13 ms·

A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

121 points by gardenfelder 4y ago

gardenfelder 4y ago
https://archive.ph/hEWuQ https://archive.ph/hEWuQ
mtsolitary 4y ago
He did also build it though…
- pharmakom 4y ago
  It’s my company and I’ll ruin it how I like!
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  If we want to forget about the other 3 co-founders that were basically robbed by Zuckerberg then sure, he built it all by himself.
  - vallsurf 4y ago
    Sure, if you're talking about a pre-seed stage startup with a single product 20 years ago. Meta/Facebook isn't that anymore, and hasn't been that for a very long time. Say what you want about Zuck, but the fact he more or less successfully has been running one the worlds largest tech companies of the century is pretty impressive.
    - grumple 4y ago
      What other products do they have other than those they acquired? 98% of their revenue is from advertising on Facebook and Instagram (according to their financial reports).
  - justrealist 4y ago
    None of them were technical. To the extent they contributed, it was either irrelevant to execution or simply a vaporware idea they had no ability to make happen (the twins).
JKCalhoun 4y ago
"How" left off of article title. I understand why that happens though.
- teddyh 4y ago
  It’s automatically stripped by HN when an article is submitted.
  - grog454 4y ago
    Why does HN automatically strip "How"?
    - boeingUH60 4y ago
      To avoid clickbait “How to” articles, I guess.
quantumwoke 4y ago
For me the big turning point at Meta was the acquisition of Oculus. At the time, it was great, forward-thinking and gave everyone a lot of hope for the future of Meta and even society if you believed the hype. This peaked at about 2020 when the opportunity for VR and remote work became real and necessary due to an unprecedented pandemic. However, we all know the rest; hyperfocus on VR to the detriment of the rest of the company (most notably Instagram missing out on short-form video content) leading to the gradual slide off the cliff. VR is still important but Zuck needs to radically reshift and refocus to save the farm and stave off OpenAI. Interesting few years ahead.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  > However, we all know the rest; That does make everything a lot simpler, doesn't it.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Is there any kind of indication VR (or its cousin, AR) is important to any extent? Everything I know suggests it's a niche technology that has little chance of becoming anything but a niche technology. It's not made any significant headway in gaming, in entertainment of other kinds, nor in general business settings. There are some specialist domains where 3D visualization is worth the cost and inconvenience, but it seems to me very unlikely that it will ever escape those. Meta's gigantic investment with little to show for it seems to me to support this observation.
  - rolph 4y ago
    AR has more utility than VR , and i think telepresence requires elements of both. AR could be used to visually aid a tire change, or display sales specials overlayed on visual of IRL signage
  - quantumwoke 4y ago
    For a brief moment during 2020, you could see the hype actually meet reality when a wave of VR startups that promised to transport us "as if we were really there" to the office. Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call. These days, I see it much more commonly used for training purposes now that we are all being forced back to the office.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> In a statement, Meta spokesman Dave Arnold said the conditions that led to the layoffs are “well known and reverberating throughout the industry.” Sad that you can get away with a statement like that.
- blitzar 4y ago
  conditions that led to spokespeople getting away with statements like that are “well known and reverberating throughout society”
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  To be fair the planned 3Q23 artificial recession produced by the fed is fairly well known and the proactive layoffs just in case are reverberating through tech.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > Sad that you can get away with a statement like that. What mechanism would you say should prevent someone from making a statement like that?
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Not really sure what you mean by ‘get away with’. Journalists are obliged to ask companies to comment and spokespeople make those comments. The spokesman doesn’t get interviewed or grilled and it is generally left to the reader to interpret the comment and decide if the spokesperson has ‘gotten away with it’. Do you have the same reaction whenever an organisation has a scandal and they ‘don’t want to comment on an ongoing investigation’?
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    Yes. When Donald Trump says something like "As we all know Sleepy Joe Biden eats babies for breakfast", reputable journalistic sources will print it, and will have a sentence somewhere down the line that says "According to the FBI, there is no evidence that Joe Biden consumes human flesh. Likewise, when a tech C-suite exec makes vague references to macroeconomic conditions, a reputable journalist would include a sentence like "Although rising interest rates have dampened venture capitalist investment into new startups hurting the growth and creation of billion-dollar valuations, the Big Tech companies including Meta have demonstrated continued growth and record profits quarter after quarter, yet still chose to undertake a policy of layoffs self-referencing each other as justification."
