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Another Round of Layoffs at Meta
- wheresmycraisin 4y agoI wish we had more insight into who these companies are actually laying off. Is Meta letting go of engineers? Data scientists? Pro* managers? Bus drivers? Content moderators?
- ukuina 4y agoFrom the blurb: "Meta is planning another round of layoffs, I can unfortunately confirm. Leadership has been coy both internally and externally about what is coming, but I’m told that the current plan is to announce more cuts in March after last year’s performance bonuses are paid out. Given what I’ve heard about plans to cut certain orgs by double-digit percentages, I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number is somewhere in the ballpark of the last layoff, which was about 11,000 people or 13 percent of the company."
- abudabi123 4y agoTrue talent will find a way to HP's former site now occupied by Tesla's Engineering HQ in Calif. Stay optimist.
- mjfl 4y agoFacebook is copying the blue check thing from Twitter. I wonder if Zuck will also copy firing 75% of the staff.. lol.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- airstrike 4y agoI mean, twitter.com seems to manage to continue running fine with only 25% of staff left. I'm sure others are looking at that and going "hmmm"
- hansvm 4y agoAm I misremembering reading about a major prolonged outage a few days ago?
- seanhunter 4y agoYou aren’t talking about this major prolonged outage two weeks ago https://www.techradar.com/news/live/twitter-outtage-what-happened-when-will-service-be-restored-and-more https://www.techradar.com/news/live/twitter-outtage-what-hap... Or this outage today https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/story/twitter-outage-twitter-down-micro-blogging-site-unable-to-load-posts-2338767-2023-02-23 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/story/twitter-outage-tw... because that one was brief YOu might be talking about this one https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23215529/twitter-down-outage-error-capacity https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/14/23215529/twitter-down-out... …or maybe this one https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/16/twitter_okays_cannabis_ads/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/16/twitter_okays_cannabi... It’s sort of hard to tell because everything’s working so well and is so fine that there are quite a few outages to choose from.
- hinkley 4y agoEach outage will get worse as the skeleton crew burns out. I’m a fan of small focused teams. This ain’t how that happens.
- piva00 4y agoBots are even more insidious than before, I deleted my account and now only use it to follow breaking news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I constantly get errors, videos not loading, glitches on the page. Not sure what you mean "running fine", I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating... It's attrition, it's slowly degrading. It's definitely breaking, in my experience.
- Nextgrid 4y ago> Bots are even more insidious than before Not sure if that's actually caused by the recent changes as opposed to confirmation bias or merely the renewed attention that Twitter recently got. I wouldn't comment on their moderation being better or worse since the acquisition considering they were already at zero as they couldn't even regex-out very obvious crypto scam tweets in reply to high-profile accounts. > I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating Me too, though that has nothing to do with the acquisition and was just as bad as before - something to do with justifying having dozens/hundreds of frontend engineers so they shipped a monster weighing megabytes to display ~300 characters of text.
- htag 4y agoI imagine Meta has a harder time recruiting then their peer companies, because of their reputation and the moral hazard. I wonder how much investment it will take them to get staff levels back to where they are now. It really feels like they are peaking as a company.
- karmasimida 4y agoI guess they will stay with about 50k people with maybe barely modest growth in HC for many years to come.
- hnfong 4y agoMaybe this will be true in the years going forward, but AFAIK even in 2022 they were still considered top tier FAANG to work for among new grads, if only for the fact that compensation is generally somewhat higher than their peers.
- AlphaCharlie 4y agoIt's only higher than other big tech companies because they have so much difficulty hiring new grad. it's what's holding the funnel together, the moment comp drops compared to the others they will lose a ton of candidates.
- htag 4y agoSince ~2016 Meta employment has signaled to me that someone values high compensation above anything else. This view has become so popular that choosing to work at Meta indicates you are fine broadcasting this signal. There might be some exceptions for those working on Oculus, but it's not a blanket exception.
- lordnacho 4y agoI'm not sure that's entirely fair. Whatever you think of the company that's no denying they have interesting problems to work on, such as AI, plus ordinary big tech scaling. Plus you don't know whether a person even had other offers.
- seatac76 4y agoFeels like we are in the midst of a live experiment wherein we find out just how overstaffed tech companies are.
- flashgordon 4y agoor we find out that current gen of tech companies are no longer the innovators and wall st also has stopped buying the story of them being growth companies and wants their money back. Definitely good for the next gen if innovators!
- ulfw 4y agoOr we'll find out how company founders might be great at founding and running a 100 person shop but truly lack vision and managerial skill to run a 100,000 people corporation.
