15 ms·
Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/meta-job-cuts-10-percent-8000-employees/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/meta-job-cuts-10-percent-8...
- reconnecting 6mo agoGiven the same trend at Oracle and Amazon (1), it seems large corporations are cutting costs ahead of bad news... and that news isn't about AI.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoIt is about AI. The news is "the AI is far less monetarily lucrative endeavour than we thought but don't worry, we already fired enough people to compensate for the loss"
- kakacik 6mo ago... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month. Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoIt's still useful for that. As a tool, not "replace half the devs" pipe dream of the executives. Could probably replace fair few of executives and higher management tho, why pay sycophants six figures when all you need is LLM sub
- mirrorlogic 6mo agoPunchy FTW
- torginus 6mo agoFrom what I can tell, its more about cashflow - basically companies need to spend most of their revenue or be taxed on it - and you can buy only so many servers. Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoProgrammers only or across the company?
- OtomotO 6mo agoNever at the head... Although the fish begins to smell at the head, as we say here...
- swiftcoder 6mo agoThey don't have 80k programmers. That's total staff
- Ancalagon 6mo agoRe: > If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad > https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-get-so https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...
- lpcvoid 6mo agoYeah, also first thing I thought about. What a shit time altogether right now.
- BurningFrog 6mo agoIt's well known since ancient times that money doesn't buy happiness.
- voxl 6mo agoAnd it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."
- hluska 6mo agoThese comment sections are getting more and more useless by the day.
- renticulous 6mo agoMoney buys you Freedom. A much more general category theory type framing.
- LogicFailsMe 6mo agoMoney fills your Maslow. After that, you are responsible for your happiness. And there sure are a lot of rich people who aren't very happy.
- bsimpson 6mo agoOr as Daniel Tosh put it: "It buys a WaveRunner. You ever seen a sad person on a WaveRunner?"
- rvz 6mo agoIs this what they mean to "Feel the AGI?" AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.
- OtomotO 6mo agoAsocial Grumpy Interests?
- advisedwang 6mo ago> AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta Care to elaborate on how you came to this conclusion?
- rvz 6mo agoGiven that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising: It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".
- josefritzishere 6mo agoIt's like the economy is struggling or something.
- shimman 6mo ago[flagged]
- krapp 6mo ago>All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into. One might almost say workers should... own the means of production?
- oytis 6mo agoEvery programmer owns the means of code production (unless they forgot how to code without Claude). Turns out it's not necessarily enough to make money.
- oblio 6mo agoCode production is not code distribution nor code advertisement, nor code marketing in general, etc.
- oytis 6mo agoYeah, that's the thing. You need the whole business to turn code into money, and you need this business to be run well, and either do what people with big money want it to do or to make lots of people with small money pay for its product regularly. Either way, it's not what autonomous programmer commune will do well in my opinion
- bombcar 6mo agoIt's usual for the programmers (or laborers in general, perhaps) to assume that their portion of the business does all the "real work" and the 60-70% "rest of the company" do nothing and add no value.
- jerkstate 6mo agoThe means of production are for sale, they can own them if they want!
- prism56 6mo agoWonder if there is a self fulfilling prophecy. These large "AI" companies push their models/platforms for increasing productivity. If they're not reducing their own workforce or increasing productivity and reaching larger growth and profits, why would the rest of the world believe them and do the same.
- dwa3592 6mo agoWould it be Mark's cloned AI who will call everyone 'personally' to share this news? I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.
- shmatt 6mo agoif you've ever been through a Meta loop (and their method is to cast an extremely wide net, so chances are you have), you've seen how inefficient their loop can be for long term success 6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals" Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip * 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end
- nobleach 6mo agoThat wasn't my experience at all. I had a recruiter screen where she asked me some technical questions. I then had a longer discussion, then a code screen, then an arch-deep-dive. The entire process was very professional and EVERY person came off like they really wanted me to succeed. (Sure it's an act but it's a very helpful act when you're in the hot seat) My intervews were in 20202/2021. Perhaps things have changed?
- shmatt 6mo agoYou had interviews scheduled longer than 45 minutes?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- stuxnet79 6mo ago2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.
- pinkmuffinere 6mo agoThis seems a bit ridiculous, that’s only 5-6 years ago. Things change, but the mechanisms and culture isn’t entirely different.
- geremiiah 6mo agoThe only part of Meta I care about is the PyTorch team. Are those people also being affected by this?
- htrp 6mo agoa bunch of them already left....
- trjordan 6mo agoIt's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat. It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now. But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand. They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards.