manojlds 4y ago
Stock is doing great, so how bad is it really.
- pyrrhotech 4y ago
  Perhaps it's done great on a YTD basis or since the panic low last Fall, but overall Meta has been a laggard for many years now. A mere 36% return over the last 5 years compared to 66% for SPY and 96% for QQQ. Furthermore, it's still nearly -40% off its peak in September 2021.
neel8986 4y ago
Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sailing to oblivion. Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off given the technical arc. Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.
- muglug 4y ago
  The problem of VR goes beyond hardware innovation: most people don’t want to completely shut themselves off from the world for hours on end.
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    I have friends that got married, never had kids, and spend large chunks of their free time in MMORPGs, League of Legends, and a seemingly endless array of virtual-based entertainment. They also seem to get a lot of personal meaning and satisfaction from nerd pop culture like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings which is evidence that their rich fantasy lives have such deep meaning for them. So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world, provided it wasn’t clunky and caused headaches.
    - roydivision 4y ago
      You have a few friends != large number of people will do the same.
      - monero-xmr 4y ago
        I take the entire breadth of my lived experience when trying to predict the future, and I place high value on anecdata. My strategies have served me well thus far, but if you want to outsource all of your thinking to “experts”, good luck to you.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> Ambitious managers could move up the ladder by proposing projects requiring them to spin up a new team or claim a departing manager’s direct reports. These climbers were privately called “empire builders”... Same at Apple (and same term) when they were flying high after the iPhone success. Apple began that insane period though (perhaps beginning around 2001 or so with the iPod introduction) after having wandered in the desert for half a decade, having nearly gone out of business. In hindsight the circling-the-drain of the late 90's was a good experience for Apple — gave them focus, clarity. Or perhaps that was just due to Jobs returning and bringing his own focus and clarity to the company. Regardless, Facebook has only seen up, up, up. Perhaps all tech companies need a bit of sobering (sobriety?) to pull them back to reality.
- darth_avocado 4y ago
  Isn’t that always the case? Management and Administration are the two things that latch on to any organization, bloat it, introduce inefficiencies and then create a career out of trying to solve those inefficiencies. They ultimately don’t solve them because the way they try to solve it is by hiring more people.
uptownfunk 4y ago
Mistakes happen, the bigger you are the bigger your mistakes. It’s a good reminder that we are all mortals here. Frankly based on how addicted almost everyone is to their cell phones and social media it was the natural move to make, I think meta fumbled the execution or was just too premature. AI is a great pivot. I think they will be fine.
- Panini_Jones 4y ago
  > AI is a great pivot. What is the "pivot", exactly?
sashank_1509 4y ago
There has to be some incredible lag in the news media, to be reporting this at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year. Meta beat all analyst estimates in its earnings call, whatever Meta is doing it’s working. My only regret is not investing enough into Meta when it was 90$ (Now it’s 240$)
- awegio 4y ago
  Well, it's about workforce, not the shareholders. There is probably some correlation between morale and stock price, though.
  - sneed_chucker 4y ago
    There's a major correlation at a company like Meta where a huge chunk of your compensation is payed in stock grants.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Cutting workforce to boost margins is MBA management 101. Every exec does this, for precisely the sentiment in your comment: it makes shareholders think the CEO is a genius.
- cipheredStones 4y ago
  > at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year What are you talking about? Meta stock is up 14% from a year ago, down 26% from two years ago. It was last at a third of its current price eight years ago. Edit: Oh, I get it. You're selectively measuring from its low point six months ago - when it had fallen 75% from its 2021 peak.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    i bought about 2k€ of shares when it was between 95-100€/share, so his numbers are almost correct wrt my depot at least (only x2 though) :-)
- 4y ago
fallat 4y ago
Too much focus on VR. Apple's execution on AR will determine a lot.
- timbit42 4y ago
