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Meta is about to start its next round of layoffs
- ShamelessC 4y agoFor the love of God, how many times have they done this at this point?
- 1123581321 4y agoThree.
- mattnewton 4y agoAnd the stock ticks up every time
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- coolbreezetft22 4y agoThis article is still about the 2nd layoff, just confirming the concrete time looks like where as previously just known to be sometime around end of april / early may
- 1123581321 4y agoAh, yes, you’re right. I didn’t realize they announced a two step layoff in March. So, two, I guess.
- laweijfmvo 4y agoIt's a 3-step layoff actually. March, April, and May.
- paxys 4y agoFacebook/Meta has done exactly one mass layoff in its history (in November 2022), and this is the second.
- compiler-guy 4y agoEvery single round of layoffs generates several stories: 1. Announcement 2. Identifying who is affected 3. Start of the actual action 4. Morale is affect this or that way So we hear each action in painful detail. Not as painful detail as the folks getting laid off of course. But each story hits the front page.
- abledon 4y agobut how much did they hire in the last 2-3 years?
- zwieback 4y agoSo from 86000 last year they'll be going to 60000ish this year? That is pretty severe. For those of us in mature industries cyclic layoffs are just how things are but 25% shrinkage is scary.
- throwaway019254 4y agoThey had 45k employees three years ago. Maybe they were really hiring too much?
- SoftTalker 4y agoI really have a problem imagining what 86,000 employees do, even at a company like Meta
- sbarre 4y agoYep same. I work for a telco that runs a national physical phone network, a high-speed home Internet fibre network in about a third of the country, retail stores across the country, call centers, a full sales & marketing team, plus a huge IT operation, and we are less than a third of that headcount. To be fair, Meta is a global business with billions of users, so I'm sure it takes people to run all that, but it's still hard to rationalize.
- edmundsauto 4y agoBeing global is a big part of it. Imagine trying to follow regulations for thousands of products that reside within the apps in every country in the world. You need to have engineers who can localize, work with legal teams who understand global and regional requirements. You need folks to work with the local version of the FTC if you are under consent agreements. Your HR team has to be experts in local employment law in every jurisdiction, especially during layoffs. Folks who haven't worked on products that cross jurisdiction (and for a company that has a LOT of attention on it, due to being so much in the press) - it's just a completely different scale. Heuristics for headcount in a single country just don't really work.
- guestbest 4y agoMaybe META can shed users, too, and replace them with AI chat bots
- candiddevmike 4y agoThat already happened years ago, in my experience
- midoridensha 4y agoGiven the quality of discourse I've seen in many Facebook threads, ChatGPT could do a lot better.
- rvz 4y agoEngineers obviously affected. As long as the stock goes up after buying at $88, then keep it going to save money. Meta will survive. It just needs to unload more unnecessary hires and adjust to save more money in the long term. All caused by the over hiring mania followed by the unsustainable zero interest rate phenomenon and a decade long quantitative easing bubble that had to end.
- zwieback 4y agoThe zero interest rate and quantitative easing was available to non SV companies, though, and they went through much milder bubbles. There's definitely something specific about tech mania. And now AI company will hoover up the talent, maybe the monetary and fiscal policies will slow that bubble down a bit.
- laweijfmvo 4y agoThis just feels like a convenient story. Why would tech companies, who bring in billions in profits each quarter, be so dependent on zero interest loans? If anything, the non-SV companies reducing their ad spend would be a bigger contributor, assuming that has happened?
- zwieback 4y agoThe ones that bring in billions in profits are less dependent, of course, but even those will carry loans on their books. Why not, if money is free. Each large corporation has essentially an investment bank on the inside.
- vineyardmike 4y agoBecause development has high upfront costs. You need to build something before you can collect any money. That means lots of expensive engineers. When building is nearly free (free money now at expense of tomorrow’s cash flow), you build things to sell tomorrow. Businesses of all sorts get loans when the rate is good. It’s a business cash flow thing. Look at the SEC filings for all big tech companies. They discuss their billions in debt.
- annadane 4y ago[flagged]
- sberens 4y agoInteresting, about 95% of your comments in the last year are saying something negative about Meta/Zuck.
