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Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big rou

Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. Employees will be sitting around waiting for the next round of cuts to happen, and many people do not like operating in such an unstable environment and will seek more stable employment. If layoffs are necessary, you tell the staff why and the correction you need to make, and then you set out to make the cuts big enough so that you can go at least a year without having to do another round. The way Meta is operating is if they don't know anything beyond two feet in front of them.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. Not to be ultra cynical but why waste effort calling this out? What accountability is going to happen? They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money. Is that not more or less how this is playing out?
- zpeti 4y ago
  > don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever I don’t think that follows. You want to overhire to make extra profits. Then just downsize when it’s over. Which is almost exactly what all tech companies are doing now.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    so in that case, not a failure by leadership whatsoever, it’s actually them doing exactly what they should?
    - johngladtj 4y ago
      Exactly. Layoffs aren't a bad thing.
      - fredoliveira 4y ago
        > Layoffs aren't a bad thing. This very much depends on whose perspective you're looking at them from. They are very much a bad thing for all the workers getting let go.
        zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        Probably not all of them. I know a few people happy to get a paid year off
        hello_moto 4y ago
        Not in this bad econ timeframe
      - santoshalper 4y ago
        I guess if you run a warehouse that's true, but Facebook is a tech company. How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees? How much institutional knowledge left with them? How many decisions took longer to make because managers were focused on picking who got laid off instead of focusing on the work? How many managers became hyper-cautious with their planning because they don't know how many employees they will have? How many hours were lost to employees worrying about job security and prospecting for a new job instead of worrying about solving business problems? How many projects got started because there were ample resources that now have to be shut down abruptly? Large scale hiring and firing in technology is incredibly expensive and not to be taken lightly. Facebook has wasted a huge amount of time, focus, and energy on this and their leadership should absolutely be accountable to shareholders.
        JAlexoid 4y ago
  - KMag 4y ago
    Wouldn't you prefer to hire contractors to fill short-term demand and transition them to full employees if the demand ends up being more robust than expected?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Except that: - I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor and - I'm sure the layoffs are not purely LIFO anyway.
      - polygamous_bat 4y ago
        > I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor. Speaking for myself, personally, if I were to join a role as a contractor basis rather than a full timer, I would expect extra compensation to justify the added risk of being laid off whenever. Hiring people by telling them they're full time, and then laying them off and treating them like contractors, is a breach of faith by management by hiding the risk factor of "demand after COVID will return to normal level" behind pretty promises. They made some extra profit by underpaying the nominally full time workers who were left carrying the extra risk of losing job, and it's showing now.
        JAlexoid 4y ago
        Coming to US from Europe - in US employees are contractors(hi at will employment), actual contractors are just people who are smart enough to know that.
        mrtranscendence 4y ago
        Well, contractors don't get severance when their contract ends, whereas layoffs for employees are typically attended by some small payout. That's not much but it's not nothing. Contractors also have to deal with their own taxes and buy their own insurance (for worse rates). Of course, if I were a contractor I could probably get double my current salary ... but I'd still rather be an employee, even in the face of at-will employment. Particularly given that my employer is doing great and didn't over-hire during COVID.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Hum... How actually is it supposed to work? Did those extra people jump into productivity immediately during the short term boom instead of taking time to learn the business and fit in, like developers always need? By what magic did all the large US companies manage to do that? The boom itself lasted for about an year. It's enough time to get some of those people to contribute positively. It's not even close to enough time to compensate for the drag of increasing your headcount by 30%. And the most competitive period was the first few months, where new people were all drag. Nope, I do conclude that they expected the boom to stay forever. They could have expected things to stop growing that quickly, but they clearly didn't expect a contraction. To be fair, none of them are on the area of economical forecasting. And the crazy decisions of the US monetary policy isn't something that one could expect people to just guess. But the sheer amount of overreaction from those companies on both situations isn't something to take lightly. That's clear display of incompetency.
- gretch 4y ago
  > They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money. Is that not more or less how this is playing out? You forgot the part where right before he did all of that, he made Facebook, one of the biggest money printing machines on the planet of its time. Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective).
  - bink 4y ago
    > Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective). So were many of the employees who were and will be laid off. Isn't business more about "what have you done for me lately"?