  VR will be huge for gaming and other more niche things, but AR will be what people use all day, every day in their lives. Meta is focused too much on VR when they are not a gaming company. They should be focused on AR. They will be playing catch up with Apple when Apple released their AR.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    The applications of AR are obvious, but I don't think the technology to make it generally useful exists. You need a device which: --- 1. Looks normal, or at least relatively normal. (I'm not actually convinced the "at least" part is sufficient.) 2. Is comfortable to wear for extended periods. (Not too heavy, not too much heat, etc.) 3. Has a battery which can last most of the day. 4. Has lenses which are transparent, but onto which images can be digitally superimposed. 5. Has enough computing power on-board to do the actual AR calculations and graphics rendering, or is able to wirelessly communicate with a phone with extremely low latency. (Note that for Meta specifically, the latter approach would still leave them reliant on Apple/Google.) * Bonus points for handling prescription lenses somehow, lest you cut off a huge portion of the potential market! --- This is really hard! Modern computers are small, but they aren't nearly small enough to do #5 without ruining #1, much less #2. Nor are they power-efficient enough for #3. It's great to want things, but outside of science fiction you need more than just a vision of how something could work, you need technology to make it happen. Building a useful VR headset is not easy, but it is a lot easier. You don't need the battery to last all day (if you have any battery at all), and it's okay if the headset looks kind of stupid. You want the headset to be as comfortable as possible, but it's okay if it feels weighty after an hour or so. And because the headset can be bigger and heavier, you can also get away with shoving more computing power inside. We'll see what Apple announces at WWDC, but I'm skeptical they will make more headway than Meta.
    - 4y ago
w0mbat 4y ago
The newspaper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos says rival billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot. What a shocker.
darkwizard42 4y ago
I can't take this article seriously. They are having a hard time hiring in 2022-2023 because of the scandal of 2016?? Facebook remains one of the TOP landing spots for any engineer still. The rep might be tarnished a bit, but you would be doing yourself a disservice if your company wouldn't consider an engineer with 2-5 years of senior SWE experience from FB. EVEN after the stock downturn it remains near the top in prestige and compensation -- though admittedly they are hiring a lot less and firing a lot more. I think traditional journalism fails hard when covering tech because tech moves and evolves so quickly and this journalist in particular tries to weave a multi-year story that isn't as connected (or the threads they have chosen aren't) as it seems. Both with Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Move fast and break things" the media got what they wanted, a nice sound bite that was (at least for a time) the motto of the company. Things change, companies evolve, the "risky" projects are more expensive, the failures are magnified (Google+, FB Phone, etc.) so companies themselves change. I don't think its fair to keep holding them to an ethos that hasn't/doesn't scale. I don't know, I'm just tired of all these hit pieces on Meta/Zuckerberg. At least they have discipline (sharp revenue focus), conviction (betting on AI + metaverse), and focus (flatter structure than other peer companies even before the pandemic bloat) -- a lot more than I can say for a majority of tech companies these days...
- dasil003 4y ago
  Definitely agree that this kind of media narrative is ChatGPT-level of arbitrary free association that leads to completely nonsensical conclusions. You're also right that FB is still a strong resume signal. That said, I think FAANG reputation has been slowly diluting for a while, and significantly diluted from the over-hiring during the pandemic. The bottom line is the hiring process creates a floor in terms of raw coding ability, but says very little about their ability to drive impact in companies with a lesser warchest of technical talent. The average FAANG engineer is standing on the shoulders of giants at best, and coasting at worst. Being able to deal with a large technical bureaucracy is probably the most consistently reliable signal that a FAANG tenure gives you, but that's not what most hiring managers at companies with lesser tech brand recognition are actually looking for. They're probably imagining something like the scrappiness of folks that built Google from 2000-2005, or Facebook from 2005-2010. Of course those folks still exist, but they're a lot thinner on the ground relative to the massive headcount they have today.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
>“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one current employee said. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.” So as long as we're getting paid to be evil, we're ok with that, but when the total disregard for other people is directed at us, well we're upset.
ranting-moth 4y ago
I was going to post a few pics on Facebook today but it just hung. In the dev console was a repeated CORS error, over and over again. Really Facebook, you don't test your fundamental feature on Firefox?
redsid 4y ago
simpleton view as a non-tech person - investors/traders are well known to buy high / sell low and I think that holds true for businesses. I suspect VR needs more AI in it for story telling and experience as suspect most of the VR work is more akin to 90's expert systems. Open worlds needs standards for open explorations and standards may be the key for all the current LLMs and next generation models to show up in VR. Assuming FB has been successful in leveraging the inhouse pytorch expertise over these years and hopefully has not lost it's people in their zealous cost cutting when forced to de-prioritize VR. If that is the case, then we have seen that many times over and over - deep pockets and patience wins most of the trades
MichaelRazum 4y ago
Facebook is far from done or broke. Especially now where we have the hype and progress around chatgpt. They are in an excellent position regarding that tech. *if they can execute
achow 4y ago
https://archive.is/XqFyo https://archive.is/XqFyo
poxwole 4y ago
Workers are paying for Zuck's fuckup.

