5 ms·
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
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt'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 agoTikTok is also planning layoff in thousands https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34912150
- randomdata 4y agoIf 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.