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Allow Facebook to stagnate while Zuck focuses on the Metaverse.
  - dumbotron 4y ago
    My read was that as long as the money printing machine is running, Zuck can do whatever random side project he wants. Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck.
    - otoburb 4y ago
      >>Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck. This might apply to other companies that don't have founder-majority ownership, but that's not the case with Meta because Zuck still retains control with over 50% voting power.[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-supervoting-stock-resistance-2022-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
  - 4y ago
- science4sail 4y ago
  Well, they still do have to shed some crocodile tears and make a post claiming that they take "full responsibility". Perhaps the latter could be outsourced to ChatGPT though.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I'd be surprised if most of those aren't drafted by assistants anyway.
- jfoutz 4y ago
  Let's set aside that it's Meta for a moment. Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy. Think Chrysler in the 70's pre Iacocca. They face troubles that leadership is incapable of handling. Companies like that get sold and broken out for parts. Or, some have major shakeups with leadership and come back as something else. Meta, of course, is different. Leadership made a few mistakes, sure, but they're more than ready to cope with changes to social media in the face of tools like ChatGPT available to everyone. Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers. And you can be sure they're innovating behind the scenes. Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.
  - reaperducer 4y ago
    Meta, of course, is different. Is it, really? All the "tech innovation" and "too big to fail" talk was said about Chrysler, too. Lots of people look at Meta through HN-tinted glasses. It's still just a company, like any other.
  - Mistletoe 4y ago
    For the whole second paragraph citations are sorely needed. This reads like something you would read on a nervous META stockholder forum.
    - runamok 4y ago
      I agree with you but I'd imagine new tech like chatgpt won't interject in a user's interactions with facebook and instagram as it does with google where I ask my AI for something vs. search for it in google.
      - Mistletoe 4y ago
        How will chatgpt make money if it doesn’t?
        runamok 4y ago
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > They got hired for leadership roles. Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Meta, and owns 55% of the voting shares.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  If their compensations are linked to Meta results and stock prices, they are going to pay for that. You can pass off one round of layoff as having to make a tough decision after overhiring when things looked different. Having to do a second one doesn't look good however. It's basically admitting that you either botched the first one or just realised things are significantly worse than you thought neither of which are particularly appealing to investors.
- deeviant 4y ago
  This is a forum that tends to attract entrepreneurs. People that hope to grow something small into something big and learn the lessons that can take them through that journey. So it seems to me, it's a perfectly reasonable point out failures of business leadership that result in worse business performance, as they see it.
- f6v 4y ago
  > What accountability is going to happen? Women and blacks couldn’t vote back in the day. It’s in the realm of possibility that the society will change and demand leadership accountability.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Zuck wasn't hired, he founded the company and structured it such that he would always have a majority of voting rights and control over it. It is very, very difficult to remove him unwillingly. If he wants to bet the entire farm on metaverse and sink the company, ruin shareholder value, layoff everyone, etc. then he can and seemingly will do it. At some point there will probably be moves from hedge funds and big share holders to sue him for breach of fiduciary responsibility. It will be interesting to see how he responds.
- awill 4y ago
  not to be cynical. But presumably many CEOs knew the COVID demands wouldn't last forever, and overhired anyway. I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity? No, they took short-term gains deliberately, not caring about the future.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity? No. But there was probably a reasonable bet that a lot of people (at least those in comfortable houses) would decide that doing the virtual exercise thing at home really did beat going out to the gym. One of the things we're seeing right now is that with some exceptions (there's generally more flexibility about going into the office every day than there used to be) the "new normal" looks a lot more like the "old normal" than a lot of people thought it would.
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part. Thousands of people are losing their livelihoods and the image of Meta should reflect that. What do you mean calling this out has no effect?
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    > It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part. There are other comments here that say this is 100% wrong. It's not a failure at all. They did exactly what they should have/continue to do exactly what they should be doing. In COVID, it was time to capitalize on growth. In 5.25% Fed Funds rate time, it's time to shrink. Leadership is executing/has executed both of those plans. > What do you mean calling this out has no effect? What's going to change? You and I and 10,000 people online calling out some random entity we summarize as "leadership" isn't going to change anything going forward. Why waste the energy being mad at random news online that we both sought out/choose to reply to? Miserable way to walk around life.
    - pwthornton 4y ago