- CacheRules 4y agoWhy is that interesting? I disagree.
- atleastoptimal 4y agoPerfect time for me to be looking for a new job :/
- retrocryptid 4y agoI guess it's good to hear that Meta is still around.
- tayo42 4y agoJob market continues to be terrible... Ugh...
- tootie 4y agoThe job market is still pretty strong. It was wildly overheated in 2021.
- 0zemp1c 4y agosure, if you feel like applying to the companies claiming unfilled positions: Chipotle, Mcd's, Target, Walmart etc
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sberens 4y agoHm, my tech job tracker[0] shows that it's probably one of the worst hiring markets ever. Where do you see that the market is still strong? [0] https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/ https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/
- capableweb 4y agoThat's a hugely biased source, of course. Assuming you're in the US (as HN is biased in that way, and you're using HN as a source), the unemployment rate seems to hover around ~3.5% for the last year, and it was ~6% two years ago. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
- tayo42 4y agoThere's no way tech is big enough to move that number significantly. It's like repeated sf arguments how the city is dominated by software, except even that city is mostly service and finance jobs.
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- nostromo 4y agoWe’re on the edge of an AI boom, and our tech giants are cutting rather than investing. This seems like a bad strategy.
- femiagbabiaka 4y agoThey're doing both.
- oh_sigh 4y agoI'm ignorantly confident that no one in AI-related divisions/projects are being cut at Meta.
- aiappreciator 4y agoMeta made the dumb decision to invest in VR, rather than AI. Those giant and expensive VR teams (Or the devs who made horizon worlds...) aren't going to easily transition into AI. AI generated content is the real core of metaverses, not VR goggles. Hence Nvidia is actually making the right bet on its 'omniverse' infrastructure. Nvidia has made no layoffs, and I don't expect any within the next 5 years.
- abeppu 4y agoIn FAIRness, their investments in AI research have been significant in absolute terms. What may be lacking is the connection between research and actual products, but I think that's true everywhere. Though I agree VR has been a distraction, I think it's misleading to say the investment was in VR "rather than AI"; it's been in addition to.
- yreg 4y agoMeta had their own successes in AI research. And I wouldn't be so sure the goggles are going to stay irrelevant.
- whiplash451 4y agoVR googles absolutely are core for Meta as they want to own the next (physical) platform. They’ve learned the hard way the cost of not owning the hardware layer.
- gatefun 4y agoFacebook's Android application has been riddled with bugs for months, overrun with ads and now they are cutting the workforce. It'll be interesting.
- slig 4y agoFacebook's apps on Android were always second-class citizens.
- yevpats 4y agoIronically this will most probably help as most companies now understand that putting more people on the same piece of software doesn't really help but make it worse.
- whiplash451 4y agoYou still need to keep the remaining employees engaged, though. Adding workforce is not useful != removing workforce is
- gatefun 4y agoI hope it helps them. At my company, there were efforts to compartmentalize our web application to make it more scalable for adding more features inside it. I left before I saw this effort in action, but the principles it was based on were solid. I believe some applications could be compartmentalized so that adding more features/teams would bring more value (without making it worse) however, I might be wrong.
- breatheoften 4y agoAnybody want to predict how the market will react to this? My take is that it will be a negative response. They've already shed a lot of workforce -- at this point they are still facing revenue growth loss more than they'll save in costs from reduced headcount -- and I think it's unlikely they'll be able to fire folks into a convincing story about future profit growth ... To me it's clear they are no longer a machine able to turn ever expanding quantities of engineering talent into ever ever expanding monetary growth ... so what's left to value in their overall organizational brand? Personally I think they have an enormous amount of technical and organizational talent still in their ranks -- but ... why? Why will they stay and try hard to chase after whatever the next gravy fad train might be? Seems like it won't be the meta verse ... and if the next fad is really going to be "ai" -- could there really be enough talent that can really stomache the thought of allowing instagram to be the one to control the worlds first super intelligent agi ...?
