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For context: "In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company’s history. In 2021, it added another 13,
by albntomat0 4y ago
For context:
"In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company’s history. In 2021, it added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the two biggest years of expansion in Facebook’s short history."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-growth-than-tech-peers-no-layoffs-yet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
- hammock 4y agoAlso for context. FB stock in 2020: 234 Today: 190 FB revenue in 2020: $86 billion 2022: $117 billion
- arnon 4y agoRevenue is nice but revenue-per-full-time-employee is a more meaningful metric.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y agoInflation adjusted revenue per employee even more so
- Quarrelsome 4y agomeaningful for profitability, but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoSociety should get rid of computers and construction equipment then. Everyone can have a lot more employees.
- hammock 4y agoNo need to get rid of computers and backhoes. You don’t have to have work in order to have employees. At least that’s what the parent seems to be implying
- dx034 4y agoConstruction is actually one of the few sectors that hasn't become more productive per employee over past decades. Buildings have become vastly more complicated but there's comparably little automation.
- hnfong 4y agoYou might be interested in these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdIvnIUw0tE Not sure whether this is more common in the US these days. I know for a fact that a lot of buildings in China are constructed this way.
- dx034 4y agoBut did you notice how many construction workers are shown there? You can certainly build faster with prefab, but it's still a very manual process, both at the factory and on the construction site. And anything afterwards (wiring, HVAC, painting) is also nearly 100% manual labor. It seems we've made amazing progress on the "software" side of AI, but are still very far behind on the "hardware" side, ie robots.
- hnfong 4y agoI'm aware it's still a very labor intensive process. But there seems to be great potential for improvement with Tesla-esque automation processes if the capital investments are worth it. The main disadvantage about physical objects vs software is that physical objects are not as easily scalable and matter is generally more expensive than bits... so the economy of scale is harder to exploit. But give it some years once the marginal utility of software decreases to a point, I think people will divert more focus (and more importantly capital) on automating hardware stuff.
- Quarrelsome 4y agoI mean that employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children. As opposed to some dystopia where an exceptionally efficient and low employee organisation makes all the money and there is no/limited distribution of that wealth.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoThe tech companies such as Meta that pay good wages and have good working conditions are able to do so because they are exceptionally efficient and require a relatively low number of employees to generate the outsize profits they do. So that “dystopia” can already be considered to be here.
- Quarrelsome 4y agosure, but I merely wish to mention it within the context of "having high profit to employee ratio is good". Everything has trade-offs.
- newaccount2023 4y ago> but surely having more employees can be of benefit to society. that is how the Soviet Union worked...they just cut to the chase and had the state employ everyone directly strange how an economy can fail with full employment...
- Quarrelsome 4y agoI used to live in the Soviet Union so I am well aware of its failings. Rather I mean that if a one-man shop makes all the money in the world then that can be also problematic. Employing people for good wages and good conditions has a holistic benefit to society in that it enables more people to fulfil their needs and have space for children.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoMaybe employment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the goal is to build automation to the point that the moral imperative to labor isn’t as imperative.
- oblio 4y agoOh, you optimist, I like you! In real life the goal will be to build automation so that the few owners of the robots can buy more 200m long yachts.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoNo, they get the 200m yachts for building the capability first. There will come a time on our trajectory that artificial scarcity is such an obvious canard that we will move past it into a post scarcity world. I don’t know how it’ll be constructed, but the need to work being a moral imperative will necessarily fall away as it becomes obvious it’s not necessary nor imperative nor moral. I think this is unavoidable, sans some sort of plateau or limiting factor or regression, and the rate of change I see makes it look like we aren’t far away - although the realization of that the wizard is just a man behind the curtain may be.