      But did Meta capture anything additional under low interest rates or did they blow billions on Metaverse R&D that never panned out? I heard from someone hired at Google last year that they basically had no work to do. Google kept staffing up, but they didn’t have plans and programs for a lot of these new hires to work on. What were they capturing exactly?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Zuck didn’t get hired. He owns a controlling interest in the company.
asow92 4y ago
Agreed with just one comment: > The way Meta is operating is if they don't know anything beyond two feet in front of them. Have they had to up until now? Some of these social media companies have had money printer business models for their whole existence, and now they actually have to consider long-term consequences of their actions.
- ergocoder 4y ago
  Zuck refused to sell at 1b because he planned to build a 100b company. If that is not long term thinking, I don't know what is.
  - asow92 4y ago
    It's one thing to grow on the ride up, and now we're on the ride down. It takes a different kind of long-term thinking.
    - ergocoder 4y ago
      So, they do have long term thinking, just not the kind that you want it to be? You should have clarified your comment that you want long-term thinking that makes the stock goes up while all of your peer stocks are going down i.e. market crash. Cool, Zuck definitely isn't that good lmao.
      - asow92 4y ago
        I don't care what they do. I'm just observing that they and others over leveraged themselves and now need to lay people off because of market conditions.
  - dumbotron 4y ago
    It's also survivorship bias.
    - ergocoder 4y ago
dumbotron 4y ago
> Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. In 2008, this was more understandable. The economy was in a quick decline, and it was hard to know where things would bottom. Right now, things don't look all that different from their first round in November. You mentioned trust with employees, but for investors, they should look at this, combined with leadership churn, and know something's not right. There's a CEO who is/was distracted by his pet metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency, who wasn't paying attention to TikTok or thinking critically about post-pandemic scenarios. I assume Sheryl Sandberg over leadership disagreements, but being the pro she is, she's kept her mouth shut about it.
- nr2x 4y ago
  Yes, so professional to have company staff plan your wedding
  - telotortium 4y ago
    Did that ever reach a conclusion? All I can find are articles from last year (https://archive.ph/YaKxL https://archive.ph/YaKxL). Also, planning a wedding would not be out of the job description of something like an executive assistant - their whole point is to do busywork and personal-life logistics so that the executive focuses more fully on their work.
- paganel 4y ago
  > metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency Crypto is of course 95% all a scam, but as crazy as it may look from the outside I think Zuckerberg was right on that one. He didn't want to compete against the likes of all the crypto-bros and the other crypto scammers, there were no hundreds-of-billions to be made out of that, he wanted to compete against governments and central banks by actually instituting a "global" e-currency. That's why a lot of central bankers and governments reacted immediately to Facebook's announcement, they knew what was at stake. If anyone could have technically accomplished that, on the private/non-government side, that was Facebook (or maybe Amazon, possibly Google). Of course many central banks and governments now want to implement the same "global" e-currency project that they were very quick to deny to Zuckerberg.
addHoax 4y ago
The failure of leadership in society continuing to conjure a fake world of finance and on rails career paths in alignment with the normalized production routines coming out of world wars. A normalized post war economic society is what’s enabled the fiat currency sleight of hand and environment destabilizing consumerism. The reality is “American society” has created this situation. It’s isn’t just on Zuckerberg, the Fed, Congress, etc. Society as a whole has been a shit leader and steward of its own agency, deciding the future does not matter then finding itself in these “oh shit; we never saw that coming” moments. Zuckerberg is a hostage to the pitchfork wielding billions that also exist just like you or I. What is his play? Stand at a mic and say “hey btw this is all gibberish and you’re all fucking dumb for buying it?” He’s a product of society.
devmunchies 4y ago
I would think that all of the middle managers have an incentive to balloon the company because it gives them more status. So the top leaders are fed a bad hiring strategy from their lieutenants. It is ultimately the C-Suites responsibility to keep middle managers in line but it would be difficult to push back on the army of middle managers in a bull market when they could just leave if they don't get their "career growth". The cynic in me wonders if the black pill is that these boom/bust cycles in employment are mostly unavoidable. Maybe it does make more sense to balloon during a boom, grow more than you need like a chipmunk hoarding acorns. Better to have the talent and not need it than to need it and not have it.
somsak2 4y ago
> The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. do you have a source for the second sentence?
- kamaal 4y ago
  >>But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. This is one is true. Routine never ending layoffs dent morale. People can never be sure if they are next, hence they don't start working on anything new. Everything goes into maintenance mode. Everybody is interviewing all the time. Eventual erosion of enthusiasm, morale and an overall doom+gloom situation means your already crappy situation gets more crappier. If you have to absolutely do it, do it once and be done with it.
mountainriver 4y ago
Research also shows that any layoffs negatively effect the performance of the company over the long term. They bill it as “dropping the low performers” but in my experience, that’s rarely what actually happens.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. Not to be ultra cynical but why waste effort calling this out? What accountability is going to happen? They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money. Is that not more or less how this is playing out?

