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I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat. If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.

musicale 4y ago
I may dislike Facebook, but this is great! Kudos to Zuck for doing the right thing for his employees.
fatnoah 4y ago
> I worked at Facebook when covid first hit Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
antipaul 4y ago
My Facebook interview process was not only more professional, objective, and relevant than any other, it was also actually enjoyable, as I said elsewhere. I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.
tomerbd 4y ago
amazing and imagine if this was not just a common cold
sytelus 4y ago
I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.
- iepathos 4y ago
  "Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.
  - ignaloidas 4y ago
    Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable. TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
- guhcampos 4y ago
  I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are. From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good. I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
  - landemva 4y ago
    > People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS. My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> If it were just about the money Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
- dunkmaster 4y ago
  Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is about money in the linked article: "Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "
  - mathverse 4y ago
    It is about trimming the fat mainly. Meta is still absolutely a money printing machine.
    - Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
      In fact, this is one of those truisms about the "down" side of the classical business cycle - that recessions partly function as an excuse to cut inefficiencies. How accurate this truism is, I don't know.
      - tibbon 4y ago
        Proof is that Meta stock is up today. I don't like this system of value, but it's what we've got.
        trey-jones 4y ago
        Today's price action is rarely a reflection of today's news.
    - groos 4y ago
      "trimming the fat" - this is such an unfortunate phrase. In evolutionary terms, fat is what let species survive lean periods.
adam_arthur 4y ago
It’s easy to be generous when times are good and your equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  And yet, many are still not generous when times are good.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Many were. And now that their stocks are down 90%, they aren’t
- phonebucket 4y ago
  > equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals Which fundamentals? The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]? The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Those stats are for now, not then. Good try though And they are vaporizing all of their FCF by reinvesting into the metaverse. Or were until the stock continued to collapse. It’s fair value here if you assume the metaverse is actually something they can monetize in a big way. Too far off for most investors
jiscariot 4y ago
princevegeta89 4y ago
Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.
- kraf 4y ago
  You can't be serious. I think it's rare for a company to treat developers poorly but that's beside the point. Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides. This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it. He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
  - phone8675309 4y ago
    Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
    - cookie_monsta 4y ago
      I'm so glad I never said anything stupid when I was 19
      - phone8675309 4y ago
        I've yet to see any evidence that his attitude has changed on this issue.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
racl101 4y ago
That's good to hear about Mark as opposed to just the bad stuff.
donretag 4y ago
I worked at Ticketmaster when covid first hit. Since the beginning, management has always been positive and re-iterating that the cash reserves are substantial and the company can endure the loss of revenue. Then the first layoff hit. Same re-iteration. We are good. Then came the second layoff.
- cachvico 4y ago
  Curious - what's the vibe like at Ticketmaster when ticket fees comes up?
- lupire 4y ago
  The company is fine. The employees are not. Anyway, you don't join Ticketmaster for anything approaching morality. Snakes eat snakes.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Salesforce announced their largest profits ever the same week they announced their first layoffs ever, I believe. The company, as they said, was in great shape.
tomcam 4y ago
Not normally a fan of the man, so this is very nice to hear.
dbg31415 4y ago
Hold up. You know they got money from the government not to lay people off, right?
- syntaxing 4y ago
  As in a PPP loan? I haven’t found this in public record, any source I can reference?
j0ba 4y ago
I'm pretty sure he didn't lose a single one of his billions paying them, but good on him anyways. He definitely didn't have to do it.
bergenty 4y ago
- infecto 4y ago
  Same boat as you. I understand the privacy concerns and the fear that Facebook is changing society for the worse, all of this is worth discussing but I don't see it as an evil company trying to actively ruin people. Truly excited to see how far they can push VR and AI.
- JohnAaronNelson 4y ago
  Facebook (and social media in general) has made the world a more divided place full of sadder and angrier people. He runs a company that optimizes for that scenario while accruing unimaginable sums of capital, and he doubled down with Meta. Hmm I wonder why some people are not fans.
  - martindbp 4y ago
    It's not social media, it's the internet. Whether on Facebook or reddit or Twitter, you can find a group of people who reinforce whatever bad ideas you have. This creates echo chambers wherever you go. If you think the world is flat or run by the illuminati you can find 10000 people to reinforce that belief. But it's also great to be able to find communities for whatever niche hobby you might have , and it's spreading real knowledge faster than ever in history.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Social media is just a tool for political atomization. People were already angry on AM radio and cable "news" channels. Gerrymandering works on political maps and demographics - politicians have figured that by boxing voters into bins and away from the center, they can have their votes forever.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
      Right. And social media capitalizes on that behavior and amplifies it significantly.
paxys 4y ago
I agree with your overall point, that Facebook employees have been very well taken care of, but: > There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  When your CEO's most famous quote is "They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks," you shouldn't be surprised what happens when you trust him.
- carstenhag 4y ago
  The beginning of covid is 2.5 years ago. I don't see how you can today say that he lied.
cletus 4y ago
Ex-Facebooker here too, also during that time. Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time. But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold: 1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively); 2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem. This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does. But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse. But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks). So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
- jimmySixDOF 4y ago
  >But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. Less true today than yesterday. Less true tomorrow than today. Rinse. Repeat.