- fullshark 4y agoThe market already reacted this is old news
- asdfman123 4y agoNo, the brokers have to drive into work tomorrow and sell their pieces of paper that say Meta on them, based on information they have read in the print version of this article.
- yodsanklai 4y ago> Anybody want to predict how the market will react to this? I suppose the markets have already reacted to this. This has been announced a couple of months ago.
- nemo44x 4y ago> so what's left to value in their overall organizational brand? They have the worlds greatest dataset of everyone - their posts, their photos, their social graph. Now train generative AI on this. They can build personal and unique AI products that no one else can at their scale because they’ve sent the last 20 years getting to know everything about everyone.
- yodsanklai 4y agoGood luck to those employees waiting to know their fate. It must be very stressful.
- beambot 4y agoI've always heard the adage "cut once, cut deep" to avoid repeated destruction of morale. Anyone care to speculate about Meta's rationale behind repeated cuts?
- rossdavidh 4y agoThe rationale is probably something like, "oops; well crap". Meta hasn't done this very often.
- the_lonely_road 4y agoThey are probably trying to shake the tree. Voluntary departures save the firm on severance.
- Kilenaitor 4y agoZuck actually posted about this on his Facebook[0]. Short answer is the first layoffs (seemingly) were rather random as far as who was affected. This new round is a lot more deliberate by 1. Cutting projects/efforts that don't make the cutline 2. Letting go the surplus of people previously needed to execute on those projects > Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects. > It's tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. That project team needs space, and maybe it tips its overall product group into splitting across multiple floors or multiple time zones, which now makes communication harder for everyone. That project team needs laptops and HR benefits and may want to recruit more engineers, so that leads us to hire even more IT, HR and recruiting people, and now those orgs grow and become less efficient and responsive to higher priority teams as well. Maybe the project has overlap with work on another team or maybe it built a bespoke technical system when it should have used general infrastructure we'd already built, so now it will take leadership focus to deduplicate that effort. Indirect costs compound and it's easy to underestimate them. > A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling. We will become an even greater magnet for the most talented people. That's why in our Year of Efficiency, we are focused on canceling projects that are duplicative or lower priority and making every organization as lean as possible. [0]: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid024Q9h2gvnYGmU6czAHYH6V2AwYB9D5mfWnrFPmVaChWHPcDCBbYo27eyZDEeXXSf4l https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/pfbid024Q9h2gvnYGmU6czAH...
- fullsend 4y agoLayoffs may be needed. But there should be a healthy dose of executives included for making those hiring decisions. And they should do it all at once. Doing it in waves is absolutely brutal.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoI was talking to a neighbor who works at AWS. Asked how it was going and he said so far so good "I've survived 3 layoffs so far". And I was like, "3 layoffs? I thought there was only one so far?" and he replied that there have been a couple others that weren't publicized so much.
- LegitShady 4y agoI have a hard time believing it - the journos are interested in the kind of muck and if there have been additional 2 rounds of layoffs how did they keep it quiet?
- haliskerbas 4y agoMight be the difference between a legally disclosed layoff and “my whole org was gutted by our director” but not big enough to require a legal disclosure.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoLayoffs happen at different scales within a company. Individual departments can have layoffs that aren't newsworthy. If someone's budget gets cut, they might have to layoff a number of people. The reason the big layoffs are newsworthy is that they impact most or all of the company at once. The big layoffs are usually associated with company-wide hiring slowdowns. The individual org/department layoffs are often not really noteworthy in the context of the entire company.
- LegitShady 4y agoI feel like I'd have read about it on twitter or mastodon or whatever else people are using these days.
- dangrover 4y agoI was there 2016-2022. The hiring boom in 2020 was definitely palpable. Entire vast orgs of teams who had no context on the problem they were solving, previous efforts, etc, because they were all so new.
- asveikau 4y ago> Entire vast orgs of teams who had no context on the problem they were solving, previous efforts, etc, because they were all so new. To be frank, that was my opinion of Facebook before you were hired.