zpeti 4y ago
> don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever I don’t think that follows. You want to overhire to make extra profits. Then just downsize when it’s over. Which is almost exactly what all tech companies are doing now.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  so in that case, not a failure by leadership whatsoever, it’s actually them doing exactly what they should?
  - johngladtj 4y ago
    Exactly. Layoffs aren't a bad thing.
    - fredoliveira 4y ago
      > Layoffs aren't a bad thing. This very much depends on whose perspective you're looking at them from. They are very much a bad thing for all the workers getting let go.
      - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        Probably not all of them. I know a few people happy to get a paid year off
        hello_moto 4y ago
        Not in this bad econ timeframe
    - santoshalper 4y ago
      I guess if you run a warehouse that's true, but Facebook is a tech company. How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees? How much institutional knowledge left with them? How many decisions took longer to make because managers were focused on picking who got laid off instead of focusing on the work? How many managers became hyper-cautious with their planning because they don't know how many employees they will have? How many hours were lost to employees worrying about job security and prospecting for a new job instead of worrying about solving business problems? How many projects got started because there were ample resources that now have to be shut down abruptly? Large scale hiring and firing in technology is incredibly expensive and not to be taken lightly. Facebook has wasted a huge amount of time, focus, and energy on this and their leadership should absolutely be accountable to shareholders.
      - JAlexoid 4y ago
- KMag 4y ago
  Wouldn't you prefer to hire contractors to fill short-term demand and transition them to full employees if the demand ends up being more robust than expected?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Except that: - I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor and - I'm sure the layoffs are not purely LIFO anyway.
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > I'm guessing many of the full-time people they hired wouldn't have taken an offer as a contractor. Speaking for myself, personally, if I were to join a role as a contractor basis rather than a full timer, I would expect extra compensation to justify the added risk of being laid off whenever. Hiring people by telling them they're full time, and then laying them off and treating them like contractors, is a breach of faith by management by hiding the risk factor of "demand after COVID will return to normal level" behind pretty promises. They made some extra profit by underpaying the nominally full time workers who were left carrying the extra risk of losing job, and it's showing now.
      - JAlexoid 4y ago
        Coming to US from Europe - in US employees are contractors(hi at will employment), actual contractors are just people who are smart enough to know that.
        mrtranscendence 4y ago
        Well, contractors don't get severance when their contract ends, whereas layoffs for employees are typically attended by some small payout. That's not much but it's not nothing. Contractors also have to deal with their own taxes and buy their own insurance (for worse rates). Of course, if I were a contractor I could probably get double my current salary ... but I'd still rather be an employee, even in the face of at-will employment. Particularly given that my employer is doing great and didn't over-hire during COVID.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Hum... How actually is it supposed to work? Did those extra people jump into productivity immediately during the short term boom instead of taking time to learn the business and fit in, like developers always need? By what magic did all the large US companies manage to do that? The boom itself lasted for about an year. It's enough time to get some of those people to contribute positively. It's not even close to enough time to compensate for the drag of increasing your headcount by 30%. And the most competitive period was the first few months, where new people were all drag. Nope, I do conclude that they expected the boom to stay forever. They could have expected things to stop growing that quickly, but they clearly didn't expect a contraction. To be fair, none of them are on the area of economical forecasting. And the crazy decisions of the US monetary policy isn't something that one could expect people to just guess. But the sheer amount of overreaction from those companies on both situations isn't something to take lightly. That's clear display of incompetency.
gretch 4y ago
> They got hired for leadership roles. They make big leadership money total compensation. Then, they make business 101 mistakes (don't over hire during COVID under the expectation that the escalated demand will remain permanently forever), then nothing happens to them and they continue making big money. Is that not more or less how this is playing out? You forgot the part where right before he did all of that, he made Facebook, one of the biggest money printing machines on the planet of its time. Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective).
- bink 4y ago
  > Even after all the mistakes, Zuck is still vastly net positive (from a business perspective). So were many of the employees who were and will be laid off. Isn't business more about "what have you done for me lately"?
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    Allow Facebook to stagnate while Zuck focuses on the Metaverse.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  My read was that as long as the money printing machine is running, Zuck can do whatever random side project he wants. Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck.
  - otoburb 4y ago
