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> 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 happe

> 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
        It's not just hiring. It's also training and ramp-up.
        mejutoco 4y ago
        > How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees?
    - piva00 4y ago
      Of course they are, the issue is that their side-effects aren't easy to track in pure quantitative terms and even less in the short/medium-term. Layoffs affect morale, in R&D you see that directly on engineers' productivity and how product managers start to behave. PMs either get risk-averse (don't rock the boat, don't mess with profit-making schemes) which stifles innovation, or they get afraid on being on the next round of layoffs if they don't make an impact quickly, they start to push teams to deliver into their reactionary mode, catering more for short-term impact rather than long-term strategic value. It's a complete mess that you won't see in pure financial terms, it will have long ripple effects into the company, some companies bounce back, others get crippled by those ripples. Employees that aren't engaged and don't trust their employers won't do their best work, employees motivated by anxiety and fear won't produce their best work. They will produce whatever they need to keep employed, that's not the best thing for a company.
      - kcplate 4y ago
        > Layoffs affect morale This is temporary in my experience. Especially in an organization that emerges from layoffs with better financial footing in an growing industry. Morale doesn’t bounce back when the survivors feel that the industry or company is dying. I doubt Meta and social media is going away anytime soon.
        piva00 4y ago
        The morale effect is temporary, the ripple effects of it, in my experience, linger for a very long time. That was my point, those are harder to visualise, quantify, but if you live the day-to-day in R&D/operations you see how people react to it over time. The analogy used in some layoffs discussions of cutting off a limb is fitting here too, your body can still perform some functions but some skills are harder to perform, some movements aren't possible or are very impaired, etc. You are still alive but you aren't the same anymore, for a company it can create really weird side-effects like some examples I brought up on the previous comment.
        kcplate 4y ago
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Yes. The figure of merit is profit, not how nice you are to your new hires.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      You know, back in the golden ages, employers had actual relationships with their employees and the communities they served both as a provider of goods and a provider of employment. That was the time when the economy actually worked for the people.
      - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        I don’t think this golden age ever existed exempt in your imagination. Have you seen working conditions in the 1800s?
      - greedo 4y ago
        Workers had little mobility or options, that's why they stuck around forever (that and pensions).
    - santoshalper 4y ago
      I'm not going to bother engaging with you from the perspective of morality and ethics, since it seems unlikely that would resonate with you. Instead, I will point out how wrong you are purely from a financial lens. The goal of a CEO of any company is to generate long term shareholder value - eg. to make the company more valuable than they found it. Mark Zuckerberg has been the only CEO that Facebook has ever known, and obviously he has created a lot of shareholder value during his tenure. On the other hand, Facebook has also lost about half of its value in the last year or so. A dropping valuation is typically a lagging indicator of a major strategic blunder or disruption. The market is essentially saying that he has done a rather poor job for the past 2-3 years and the outlook of investors is diminished accordingly. And yes, hiring a ton of people and then having to lay them off in a short time frame is a huge part of this. In a tech company, profits today are the result of long term execution of strategies and represent a return on capital investment. A designer or engineer hired today is not going to deliver much that will create revenue or profit this year. There is an old axiom in tech companies - if you want a little profit today, hire a sales exec. If you want a lot of profit in three years, hire an engineer. Bulking up your technology team only to have to skinny it down later is a massive strategic and employee distraction and is absolutely a sign of mismanagement.
  - davidw 4y ago
    This is why they call people 'resources' rather than people.
- 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.

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
      It's not just hiring. It's also training and ramp-up.
      - mejutoco 4y ago
        > How many thousands of hours were spent recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training those employees?
  - piva00 4y ago
    Of course they are, the issue is that their side-effects aren't easy to track in pure quantitative terms and even less in the short/medium-term. Layoffs affect morale, in R&D you see that directly on engineers' productivity and how product managers start to behave. PMs either get risk-averse (don't rock the boat, don't mess with profit-making schemes) which stifles innovation, or they get afraid on being on the next round of layoffs if they don't make an impact quickly, they start to push teams to deliver into their reactionary mode, catering more for short-term impact rather than long-term strategic value. It's a complete mess that you won't see in pure financial terms, it will have long ripple effects into the company, some companies bounce back, others get crippled by those ripples. Employees that aren't engaged and don't trust their employers won't do their best work, employees motivated by anxiety and fear won't produce their best work. They will produce whatever they need to keep employed, that's not the best thing for a company.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      > Layoffs affect morale This is temporary in my experience. Especially in an organization that emerges from layoffs with better financial footing in an growing industry. Morale doesn’t bounce back when the survivors feel that the industry or company is dying. I doubt Meta and social media is going away anytime soon.
      - piva00 4y ago
        The morale effect is temporary, the ripple effects of it, in my experience, linger for a very long time. That was my point, those are harder to visualise, quantify, but if you live the day-to-day in R&D/operations you see how people react to it over time. The analogy used in some layoffs discussions of cutting off a limb is fitting here too, your body can still perform some functions but some skills are harder to perform, some movements aren't possible or are very impaired, etc. You are still alive but you aren't the same anymore, for a company it can create really weird side-effects like some examples I brought up on the previous comment.
        kcplate 4y ago
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Yes. The figure of merit is profit, not how nice you are to your new hires.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    You know, back in the golden ages, employers had actual relationships with their employees and the communities they served both as a provider of goods and a provider of employment. That was the time when the economy actually worked for the people.
    - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
      I don’t think this golden age ever existed exempt in your imagination. Have you seen working conditions in the 1800s?
    - greedo 4y ago
      Workers had little mobility or options, that's why they stuck around forever (that and pensions).
  - santoshalper 4y ago
    I'm not going to bother engaging with you from the perspective of morality and ethics, since it seems unlikely that would resonate with you. Instead, I will point out how wrong you are purely from a financial lens. The goal of a CEO of any company is to generate long term shareholder value - eg. to make the company more valuable than they found it. Mark Zuckerberg has been the only CEO that Facebook has ever known, and obviously he has created a lot of shareholder value during his tenure. On the other hand, Facebook has also lost about half of its value in the last year or so. A dropping valuation is typically a lagging indicator of a major strategic blunder or disruption. The market is essentially saying that he has done a rather poor job for the past 2-3 years and the outlook of investors is diminished accordingly. And yes, hiring a ton of people and then having to lay them off in a short time frame is a huge part of this. In a tech company, profits today are the result of long term execution of strategies and represent a return on capital investment. A designer or engineer hired today is not going to deliver much that will create revenue or profit this year. There is an old axiom in tech companies - if you want a little profit today, hire a sales exec. If you want a lot of profit in three years, hire an engineer. Bulking up your technology team only to have to skinny it down later is a massive strategic and employee distraction and is absolutely a sign of mismanagement.
- davidw 4y ago
  This is why they call people 'resources' rather than people.
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.