121 points by gardenfelder 4y ago

gardenfelder 4y ago

https://archive.ph/hEWuQ https://archive.ph/hEWuQ

mtsolitary 4y ago

He did also build it though…

pharmakom 4y ago
It’s my company and I’ll ruin it how I like!
bastardoperator 4y ago
If we want to forget about the other 3 co-founders that were basically robbed by Zuckerberg then sure, he built it all by himself.
- vallsurf 4y ago
  Sure, if you're talking about a pre-seed stage startup with a single product 20 years ago. Meta/Facebook isn't that anymore, and hasn't been that for a very long time. Say what you want about Zuck, but the fact he more or less successfully has been running one the worlds largest tech companies of the century is pretty impressive.
  - grumple 4y ago
    What other products do they have other than those they acquired? 98% of their revenue is from advertising on Facebook and Instagram (according to their financial reports).
- justrealist 4y ago
  None of them were technical. To the extent they contributed, it was either irrelevant to execution or simply a vaporware idea they had no ability to make happen (the twins).

JKCalhoun 4y ago

"How" left off of article title. I understand why that happens though.

teddyh 4y ago
It’s automatically stripped by HN when an article is submitted.
- grog454 4y ago
  Why does HN automatically strip "How"?
  - boeingUH60 4y ago
    To avoid clickbait “How to” articles, I guess.

quantumwoke 4y ago

For me the big turning point at Meta was the acquisition of Oculus. At the time, it was great, forward-thinking and gave everyone a lot of hope for the future of Meta and even society if you believed the hype. This peaked at about 2020 when the opportunity for VR and remote work became real and necessary due to an unprecedented pandemic. However, we all know the rest; hyperfocus on VR to the detriment of the rest of the company (most notably Instagram missing out on short-form video content) leading to the gradual slide off the cliff. VR is still important but Zuck needs to radically reshift and refocus to save the farm and stave off OpenAI. Interesting few years ahead.