    >>Once it starts struggling (ad tracking, macro environment), shit gets real, and not just for the company, but also Zuck. This might apply to other companies that don't have founder-majority ownership, but that's not the case with Meta because Zuck still retains control with over 50% voting power.[1] [1] https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-supervoting-stock-resistance-2022-10-27/ https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/zuckerberg-motivates-s...
- 4y ago
science4sail 4y ago
Well, they still do have to shed some crocodile tears and make a post claiming that they take "full responsibility". Perhaps the latter could be outsourced to ChatGPT though.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if most of those aren't drafted by assistants anyway.
jfoutz 4y ago
Let's set aside that it's Meta for a moment. Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy. Think Chrysler in the 70's pre Iacocca. They face troubles that leadership is incapable of handling. Companies like that get sold and broken out for parts. Or, some have major shakeups with leadership and come back as something else. Meta, of course, is different. Leadership made a few mistakes, sure, but they're more than ready to cope with changes to social media in the face of tools like ChatGPT available to everyone. Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers. And you can be sure they're innovating behind the scenes. Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  Meta, of course, is different. Is it, really? All the "tech innovation" and "too big to fail" talk was said about Chrysler, too. Lots of people look at Meta through HN-tinted glasses. It's still just a company, like any other.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  For the whole second paragraph citations are sorely needed. This reads like something you would read on a nervous META stockholder forum.
  - runamok 4y ago
    I agree with you but I'd imagine new tech like chatgpt won't interject in a user's interactions with facebook and instagram as it does with google where I ask my AI for something vs. search for it in google.
    - Mistletoe 4y ago
      How will chatgpt make money if it doesn’t?
      - runamok 4y ago
andsoitis 4y ago
> They got hired for leadership roles. Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Meta, and owns 55% of the voting shares.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
If their compensations are linked to Meta results and stock prices, they are going to pay for that. You can pass off one round of layoff as having to make a tough decision after overhiring when things looked different. Having to do a second one doesn't look good however. It's basically admitting that you either botched the first one or just realised things are significantly worse than you thought neither of which are particularly appealing to investors.
deeviant 4y ago
This is a forum that tends to attract entrepreneurs. People that hope to grow something small into something big and learn the lessons that can take them through that journey. So it seems to me, it's a perfectly reasonable point out failures of business leadership that result in worse business performance, as they see it.
f6v 4y ago
> What accountability is going to happen? Women and blacks couldn’t vote back in the day. It’s in the realm of possibility that the society will change and demand leadership accountability.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
Zuck wasn't hired, he founded the company and structured it such that he would always have a majority of voting rights and control over it. It is very, very difficult to remove him unwillingly. If he wants to bet the entire farm on metaverse and sink the company, ruin shareholder value, layoff everyone, etc. then he can and seemingly will do it. At some point there will probably be moves from hedge funds and big share holders to sue him for breach of fiduciary responsibility. It will be interesting to see how he responds.
awill 4y ago
not to be cynical. But presumably many CEOs knew the COVID demands wouldn't last forever, and overhired anyway. I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity? No, they took short-term gains deliberately, not caring about the future.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >I mean, look at Peleton, did they really think everyone would be locked in their houses for all eternity? No. But there was probably a reasonable bet that a lot of people (at least those in comfortable houses) would decide that doing the virtual exercise thing at home really did beat going out to the gym. One of the things we're seeing right now is that with some exceptions (there's generally more flexibility about going into the office every day than there used to be) the "new normal" looks a lot more like the "old normal" than a lot of people thought it would.
Ancalagon 4y ago
It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part. Thousands of people are losing their livelihoods and the image of Meta should reflect that. What do you mean calling this out has no effect?
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > It deserves to be called out as a massive failure on leadership's part. There are other comments here that say this is 100% wrong. It's not a failure at all. They did exactly what they should have/continue to do exactly what they should be doing. In COVID, it was time to capitalize on growth. In 5.25% Fed Funds rate time, it's time to shrink. Leadership is executing/has executed both of those plans. > What do you mean calling this out has no effect? What's going to change? You and I and 10,000 people online calling out some random entity we summarize as "leadership" isn't going to change anything going forward. Why waste the energy being mad at random news online that we both sought out/choose to reply to? Miserable way to walk around life.
  - pwthornton 4y ago
    But did Meta capture anything additional under low interest rates or did they blow billions on Metaverse R&D that never panned out? I heard from someone hired at Google last year that they basically had no work to do. Google kept staffing up, but they didn’t have plans and programs for a lot of these new hires to work on. What were they capturing exactly?
PaulHoule 4y ago
Zuck didn’t get hired. He owns a controlling interest in the company.