- oblio 4y agoYou do realize that they managed to build artificial scarcity in virtual worlds through licenses, DMCA, NFTs? And morality or progress are not given under any circumstances.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoAnd that’s why Zuck is wrong. The reality we exist in is not constrained by human constructs. Yeah I realize progress or morality isn’t a given - I think I mentioned the offroads. But if things keep going in this direction we are heading now, I suspect we might actually get there.
- rchaud 4y ago
- hammock 4y agoFeel free to add that value, this is a public forum
- arnon 4y agoRevenue in 2021: 33,671 M USD Revenue in 2022: 32,165 M USD FTEs in 2021: 71,970 FTEs in 2022: 86,482 Revenue-per-FTE in 2021: $467,847 Revenue-per-FTE in 2022: $371,927 That's 21% less revenue per FTE. [1] 2022 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2023/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2022-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... [2] 2021 results https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2022/Meta-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2021-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- adverbly 4y agoIsn't that still missing a massive piece of context? What about costs?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoThe irony is that FB would probably be doing pretty well if not for spending $10B per year on the Metaverse.
- pera 4y agoAnd 2019 was the year when they announced the cryptocurrency and the "metaverse" projects...
- spaceman_2020 4y agoas an aside, Instagram just announced that it's shutting down its NFT features. Safe to say that the web3 hypetrain is over.
- capableweb 4y agoHow is that "safe to say"? Purely a guess, like anyone's guess. Looking at numbers, BTC went up 15.8% in the last 24h, up 16% in the last 7 days. Global marketcap of cryptocurrencies went from 804B USD in November 2022 to 1,121B USD today (~32% increase). If anything, it seems to slowly recover. Although I agree that NFTs are trash and should be forgotten about. But the cryptocurrency market as a whole seems to be more resilient than many think.
- dx034 4y agoCrypto might stay popular, but I also don't see any indication that web3 will live up to the hype. They still haven't found real use cases that need web3. Crypto, however, will remain popular as long as governments don't ban it.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoBTC !== Web3! Neither are most other coins.
- rchaud 4y agoPerception is reality though. The average person doesn't care about the difference between BTC and ETH and ERC-20 tokens, it all looks like the same get-rich-quick scheme. People aren't reading whitepapers, every coin has one. They're evaluating Youtube thumbnails as their source of information.
- 4y ago
- hnarn 4y agoAccording to Gizmodo, Meta put $13.6 billion dollars into “Reality Labs” (VR) in 2022. Simply eye-watering. It’s almost half of Iceland’s GDP.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- oblio 4y agoAs impressive as that sounds, Iceland has less than 400k people, it's about the same size as Cluj, a city in Romania probably 0.1% of HN ever heard about :-)
- varispeed 4y agoCouple of years ago I happened to work with a dev from Cluj. Awesome guy and very talented.
- hnarn 4y agoThe reason I took the example is because Iceland is a developed western country that most people have heard about that happened to match the number. Sure, Iceland has a small population but their GDP per capita is almost 5x that of Romania.
- varispeed 4y agoand how much of that will "trickle down" to the workers?
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoWhat an incredible amount of wasted effort in hiring that many people to then firing them 2-3 years later.
- dev_0 4y ago[dead]
- Laaas 4y agoIt is quite possible that the people they are firing aren't the ones they recently hired, but instead people who have been there for a long time but aren't meaningfully contributing anymore.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoThat is true, but I imagine that growing the company significantly must have had costs in itself.
- acchow 4y agoMany managers get promotions for how much the people under them accomplish. There is some adjustment to headcount, but the more you can get hired under you, the higher you can get promoted. This is the outcome of that.
- ascotan 4y agoI personally think this "we hired too many people" excuse doesn't hold water. This reminds me of the dot-com bubble where they jacked up interest rates and it caused companies to do layoffs. Back then interest rates were low and money was cheap. It was growth over profit and when money is cheap you can afford to run in the red as long as you're getting bigger. The minute interest rates went up companies had to rethink how they're going to spend money. We haven't seen the type of corp consolidation yet that we saw back then but it's still early days.