jstummbillig 4y ago
> However, we all know the rest; That does make everything a lot simpler, doesn't it.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Is there any kind of indication VR (or its cousin, AR) is important to any extent? Everything I know suggests it's a niche technology that has little chance of becoming anything but a niche technology. It's not made any significant headway in gaming, in entertainment of other kinds, nor in general business settings. There are some specialist domains where 3D visualization is worth the cost and inconvenience, but it seems to me very unlikely that it will ever escape those. Meta's gigantic investment with little to show for it seems to me to support this observation.
- rolph 4y ago
  AR has more utility than VR , and i think telepresence requires elements of both. AR could be used to visually aid a tire change, or display sales specials overlayed on visual of IRL signage
- quantumwoke 4y ago
  For a brief moment during 2020, you could see the hype actually meet reality when a wave of VR startups that promised to transport us "as if we were really there" to the office. Now, you can choose to be cynical about that but I think it genuinely did live up to the hype when I could remote in to a full infinite-screen workstation and interact much more freely with coworkers than a Zoom call. These days, I see it much more commonly used for training purposes now that we are all being forced back to the office.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> In a statement, Meta spokesman Dave Arnold said the conditions that led to the layoffs are “well known and reverberating throughout the industry.” Sad that you can get away with a statement like that.

blitzar 4y ago
conditions that led to spokespeople getting away with statements like that are “well known and reverberating throughout society”
fnordpiglet 4y ago
To be fair the planned 3Q23 artificial recession produced by the fed is fairly well known and the proactive layoffs just in case are reverberating through tech.
flanked-evergl 4y ago
> Sad that you can get away with a statement like that. What mechanism would you say should prevent someone from making a statement like that?
dan-robertson 4y ago
Not really sure what you mean by ‘get away with’. Journalists are obliged to ask companies to comment and spokespeople make those comments. The spokesman doesn’t get interviewed or grilled and it is generally left to the reader to interpret the comment and decide if the spokesperson has ‘gotten away with it’. Do you have the same reaction whenever an organisation has a scandal and they ‘don’t want to comment on an ongoing investigation’?
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Yes. When Donald Trump says something like "As we all know Sleepy Joe Biden eats babies for breakfast", reputable journalistic sources will print it, and will have a sentence somewhere down the line that says "According to the FBI, there is no evidence that Joe Biden consumes human flesh. Likewise, when a tech C-suite exec makes vague references to macroeconomic conditions, a reputable journalist would include a sentence like "Although rising interest rates have dampened venture capitalist investment into new startups hurting the growth and creation of billion-dollar valuations, the Big Tech companies including Meta have demonstrated continued growth and record profits quarter after quarter, yet still chose to undertake a policy of layoffs self-referencing each other as justification."

manojlds 4y ago

Stock is doing great, so how bad is it really.

pyrrhotech 4y ago
Perhaps it's done great on a YTD basis or since the panic low last Fall, but overall Meta has been a laggard for many years now. A mere 36% return over the last 5 years compared to 66% for SPY and 96% for QQQ. Furthermore, it's still nearly -40% off its peak in September 2021.

neel8986 4y ago

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sailing to oblivion. Moreover we still don't know how entire VR game will play off given the technical arc. Just one or two cycle hardware innovation may make VR successful.

muglug 4y ago
The problem of VR goes beyond hardware innovation: most people don’t want to completely shut themselves off from the world for hours on end.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  I have friends that got married, never had kids, and spend large chunks of their free time in MMORPGs, League of Legends, and a seemingly endless array of virtual-based entertainment. They also seem to get a lot of personal meaning and satisfaction from nerd pop culture like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings which is evidence that their rich fantasy lives have such deep meaning for them. So I find it totally plausible that a huge amount of people would spend large amounts of time in a more immersive virtual world, provided it wasn’t clunky and caused headaches.
  - roydivision 4y ago
    You have a few friends != large number of people will do the same.
    - monero-xmr 4y ago
      I take the entire breadth of my lived experience when trying to predict the future, and I place high value on anecdata. My strategies have served me well thus far, but if you want to outsource all of your thinking to “experts”, good luck to you.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> Ambitious managers could move up the ladder by proposing projects requiring them to spin up a new team or claim a departing manager’s direct reports. These climbers were privately called “empire builders”... Same at Apple (and same term) when they were flying high after the iPhone success. Apple began that insane period though (perhaps beginning around 2001 or so with the iPod introduction) after having wandered in the desert for half a decade, having nearly gone out of business. In hindsight the circling-the-drain of the late 90's was a good experience for Apple — gave them focus, clarity. Or perhaps that was just due to Jobs returning and bringing his own focus and clarity to the company. Regardless, Facebook has only seen up, up, up. Perhaps all tech companies need a bit of sobering (sobriety?) to pull them back to reality.