- EMM_386 4y agoI'll never understand how these companies literally doubled or tripled in size. Nobody thought to themselves "maybe this zero-rate interest environment will end", or "maybe our business model is losing steam"? No, instead they went full-on increasing headcount, leaving software engineers scratching their heads on exactly what they were supposed to be doing. When discussions started about companies "poaching" talent so that others couldn't get them, I saw the writing on the wall. Possibly no role even lined up, but let's just get them onboard and we'll figure that out later. I'm over 20 years into this career but am not FAANG. I like my boring, predictable companies for some reason, and they like me.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago> Nobody thought to themselves "maybe this zero-rate interest environment will end", or "maybe our business model is losing steam"? No one in management cares. The hiring and then firing is a feature, not a bug.
- luxuryballs 4y agoI think there may have been some government financial incentive but I wonder if there was a sense early on, in no small part due to the terrible media and government messaging FUD around Covid, that there would be significant death and debilitation that could have a meaningful impact on available talent, so they decided to get some extras and/or secure some off the market in advance.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoDisclaimer: I'm an engineer at Meta AMA. I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Mostly, it seems like most workers in the building chit-chat and have meetings rather than do anything resembling actual work that's building product going in front of users. Country-club, cult-of-toxic-positivity lots of relaxing going on, in my view. In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Also, the spend on R&D needs to be more focused on productization. Finally, I'm still wondering why there's no consultantish enterprise sales arm monetizing and discovering opportunities for lucrative SaaS products like Workplace.
- rerx 4y agoPlease help out us outsiders. My guesses are: MPK = Menlo Park? FRE = Fremont?
- EMM_386 4y agoIsn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather. That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects. That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three. And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!
- falcolas 4y agoBalancing the books (books which are, mind you, awash in black ink) using people's livelihoods. How very dystopian. Normal attrition rates, which are about 3% per month† for our industry, should be enough to manage even the worst hiring imbalances in a matter of months. Perfectly reasonable for a healthy and growing company like Facebook. Specifically, a 3% monthly attrition rate would take Facebook from ~85k to ~60k in under a year. Maybe a bit longer to replace positions which they couldn't afford to downsize. Voluntary layoffs would help speed that up if necessary. There's little reason for a healthy company to do layoffs unless their goal is sudden spikes in stock prices. † https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t11.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t11.htm
- wpietri 4y agoAnd let's not forget social contagion: https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layoffs-caused-by-social-contagion-companies-imitating-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/stanford-professor-mass-layo...
- falcolas 4y agoAnd shareholder pressure. But as far as I have seen, it's been meaningless pressure, since the shareholders did nothing to companies who did not do mass layoffs at their behest.
- CamelCaseName 4y agoIn a downturn your natural attrition rate falls very quickly. Data: https://i.imgur.com/SwqhZX0.png https://i.imgur.com/SwqhZX0.png
- throw_m239339 4y agoAnd nobody here is talking about about the complete failure of that useless metaverse which is solely the responsibility of Zuck? He should fire himself for his failures...
- metamate419 4y agoI'm an engineer at Meta waiting to hear my fate. Regardless of what happens tomorrow, I want to be gone by the end of the year because of leadership. The "I don't foresee more layoffs" line in November was bad. I understand that circumstances change, but other than SVB (which was contained and didn't really impact Meta), there wasn't much between November and March. This shows a lack of foresight beyond around a month, not to mention how haphazard the layoffs were. NYT reported that execs are phoning it in. I have no first-hand knowledge of it, but I believe it. Zuck missed TikTok. He wasn't ready for Apple's privacy changes. Rather than paying attention to competitors, he was busy building a failed cryptocurrency and the metaverse. Unless letting TikTok take hold was a big brain plan to get lawmakers to stop looking at Meta. The rebrand was poorly timed. It was almost exactly at the stock peak before reality started setting in. Sheryl left. Then there's the overhiring, but at least everyone else in the industry did it, so that's merely average performance. I don't like it as an investment, and I'm having a hard timing making the case for it being somewhere I want to work.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago[dead]
- rconti 4y ago> Meta’s next round of cuts shows that this isn’t the end of tech layoffs, it’s only the beginning of the next wave. I don't see how it says anything either way.
- akmarinov 4y agoDamn, that’s the third time Zuck takes full responsibility. It’s probably hard on him.