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Meta is preparing large-scale layoffs this week
- hokumguru 4y agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33497012
- scarmig 4y agoI'm pretty surprised that one fell off the front page so fast.
- metadat 4y agoPeople flag things they don't like, and it increases the decay rate.
- unityByFreedom 4y agoThat seems too easy to game.. how many flags does it take?
- metadat 4y agoShrug, it helps reduce "unwanted" content in the community. I'm sure it depends on a few different factors (upvote, comments, possibly keywords). Mods can also pin or de-list stories as they see fit. It also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power. If one abuses the function I imagine mods can / will [silently] neuter the account to have less (or no) effect. There was also an interesting story recently about hacking HN ranking. The author created a bunch of accounts and got stories delisted from the frontpage by having too many noob accounts give a story an upvote over a short time period, apparently this triggered an anti-spam mechanism. At some point it seems like a waste of time with poor ROI. You can make a story go away, so what? It's not like it'd work indefinitely, if it became widely abused the mods will catch on and modify the system. I think the goal of HN is to have fun and interesting conversations, and connect with people. Excessive manipulation would be harmful with no real upside. Here's the link: https://reverseengineeringtogether.wordpress.com/2022/10/18/how-i-managed-to-take-down-arbitrary-posts-on-hacker-news/ https://reverseengineeringtogether.wordpress.com/2022/10/18/... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255477 Hehe, it got death by flagging. That's pretty funny.
- pvg 4y agoIt also depends who does the flagging, more karma == more power. Pretty sure this is not true. The easiest way to 'manipulate' what's on the front page is to just send the mods an email about posts that could use a bit of a downward shove. Pre-announcements, dupes, etc regularly get tossed out. The front page would be all dupes and rage if that didn't happen.
- metadat 4y ago100%, I email Dang quite frequently when I see fucked up shit. Not sure whether he likes me or not, because I've also been the source of problems sometimes. Nevertheless, he's consistently polite and helpful :) As for the flagging, it's what I've seen claimed but don't know for sure. Thank you for the reality check, @pvg!
- pvg 4y agoThey should add 'there is no secret cabal of high karma users' to the FAQ. That'll clear that misconception up right away!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoIt's a prenouncement sort of thing and the convention is to discuss such things when they actually happen mostly because otherwise you end up having the same discussion N times. 'preparing to notify' is classic announcement-of-announcement and those get downweighted routinely.
- shagie 4y agoHN tries to downweight posts that get too much engagement too fast. This is described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089 After the rate of posting cools down a bit (from not being on the front page), it can bubble back up.
- jcollins1991 4y agothank you sooooo much for sharing this, because I've been on here for what seems like forever and never had this explained... resolves one of my bigger gripes about behaviour of the ranking algorithm, I only wish details / stories like this were more widely shared
- shagie 4y agoThere are a lot of features that are out there that are lightly documented / only hinted at in the "this is how it works". https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m... You might also like to add the second chance pool to your pages to browse rather than just the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
- SevenNation 4y agoNothing in the article supports the "large-scale" qualifier in the title. There's also no link from Reuters to to the alleged WSJ report, but that is unfortunately par for the course. I could understand a title like "Meta is preparing layoffs this week", but not the one used by Reuters. Alternatively, the Reuters report could include details possibly contained in the original WSJ article. Or maybe "Meta is preparing to layoff thousands this week" as others have reported. If it's only 2,000 and the workforce is 65,000 strong, that's 3.1% of the workforce. Is that large-scale?
- pvg 4y agoIt's WSJ's wording from https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-is-preparing-to-notify-employees-of-large-scale-layoffs-this-week-11667767794 https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-is-preparing-to-notify-emp...
- pcurve 4y agoFirst, 3.1% is kind of big. Second, there's legal definition of Mass Layoff as per WARN act. > at least 50 employees are laid off during a 30-day period, if the laid-off employees made up at least one third of the workforce > 500 employees are laid off during a 30-day period, no matter how large the workforce; > an entire work site is closed down and at least 50 employees are laid off during a 30-day period.
- andrew_ 4y agowhat's wild is that since the Twitter layoffs last week, recruiter messages on LinkedIn to my account have gone from ~10/day consistently to 0 since the announcement.
- lumost 4y agoTwitter sounds an awful lot like SGI or Sun. For many companies, they will take this as the sign to batten down the hatches for a bit. We still don’t know what high interest rates are going to do to businesses like Uber.
- AnotherGoodName 4y agoOn that note Metas Bay Area HQ is the old sun campus. The back of the Facebook sign at the entrance still has the Sun Microsystems logo as a sort of reminder that nothing is permanent.
- cr4nberry 4y ago> The back of the Facebook sign at the entrance still has the Sun Microsystems logo as a sort of reminder that nothing is permanent. Pretty freaky if true
- I_AM_A_SMURF 4y agoIt's true, or was at least: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back-of-facebooks-sign-2014-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kps 4y agoAnd Google's was SGI.
- gonzo41 4y ago
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoThis has to be the greatest time since 2008 to be hiring tech talent.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- yrgulation 4y agoYeah but most companies dont need leet code programmers, they need developers. The market for devs is still strong.
- washywashy 4y agoKind of a blanket comment and seems a bit spiteful and unfair. Granted interviews at those companies could use a refresh and there are probably “leetcode” programmers there for sure, but there’s also plenty of talented developers at those companies.
- 999900000999 4y agoI'd love to interview as a ' developer '. But I'm a crappy leet coder so I never get to that. I've blown quite a few FAANG interviews due to this. To be fair, I'm self taught so I don't have a great data structure background. I've still had a good career though.
- yrgulation 4y agoDid a ton of leet like coding in high school and forgot most of it. Pretty irrelevant to most jobs. Unless you build low level tooling then you really dont bubble sort on a daily basis.
- roncesvalles 4y ago1. Anecdotally these layoffs seem to have affected mostly non-technical roles. 2. The US produces 65,000 [1] CS graduates each year. This doesn't include immigration and people who go into tech having graduated with non-CS degrees. The layoffs are significant in their local context but I wouldn't think they're large enough to perceptibly affect much on the ground for SWEs. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-grads-outperforming-those-in-other-key-nations/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/03/us-computer-science-...
- blindriver 4y agoGood luck to all my ex-Metamates, I hope it's not as deep a cut to the bone like what Elon did with Twitter. I'll be shocked if Twitter doesn't suffer multi-day outages by the end of the year given how deep some of the cuts sounded.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]