darth_avocado 4y ago
Isn’t that always the case? Management and Administration are the two things that latch on to any organization, bloat it, introduce inefficiencies and then create a career out of trying to solve those inefficiencies. They ultimately don’t solve them because the way they try to solve it is by hiring more people.

uptownfunk 4y ago

Mistakes happen, the bigger you are the bigger your mistakes. It’s a good reminder that we are all mortals here. Frankly based on how addicted almost everyone is to their cell phones and social media it was the natural move to make, I think meta fumbled the execution or was just too premature. AI is a great pivot. I think they will be fine.

Panini_Jones 4y ago
> AI is a great pivot. What is the "pivot", exactly?

sashank_1509 4y ago

There has to be some incredible lag in the news media, to be reporting this at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year. Meta beat all analyst estimates in its earnings call, whatever Meta is doing it’s working. My only regret is not investing enough into Meta when it was 90$ (Now it’s 240$)

awegio 4y ago
Well, it's about workforce, not the shareholders. There is probably some correlation between morale and stock price, though.
- sneed_chucker 4y ago
  There's a major correlation at a company like Meta where a huge chunk of your compensation is payed in stock grants.
rchaud 4y ago
Cutting workforce to boost margins is MBA management 101. Every exec does this, for precisely the sentiment in your comment: it makes shareholders think the CEO is a genius.
cipheredStones 4y ago
> at this time when Meta managed to almost triple its stock price in less than a year What are you talking about? Meta stock is up 14% from a year ago, down 26% from two years ago. It was last at a third of its current price eight years ago. Edit: Oh, I get it. You're selectively measuring from its low point six months ago - when it had fallen 75% from its 2021 peak.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  i bought about 2k€ of shares when it was between 95-100€/share, so his numbers are almost correct wrt my depot at least (only x2 though) :-)
4y ago

fallat 4y ago

Too much focus on VR. Apple's execution on AR will determine a lot.

timbit42 4y ago
VR will be huge for gaming and other more niche things, but AR will be what people use all day, every day in their lives. Meta is focused too much on VR when they are not a gaming company. They should be focused on AR. They will be playing catch up with Apple when Apple released their AR.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  The applications of AR are obvious, but I don't think the technology to make it generally useful exists. You need a device which: --- 1. Looks normal, or at least relatively normal. (I'm not actually convinced the "at least" part is sufficient.) 2. Is comfortable to wear for extended periods. (Not too heavy, not too much heat, etc.) 3. Has a battery which can last most of the day. 4. Has lenses which are transparent, but onto which images can be digitally superimposed. 5. Has enough computing power on-board to do the actual AR calculations and graphics rendering, or is able to wirelessly communicate with a phone with extremely low latency. (Note that for Meta specifically, the latter approach would still leave them reliant on Apple/Google.) * Bonus points for handling prescription lenses somehow, lest you cut off a huge portion of the potential market! --- This is really hard! Modern computers are small, but they aren't nearly small enough to do #5 without ruining #1, much less #2. Nor are they power-efficient enough for #3. It's great to want things, but outside of science fiction you need more than just a vision of how something could work, you need technology to make it happen. Building a useful VR headset is not easy, but it is a lot easier. You don't need the battery to last all day (if you have any battery at all), and it's okay if the headset looks kind of stupid. You want the headset to be as comfortable as possible, but it's okay if it feels weighty after an hour or so. And because the headset can be bigger and heavier, you can also get away with shoving more computing power inside. We'll see what Apple announces at WWDC, but I'm skeptical they will make more headway than Meta.
  - 4y ago

w0mbat 4y ago

The newspaper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos says rival billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot. What a shocker.