- losvedir 4y agoOne round of layoffs at every company is just coming off the hiring bender of the last few years. But a second... that portends a third... and a general collapse of tech a la the dotcom crash. I had't been too worried yet, despite feeling lucky to have dodged the customary 7% at my company, but this news is starting to make me worry. Hopefully it's just Meta being in a uniquely bad position.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hackernewds 4y agoThe layoffs are nowhere near the level of even appearing in a histogram against the hiring that overwhelmed 2021/22. Where this doomering comes from must be the plain human temptation to glorify misery.
- twelve40 4y agoBoth this hiring-like-there-is-no-tomorrow and, a few short months later, layoffs "because the economy has changed" indicate lack of any sanity in business planning. Sure, most of these people will probably eventually find other jobs, but the randomness of these ups and downs in presumably mature companies is pretty disturbing.
- bmitc 4y agoMy more pessimistic take is that this style of business planning is actually planned, in that companies knew what they were doing was risky but knew they could just layoff people, as they have readily done. It is a plain as day showcase of companies treating employees as their greatest costs and liabilities rather than assets.
- twelve40 4y agoBut in what demented mind do you temporarily hire tens of thousands of extremely expensive and highly skilled workers (to do what?) and then wipe out all those projects in a year? Even if you treat people as completely disposable garbage, it doesn't even make any sense in terms of projects, to urgently come up with projects for 10k+ people then urgently cancel them. Again, these are decades-old, established, money-making companies.
- fnord77 4y agocuts this big would have to be in the california WARN database. 0/10
- nostromo 4y agoTech companies pay more than enough severance to avoid the WARN requirement entirely.
- hackernewds 4y agowrong
- nostromo 4y agoNot wrong. They keep you on payroll briefly as part of severance but you don’t go to work. It’s well known, clueless comments on HN notwithstanding.
- hughesjj 4y agoI thought things still went to the WARN db even if they do extra severance in lieu of maintaining their employment?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jvolkman 4y agoGoogle just kept (is keeping) its laid off employees on the payroll during the WARN period, but cut all other ties. WARN notices went out when layoffs were announced.
- hackernewds 4y agoThat basically is what, and why, severance is provided. The employees stay on payroll and get regular pay during the WARN prior notice period.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoI would not invest in Meta's metaverse future. It feels like Windows Mobile. Meta has the early start, money, captive audience and enthusiasm, but they don't have the hardware/software edge (that Apple coincidentally also has this time around) to really make the idea work. The headsets are not going to revolutionize much running Facebook games on budget Qualcomm SoCs, and Facebook cant buy an Unreal Engine or an M2 Pro overnight.
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- hackernewds 4y agoFacebook can, and still could totally buy Unity. This is something that they've discussed years before the pandemic or metaverse hype. https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1619818349525086208?s=20 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1619818349525086208?s=... From internal emails from Zuck^. Also has a bonus glimpse into their VR/AR strategy
- tapoxi 4y agoThis makes a ton of sense because a lot of Unity's business is in their ad platform, not engine licensing. Horizon Worlds is written in Unity, and it gives them full control over their hardware/software platform. It would do a lot of harm to Unity's relationship with smaller developers though, to Godot's benefit.
- foobiekr 4y agoUnity has already done a lot of harm to Unity's reputation.
- achow 4y agoExcerpt from this 2015 email.. "An innovation brand comes from building tangible new products. Our work in VR/AR is the best example we have. Our core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and AI is not yet tangible... succeeding in VR/AR has the most innovation potential in the next 5-10 years." > AI is not yet tangible Did Meta bet on the wrong horse?
- abledon 4y agoEngineering Managers will also begin to code again [1] [1] https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/1628737303479738368 https://twitter.com/TitterTakeover/status/162873730347973836...
- moomoo11 4y agoThis whole management heavy culture needs to F off. 9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usually awful at understanding business needs too. Get rid of eng managers. Put in a team lead and a few people. If your teams are 20 people or something dumb just fire everyone and start over. You don’t need battalions when the leaders aren’t even soldiers. Just have fire teams where everyone is a soldier that reports to their team lead. These teams report to a director who is the battalion commander. Managers should be rare. And they should be actually good at their job. People don’t quit jobs they quit shitty terrible managers.
- zactato 4y agoWho hurt you?
- lytedev 4y agoI'm gonna go out on a limb here: an engineering manager.
- moomoo11 4y agoI’ve quit jobs before over awful managers. Nobody hurt me because for me at least, I’ve gotten every job I’ve applied to. For example I got bored of my last company and my manager, applied to four companies and got each job, then just picked the one that paid most. I don’t like dealing with incompetent people. It’s that simple. I’m not a bottom feeder lmao.