musicale 4y ago

I may dislike Facebook, but this is great! Kudos to Zuck for doing the right thing for his employees.

fatnoah 4y ago

> I worked at Facebook when covid first hit Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.

antipaul 4y ago

My Facebook interview process was not only more professional, objective, and relevant than any other, it was also actually enjoyable, as I said elsewhere. I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.

tomerbd 4y ago

amazing and imagine if this was not just a common cold

sytelus 4y ago

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.

iepathos 4y ago
"Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees." Minor nit, the unparalleled part doesn't hold true here. Meta has about 600 open source projects which is nice, but Google has had over 8,000 open source projects. Meta is nowhere near Google's level of open source community support for the number of employees proportionally. Google has about twice as many employees but over 13 times the amount of open source projects.
- ignaloidas 4y ago
  Considering that most of Google's open source projects are of the "throw over the wall" kind, where they don't really care about the wider community, when most of Meta's projects (that I've seen) are interacting with and creating communities, it's not really comparable. TLDR: by KLOC Google might have more, but arguably Meta's have more impact.
guhcampos 4y ago
I do not think he is evil, just really disconnected from reality, which in all honesty most C-Levels are. From his statement it sounds like he really believed people would accept the pandemic’s restrictions as a “new normal” and this would leap-frog humanity into the virtual world for good. I am a highly cynical and pessimistic person and even I knew this wasn’t happening. People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Our generation, it turns out, is still very human centric and we are still ultimately social beings, not just social minds. Maybe kids born into YouTube, who are now coming of age, will be different, yet I still would not bet 11 thousand lives on it.
- landemva 4y ago
  > People around the World were literally risking their lives and their loved ones for a little physical connection. Other people kept working their blue collar jobs at mines and oil pads as if nothing had happened. Once I was on the mine sites, there was no indication of anything different. No masks or any other BS. My 'rona experience was totally different than the wfh keyboard careers.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> If it were just about the money Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.

dunkmaster 4y ago
Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that it is about money in the linked article: "Fundamentally, we’re making all these changes for two reasons: our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of this year, and we want to make sure we’re operating efficiently across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs. "
- mathverse 4y ago
  It is about trimming the fat mainly. Meta is still absolutely a money printing machine.
  - Gene_Parmesan 4y ago
    In fact, this is one of those truisms about the "down" side of the classical business cycle - that recessions partly function as an excuse to cut inefficiencies. How accurate this truism is, I don't know.
    - tibbon 4y ago
      Proof is that Meta stock is up today. I don't like this system of value, but it's what we've got.
      - trey-jones 4y ago
        Today's price action is rarely a reflection of today's news.
  - groos 4y ago
    "trimming the fat" - this is such an unfortunate phrase. In evolutionary terms, fat is what let species survive lean periods.

adam_arthur 4y ago

It’s easy to be generous when times are good and your equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals

