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No shit Sherlock. If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to co

No shit Sherlock. If FAANG companies lay-off smart people expert at the latest technologies and give them a comfortable severance, some of them are bound to come up with smart startups. Some are going to hurt the incumbents eventually. The BigCos shot themself in foot by doing these mimetic mass firings.

mjr00 4y ago
I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke." FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.
- screwturner68 4y ago
  I just think the FAANGs got a little drunk on profits and hiring during covid. Now that things are normalizing they realized that they hired too many people and they are chopping heads. To me I just don't see the big deal, tech does mass purges every few years and for the most part everyone lands on their feet and the industry expands even more. Giving a few thousand really smart 20-somethings six months salary and sending them on their way is going to create hundreds of startups and passion projects and a couple of those projects might actually have some value (outside of SV).
- dumbotron 4y ago
  It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
  - max_hammer 4y ago
    TikTok is also planning layoff in thousands https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
    - randomdata 4y ago
      If you buy into the premise that Meta was holding talent just so that other companies couldn't hire them, no longer is, and ByteDance has since picked them up then it stands to reason that ByteDance would be ready to shed the no-so-talented stand-ins they were using previously.
gcheong 4y ago
Or maybe they just spawned a bunch of companies that they will eventually have the pick of to acquire when they decide they need to do "something" with their cash hoards and the founders are looking for a payout.
runamok 4y ago
I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.

mjr00 4y ago

I don't know if it was "shot themselves in the foot" so much as "the unsustainable thing they were doing to prevent potential competition finally broke." FAANG's talent acquisition strategy has always been as much about preventing things from being built externally as it was building things internally. Problem is, there's only so long you can funnel all of your 500k/year engineers into revenue-negative wastes of time like Stadia, Alexa or Diem. In this case, the profitable units like cloud and ads can no longer subsidize those units made primarily to employ people in a way that prevents them from working on legitimate competitors to their actual, profitable business units.

screwturner68 4y ago
I just think the FAANGs got a little drunk on profits and hiring during covid. Now that things are normalizing they realized that they hired too many people and they are chopping heads. To me I just don't see the big deal, tech does mass purges every few years and for the most part everyone lands on their feet and the industry expands even more. Giving a few thousand really smart 20-somethings six months salary and sending them on their way is going to create hundreds of startups and passion projects and a couple of those projects might actually have some value (outside of SV).
dumbotron 4y ago
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. I know ByteDance has been slurping up some Meta talent, and you don't want someone you lay off to build the company that eventually kills you.
- max_hammer 4y ago
  TikTok is also planning layoff in thousands https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
  - randomdata 4y ago
    If you buy into the premise that Meta was holding talent just so that other companies couldn't hire them, no longer is, and ByteDance has since picked them up then it stands to reason that ByteDance would be ready to shed the no-so-talented stand-ins they were using previously.

gcheong 4y ago

Or maybe they just spawned a bunch of companies that they will eventually have the pick of to acquire when they decide they need to do "something" with their cash hoards and the founders are looking for a payout.

runamok 4y ago

I am positive faang engineers are very sharp but would they be "expert at the latest technologies"? E.g. an engineer at Google likely has a whole host of bespoke systems vs. a mixture of vendor and open source solutions the rest of companies tend to use. E.g. Borg vs. Kubernetes and the like.