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- stephc_int13 4y agoThe inside story of this whole metaverse fiasco must be interesting.
- hackernewds 4y agoHas anyone questioned why we should trust this self-promotional post (links to their newsletter) that provides no other detail?
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoNo real reason to trust it. They don’t cite any sources.
- btheshoe 4y agogenerally, this is a reputation thing
- Rastonbury 4y agoCutting twice is terrible for morale, anyone who survived the first is now worried, wondering when it's going to stop. I doubt much has materially changed since the first round, it was only a handful of months ago. Cut hard once, it won't be perfect, you can starting hiring again like BAU priority places that are breaking. Now this is drawn out 6 months of employees waiting for the sword to fall
- signa11 4y agocsco seems to have used that 'strategy' when the layoffs first hit circa around 2000's or thereabouts.
- jdlyga 4y agoIt's interesting how Facebook's target audience is nearing retirement age, but Meta is going full steam ahead with futuristic VR headset technology. It seems like a real clash of ideas, but I could see this working out well to connect people especially older people who are retired, similar to the Black Mirror episode San Junipero (a surprisingly optimistic and happy episode). The problem is Meta's headsets have a very core-gamer focused audience left over from the Oculus days, though they've started to pivot away from this in recent years. It's nowhere near ready for a mainstream audience to use for social connections. The headsets are too bulky, the interface is too complicated, and the apps require too much setup, character creation, and are just too involved. Nothing right now passes the grandma test.
- pavlov 4y agoMeta has a huge global teenage user base with Instagram and WhatsApp. TikTok complements them rather than replacing. All three are growing. I don’t know how they’re going to translate that reach to VR profits either, but focusing on Facebook-using retirees misses the big picture of Meta’s growth.
- gtirloni 4y agoI don't see teenagers using Instagram much or at all where I live.
- pavlov 4y agoThere’s something about social media that makes people confidently extrapolate their local observations to global scale. Meta’s apps have 3.7 billion active monthly users. That’s half the population of the world! It’s impossible to guess their behavioral trends based only on what you and I see around us. Even Facebook is growing despite nearly a decade of HN users declaring it’s only used by retirees and will soon die out.
- gtirloni 4y agoNot saying it's not growing or very big already. Just that the next wave of users don't seem to be coming from teenagers.
- flashgordon 4y agoSo one thing I was curious about is those who were laying off (at least the big 4) have xyz billions in the bank. If there is truly fat then it can be trimmed by either flattening the org, cutting down pay, changing work hours etc (nobody works just 40 hrs anymore). So the layoffs seem clearly for paying homage to wall st. What would happen if one of these CEOs grew a pair and held off and directed the fat to muscle? Yes their share price would fall in the short term but surely with the trillions and "toughening + austerity" wouldnt a company actually innovate and build more? It seems like the homage to wall st is needed because when CEOs go on their next play they need wall st for a good reference by the looks of it.
- zmmmmm 4y agoyep when you have billions in the bank, firing good staff is tantamount to an admission either that you have literally no good ideas for how to grow the business or that you have a 100% short term view. In either case it ought to be a humliating admission for the leadership of a tech company to make to its investors.
- gtirloni 4y ago> it ought to be a humliating admission for the leadership of a tech company to make to its investors. They usually "take full responsibility and the heavy burden" of doing the layoffs. It's like they are the ones suffering more. It's heart breaking.
- captaincaveman 4y agoCutting staff is not going to reduce their revenue for some time, and in the interim their profits increase and thus defends the stock price at a time the tech sector is getting reassessed (valuations are too high, and need adjusting). The point is, it has nothing to do with having money in the bank to pay them.
- HDThoreaun 4y agoMost big tech companies doubled staffing over the pandemic because they saw a 10% chance that people would continue to spend much more time online after the pandemic and they didn't want to miss the opportunities associated with that. They knew that if things went back to normal they could just lay all the extra people off and return to normal and the costs associated with that were worth the 10% chance to see massive growth. The idea that there was some sort of mistake seems pretty naive to me. Meta doesn't employ fortune tellers, they just react to the probabilities they see.
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- gnicholas 4y agoI find that my FB feed is roughly 50% ads. Sometimes there are two, or even three ads in a row. I barely use it anymore (and I've literally never clicked on an ad). I wonder why FB thinks people will use their product when it is half advertisements. People watch 21 mins of TV with 9 mins of commercials, and they would revolt if it were 15/15.