AbrahamParangi 4y ago
And yet, many are still not generous when times are good.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Many were. And now that their stocks are down 90%, they aren’t
phonebucket 4y ago
> equity is significantly overvalued relative to fundamentals Which fundamentals? The $117.9 billion in revenue and $39.4 billion of net profit in 2021 [1]? The price to earnings ratio of 9.22, which is far lower than the NASDAQ average of around 28.0 [2]? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-revenue-and-net-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-... [2] https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio https://ycharts.com/companies/NDAQ/pe_ratio
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Those stats are for now, not then. Good try though And they are vaporizing all of their FCF by reinvesting into the metaverse. Or were until the stock continued to collapse. It’s fair value here if you assume the metaverse is actually something they can monetize in a big way. Too far off for most investors

jiscariot 4y ago

princevegeta89 4y ago

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

kraf 4y ago
You can't be serious. I think it's rare for a company to treat developers poorly but that's beside the point. Didn't he lie to congress, waste tens of millions of dollars on legal defense for himself and repeatedly turn a blind eye to human trafficking, voter manipulation, the spread of hate and division, genocide and more? He swept studies under the rug that show that his platforms directly led to increases in teenage suicides. This man is not a good guy just because you feel he's nice to some people. People he depends on at that.
asdfman123 4y ago
People are multifaceted. I'm sure he is good to his employees, like people are describing, but that ain't it. He's repeatedly betrayed user trust, and eventually what goes around comes around.
- phone8675309 4y ago
  Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks.
  - cookie_monsta 4y ago
    I'm so glad I never said anything stupid when I was 19
    - phone8675309 4y ago
      I've yet to see any evidence that his attitude has changed on this issue.

actually_a_dog 4y ago

racl101 4y ago

That's good to hear about Mark as opposed to just the bad stuff.

donretag 4y ago

I worked at Ticketmaster when covid first hit. Since the beginning, management has always been positive and re-iterating that the cash reserves are substantial and the company can endure the loss of revenue. Then the first layoff hit. Same re-iteration. We are good. Then came the second layoff.

cachvico 4y ago
Curious - what's the vibe like at Ticketmaster when ticket fees comes up?
lupire 4y ago
The company is fine. The employees are not. Anyway, you don't join Ticketmaster for anything approaching morality. Snakes eat snakes.
lazyasciiart 4y ago
Salesforce announced their largest profits ever the same week they announced their first layoffs ever, I believe. The company, as they said, was in great shape.

tomcam 4y ago

Not normally a fan of the man, so this is very nice to hear.

dbg31415 4y ago

Hold up. You know they got money from the government not to lay people off, right?

syntaxing 4y ago
As in a PPP loan? I haven’t found this in public record, any source I can reference?

j0ba 4y ago

I'm pretty sure he didn't lose a single one of his billions paying them, but good on him anyways. He definitely didn't have to do it.

bergenty 4y ago

infecto 4y ago
Same boat as you. I understand the privacy concerns and the fear that Facebook is changing society for the worse, all of this is worth discussing but I don't see it as an evil company trying to actively ruin people. Truly excited to see how far they can push VR and AI.
JohnAaronNelson 4y ago
Facebook (and social media in general) has made the world a more divided place full of sadder and angrier people. He runs a company that optimizes for that scenario while accruing unimaginable sums of capital, and he doubled down with Meta. Hmm I wonder why some people are not fans.
- martindbp 4y ago
  It's not social media, it's the internet. Whether on Facebook or reddit or Twitter, you can find a group of people who reinforce whatever bad ideas you have. This creates echo chambers wherever you go. If you think the world is flat or run by the illuminati you can find 10000 people to reinforce that belief. But it's also great to be able to find communities for whatever niche hobby you might have , and it's spreading real knowledge faster than ever in history.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  Social media is just a tool for political atomization. People were already angry on AM radio and cable "news" channels. Gerrymandering works on political maps and demographics - politicians have figured that by boxing voters into bins and away from the center, they can have their votes forever.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    Right. And social media capitalizes on that behavior and amplifies it significantly.

paxys 4y ago

I agree with your overall point, that Facebook employees have been very well taken care of, but: > There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
When your CEO's most famous quote is "They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks," you shouldn't be surprised what happens when you trust him.
carstenhag 4y ago
The beginning of covid is 2.5 years ago. I don't see how you can today say that he lied.

cletus 4y ago

Ex-Facebooker here too, also during that time. Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time. But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold: 1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively); 2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem. This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does. But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse. But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks). So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.

jimmySixDOF 4y ago
>But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. Less true today than yesterday. Less true tomorrow than today. Rinse. Repeat.