asow92 4y ago

Agreed with just one comment: > The way Meta is operating is if they don't know anything beyond two feet in front of them. Have they had to up until now? Some of these social media companies have had money printer business models for their whole existence, and now they actually have to consider long-term consequences of their actions.

ergocoder 4y ago
Zuck refused to sell at 1b because he planned to build a 100b company. If that is not long term thinking, I don't know what is.
- asow92 4y ago
  It's one thing to grow on the ride up, and now we're on the ride down. It takes a different kind of long-term thinking.
  - ergocoder 4y ago
    So, they do have long term thinking, just not the kind that you want it to be? You should have clarified your comment that you want long-term thinking that makes the stock goes up while all of your peer stocks are going down i.e. market crash. Cool, Zuck definitely isn't that good lmao.
    - asow92 4y ago
      I don't care what they do. I'm just observing that they and others over leveraged themselves and now need to lay people off because of market conditions.
- dumbotron 4y ago
  It's also survivorship bias.
  - ergocoder 4y ago

dumbotron 4y ago

> Honestly, multiple rounds of cuts are a big failure of leadership. In 2008, this was more understandable. The economy was in a quick decline, and it was hard to know where things would bottom. Right now, things don't look all that different from their first round in November. You mentioned trust with employees, but for investors, they should look at this, combined with leadership churn, and know something's not right. There's a CEO who is/was distracted by his pet metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency, who wasn't paying attention to TikTok or thinking critically about post-pandemic scenarios. I assume Sheryl Sandberg over leadership disagreements, but being the pro she is, she's kept her mouth shut about it.

nr2x 4y ago
Yes, so professional to have company staff plan your wedding
- telotortium 4y ago
  Did that ever reach a conclusion? All I can find are articles from last year (https://archive.ph/YaKxL https://archive.ph/YaKxL). Also, planning a wedding would not be out of the job description of something like an executive assistant - their whole point is to do busywork and personal-life logistics so that the executive focuses more fully on their work.
paganel 4y ago
> metaverse project, previously distracted by making a cryptocurrency Crypto is of course 95% all a scam, but as crazy as it may look from the outside I think Zuckerberg was right on that one. He didn't want to compete against the likes of all the crypto-bros and the other crypto scammers, there were no hundreds-of-billions to be made out of that, he wanted to compete against governments and central banks by actually instituting a "global" e-currency. That's why a lot of central bankers and governments reacted immediately to Facebook's announcement, they knew what was at stake. If anyone could have technically accomplished that, on the private/non-government side, that was Facebook (or maybe Amazon, possibly Google). Of course many central banks and governments now want to implement the same "global" e-currency project that they were very quick to deny to Zuckerberg.

addHoax 4y ago

The failure of leadership in society continuing to conjure a fake world of finance and on rails career paths in alignment with the normalized production routines coming out of world wars. A normalized post war economic society is what’s enabled the fiat currency sleight of hand and environment destabilizing consumerism. The reality is “American society” has created this situation. It’s isn’t just on Zuckerberg, the Fed, Congress, etc. Society as a whole has been a shit leader and steward of its own agency, deciding the future does not matter then finding itself in these “oh shit; we never saw that coming” moments. Zuckerberg is a hostage to the pitchfork wielding billions that also exist just like you or I. What is his play? Stand at a mic and say “hey btw this is all gibberish and you’re all fucking dumb for buying it?” He’s a product of society.

devmunchies 4y ago

I would think that all of the middle managers have an incentive to balloon the company because it gives them more status. So the top leaders are fed a bad hiring strategy from their lieutenants. It is ultimately the C-Suites responsibility to keep middle managers in line but it would be difficult to push back on the army of middle managers in a bull market when they could just leave if they don't get their "career growth". The cynic in me wonders if the black pill is that these boom/bust cycles in employment are mostly unavoidable. Maybe it does make more sense to balloon during a boom, grow more than you need like a chipmunk hoarding acorns. Better to have the talent and not need it than to need it and not have it.

somsak2 4y ago

> The research is clear that layoffs negatively affect morale and performance. But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. do you have a source for the second sentence?

kamaal 4y ago
>>But one big round of layoffs has much less impact than a series of smaller ones. This is one is true. Routine never ending layoffs dent morale. People can never be sure if they are next, hence they don't start working on anything new. Everything goes into maintenance mode. Everybody is interviewing all the time. Eventual erosion of enthusiasm, morale and an overall doom+gloom situation means your already crappy situation gets more crappier. If you have to absolutely do it, do it once and be done with it.

mountainriver 4y ago

Research also shows that any layoffs negatively effect the performance of the company over the long term. They bill it as “dropping the low performers” but in my experience, that’s rarely what actually happens.