darkwizard42 4y ago

I can't take this article seriously. They are having a hard time hiring in 2022-2023 because of the scandal of 2016?? Facebook remains one of the TOP landing spots for any engineer still. The rep might be tarnished a bit, but you would be doing yourself a disservice if your company wouldn't consider an engineer with 2-5 years of senior SWE experience from FB. EVEN after the stock downturn it remains near the top in prestige and compensation -- though admittedly they are hiring a lot less and firing a lot more. I think traditional journalism fails hard when covering tech because tech moves and evolves so quickly and this journalist in particular tries to weave a multi-year story that isn't as connected (or the threads they have chosen aren't) as it seems. Both with Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Move fast and break things" the media got what they wanted, a nice sound bite that was (at least for a time) the motto of the company. Things change, companies evolve, the "risky" projects are more expensive, the failures are magnified (Google+, FB Phone, etc.) so companies themselves change. I don't think its fair to keep holding them to an ethos that hasn't/doesn't scale. I don't know, I'm just tired of all these hit pieces on Meta/Zuckerberg. At least they have discipline (sharp revenue focus), conviction (betting on AI + metaverse), and focus (flatter structure than other peer companies even before the pandemic bloat) -- a lot more than I can say for a majority of tech companies these days...

dasil003 4y ago
Definitely agree that this kind of media narrative is ChatGPT-level of arbitrary free association that leads to completely nonsensical conclusions. You're also right that FB is still a strong resume signal. That said, I think FAANG reputation has been slowly diluting for a while, and significantly diluted from the over-hiring during the pandemic. The bottom line is the hiring process creates a floor in terms of raw coding ability, but says very little about their ability to drive impact in companies with a lesser warchest of technical talent. The average FAANG engineer is standing on the shoulders of giants at best, and coasting at worst. Being able to deal with a large technical bureaucracy is probably the most consistently reliable signal that a FAANG tenure gives you, but that's not what most hiring managers at companies with lesser tech brand recognition are actually looking for. They're probably imagining something like the scrappiness of folks that built Google from 2000-2005, or Facebook from 2005-2010. Of course those folks still exist, but they're a lot thinner on the ground relative to the massive headcount they have today.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

>“What was special about Meta was the trust. We drank the Kool-Aid and really felt like it was our company [and] even willingly defended it when everyone said we were evil incarnate,” one current employee said. “But that’s been shattered, so it feels like a betrayal.” So as long as we're getting paid to be evil, we're ok with that, but when the total disregard for other people is directed at us, well we're upset.

ranting-moth 4y ago

I was going to post a few pics on Facebook today but it just hung. In the dev console was a repeated CORS error, over and over again. Really Facebook, you don't test your fundamental feature on Firefox?

redsid 4y ago

simpleton view as a non-tech person - investors/traders are well known to buy high / sell low and I think that holds true for businesses. I suspect VR needs more AI in it for story telling and experience as suspect most of the VR work is more akin to 90's expert systems. Open worlds needs standards for open explorations and standards may be the key for all the current LLMs and next generation models to show up in VR. Assuming FB has been successful in leveraging the inhouse pytorch expertise over these years and hopefully has not lost it's people in their zealous cost cutting when forced to de-prioritize VR. If that is the case, then we have seen that many times over and over - deep pockets and patience wins most of the trades

MichaelRazum 4y ago

Facebook is far from done or broke. Especially now where we have the hype and progress around chatgpt. They are in an excellent position regarding that tech. *if they can execute

achow 4y ago

https://archive.is/XqFyo https://archive.is/XqFyo

poxwole 4y ago

Workers are paying for Zuck's fuckup.