- adamlgerber 4y agoIts not that I don't believe your general point but I would be interested in evidence that you're getting more than 1 in a row. I am $50MM+/year spender on Meta ads and while I know that ad load is up I don't think its up that much where ads run alongside each other. If you can show me evidence of this I will make a big fucking deal of this to Meta.
- gnicholas 4y agoUpdate: today I was shown 8 ads in a row on FB. The first two ads were for the same storage company (but at different locations). I was shocked to see this pairing, as well as the sheer magnitude of the back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back ads. I took a screen capture video, if you want to see it. Makes me wonder if the troubles at Meta run deeper than the current layoffs will solve.
- DavidPeiffer 4y agoOut of curiosity, I went through my results on m.facebook.com. I really need to get ad blocking on mobile going again. Post, ad, post, ad, reels (which I've never intentionally clicked), ad, 3 posts, (ad, 2 posts) repeated indefinitely. My wife, through the Facebook app, had a roughly similar pattern, though with far more suggested groups.
- gnicholas 4y agoWhat’s an effective way to block FB ads on a mobile browser?
- 2devnull 4y agoMeta is lame company that’s never had a good product or an original idea. They stole the idea of Friendster/MySpace and used anticompetitive tactics to monopolize. Instagram is sort of cool, but that was just an acquisition. They are the first company that comes to mind when I hear Peter Thiel talk about stagnation. Not that the other fangs are impressive, but Facebook is by far the most underwhelming of the lot. All that money and talent and what have they built. 15 years later and it’s still just a MySpace data mining advertising machine.
- vineyardmike 4y agoWhat ways have they been anti-competitive? I hear lots of people refer to fb specifically as a monopoly, and talk about the need to break them up or punish them for behavior. Compared to other fangs, I don’t know what they’ve done? I’m not denying it but genuinely curious what people have to say. Eg Apple has taken heat for its restrictions on App stores and the double standards they impose on competitors. I’ve also heard of Google slowing down YouTube on competitors browsers to push chrome. I can’t think of any direct anticompetitive behavior beyond building a product that benefits from the network affect.
- paganel 4y agoThey've bought their way into controlling the majority of the social media space with the acquisitions of IG and WhatsApp. TikTok has helped put a dent on that, but outside the US (and its strange fixation for the colour of the online messages' background) they still control almost all the private messaging space (of course, I'm ignoring markets like China and Russia, where there are other things at play).
- johannes1234321 4y agoIf you look globally they built initiatives like "internet.org" or "free basics" where they pay telcos to make access to Facebook/Meta sites free. In those markets calling somebody on a phone is expensive, but WhatsApp is free. Looking up a business's website costs expensive data traffic, but checking the business's Facebook page is free. Big pockets finding to make Facebook the internet.
- extr 4y agoI was spared in the Nov 2022 layoff but decided to find another gig anyway and started elsewhere in January. The difference for my mental health has been night and day. Constant talk about "increased intensity" (what does that mean? I already thought I was working pretty hard), layoffs rumors with no official clarification, PSC stack ranking. No thanks, it just wasn't for me.
- senttoschool 4y agoI think it's by known that layoffs will lead to more voluntary quitting. I wouldn't be surprise if half of the reason for "increased intensity" is to get more people to leave without paying severance.
- curioushacking 4y agoI was in the exact same situation. I loved my team at Meta and learned a ton, but after the increased intensity QA from Zuck I went through two rounds of re-structuring and was shuffled to new teams. I found that I didn't have the motivation to learn the specific implementation of the huge layers of abstraction the new team was creating. Couple this with a general questioning my life goals and if I want to spend more of it on making ad serving slightly better. I was left searching. I've landed at a new gig and I've been so much happier despite a sizable pay cut at my new role. In general, while it clearly created huge turmoil, I wonder if one large round where you potentially cut too deep would be better on company health than many smaller rounds. I'd be curious if the sentiment of engineers at Twitter is now more positive then that at Meta.
- przemo_li 4y agoTwitter got new round of lay offs. Don't drink cool aid. Twitter case is not yet settled. Musk bought Twitter as company-in-crisis, and crisis was not about excess workforce...
- extr 4y agoYeah, I had similar experiences with multiple reorgs and shuffles. I was only there for a year and had 4 separate managers. After the newest one I said enough is enough, I was just tired of perpetually reevaluating priorities and roadmapping. Time to actually do some work. Glad you're happy in your new gig too, talking with others who have left it seems our story is not uncommon.
- khaled4vokalz 4y agoAfter all these layoffs, I really wonder if people will take the risk again in these companies just for the sake of `I'm a MAANG employee`. But as the hype still remains with all these Youtube videos and all I guess the dream will still be there even with the risks that are there.