at that company were in total shock that day. This was a layoff of a couple thousand employees. I also saw a salary-based layoff happen. In that one, a number of software engineers in a division making over $X were let go in a cost-saving maneuver. Macroeconomic conditions continued to decline and a few months later, most early tenure (say 3-4 years or less) were basically let go. I was new hire at the org-level layoff place I mentioned. New hires were exempted from the "resource action." Over the next 6 years that I was there, there were periodic layoffs but these were mostly targeted at folks judged as not doing particularly well or in positions that simply weren't needed anymore.
- chihuahua 4y agoIf there's a severance payment, I wouldn't mind that, as I was planning on leaving the week after next.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- borroka 4y agoIt seems to me yet another confirmation that there is no man (or woman) for all seasons and all situations. Musk looks like the disorganized mess he's making at Twitter, the kind of "visionary" we've all had to work with and who has sucked the will to live out of us: unreasonable expectations, constant changes of trajectory, the feeling that one well-spent night or one too many drinks for them would make our lives heaven or hell. Zuck is spending billions on a bet that, frankly, seems like nothing more than a nerd's dream. I am cautious in my observation, and I think it is a caution shared by many, for who could have predicted the adoption of the automobile, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, social media? And so much leeway is given to this case as well, forgetting that other supposed "manifest destinies" of technology, such as flying cars and robotic sex dolls, have gone by the wayside partly because of technical limitations and partly because, in the end, no one cares about them, either for now or forever. But we have seen the same ups and downs in many historical figures, the Churchills, the Napoleons, the Einsteins, who, after proving themselves to be brilliant as well as favored by the stars, failed to repeat later what gave them notoriety, success and admiration. Perhaps they ran out of luck, perhaps no one had the courage to tell them that it was time for retirement.
- pkoird 4y agoI wouldn't know much about Politicians but I'm certainly curious about Einstein's inclusion in your examples. Just how do you think that the discoverer of Photoelectricity, Brownian Motion, Special & General Relativity, and one of the founding fathers of QM failed later in his life?
- borroka 4y agoOne can read about Einstein's search for a unified theory of physics (see, for example, https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200512/history.cfm https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200512/history.cfm). "Failed" is a big word, which I do not like to use. I prefer to say that his gamble, which consumed the second part of his professional life, did not pay off. And the way you describe Einstein's work is the same way someone might describe, in other contexts, the work of Zuck or Musk. How is it possible that Zuck "failed" with the metaverse (remains to be seen, of course, I don't have a crystal ball) after he founded Facebook and had the genius intuition to buy Whatsapp and Instagram?
- pcurve 4y agoSo I guess it really has begun... Earnings were terrible and all techs are getting punished.
- Ptchd 4y agoMaybe if all these large tech companies get rid of the fat, we will get less cosmetic "updates"... these engineers don't even know what to do with their time.
- partiallypro 4y agoWhy would Elon Musk do this? But seriously, almost every company reliant on ads has announced layoffs this year. Neither Twitter or Facebook layoffs should be a surprise.