- 121789 6mo agothis seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
- lanthissa 6mo agometa has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years. they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross. There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
- Forgeties79 6mo agoGiven facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things. They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
- chis 6mo agoI'd guess AI has made the average SWE around twice as productive at this point. This is a sort of efficiency shock, where companies suddenly need to find twice as much productive work to do or start firing employees. FB probably had a bunch of slack to absorb this but ultimately it's just hard to find that much work all at once. I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
- linkjuice4all 6mo agoI guess Meta still needs some people to run the core business (ads/social media rageslop) but your point about 2021 staffing levels would suggest they haven't been able to innovate or bring anything new to market in the past 5 years. Llama has certainly been impressive but doesn't really add more money to the pile or more eyeballs to the ad inventory. It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
- chis 6mo agoI disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here). To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.
- rvz 6mo ago> I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. After the AI race and the large IPOs of 2026, this will be the case. The hiring pipeline will be a lot slower than 2021 and will be more controlled.
- rishabhaiover 6mo agoI have a genuine dislike for all Meta products now. With time, their intentions have become much more clear and it was never to bring people closer or whatever.
- fidotron 6mo agoGoing back to the G+ era, I remember even by that time the FB dev advocates (these existed) came off as seriously slimy, to the point that it was clear we couldn't have the Google and FB reps in the same room at the same time. (And the Google ones were much more good humored about this). Admittedly that was just a couple of guys, but it takes something to be so obviously toxic yet still chosen to represent the values of your company at a third party. Arguably the Google ones were guilty of naivete, but that's not a crime you'd want to punish too hard, and I was myself guilty of far worse.
- da02 6mo agoWhat did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?
- kakacik 6mo agoIts pretty safe bet to completely ignore any PR, be it meta, apple, google or whatever, and just look at past actions of company and owners/ceo. Shallow talk is very cheap, morality often isn't. Then no surprises happen, practically ever.
- sevenzero 6mo agoThis really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.
- mr_toad 6mo ago
- jonnonz 6mo agoWhat happened to the metaverse ?I suspect maybe wasting all the resource wasn’t a good idea
- autophagian 6mo agoThe whole concept just didn't have any legs.
- jonatron 6mo agoI find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoInternally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
- booleandilemma 6mo agoAs someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoI've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
- jldugger 6mo agoNo idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly. The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
- janalsncm 6mo agoI remember in 2022 people still said things like “there hasn’t been a major tech layoff in 20 years”. Those days are a distant memory. This Meta layoff is lost in the noise of tons of other ones by this point.
- eleventen 6mo agoIf you sort https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ by date, the machine started turning in 2020. But it did indeed kick into high gear in 2022. This was the big one I remember: https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-employees-on-top-of-the-3700-laid-off-earlier-this-month/ https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-emplo...
- gip 6mo agoI have been told by a startup founder that he wants his strongest player to replace and automate the weakest using AI! That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.
- whatever1 6mo agoLet me guess. Year of efficiency?
- HardCodedBias 6mo agoEveryone at Meta should know the score. Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance. Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers. This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago> Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers. Thats what the normal Meta up-or-out promo/comp structure is for. This sort of thing hasn't been about that for a while. Sure, they will say they stack ranked the company and fired the bottom 10%, but given how many layoffs they've done, at this point it's just an ongoing brain drain. (I departed when the writing was on the wall for the '21 layoffs)
- aprilthird2021 6mo agoThis is in addition to performance cutting just fyi. I get what you're saying but this isn't that
- mr_toad 6mo agoWhen Meta was a question mark, or a star performance was all about growth. But now it is a cash cow, performance has a different meaning. Efficiency is the name of the game, and efficiency is not synonymous with high salaries or headcount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
- zeroonetwothree 6mo agoLayoffs are not the same as performance terminations
- cchrist 6mo agoThis isn't surprising. This will happen at every tech company first, then every other company afterwards. All jobs will get automated, then all companies will be ran by one person: their owner.
- mr_toad 6mo agoSo is everyone going to run a company? Or what will the rest of the people do? If they don’t run companies, and they don’t have jobs, how will they buy anything, and who will the people who do run companies find customers?
- arnitdo 6mo agoAh yes so 8 billion (at least) companies are supposed to pull financing out of their rear-ends? You've re-discovered freelancing!
- dsign 6mo agoI wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising interest rates well ahead of an expected wave of inflation. This affects both consumer and industrial loans, and it means that many economies are going to continue in contraction or that things may get worse.
- pipes 6mo agoThe raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.
- mswphd 6mo agoinflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid. Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.
- altmanaltman 6mo agoCan you elaborate on what you mean by "central banks got inflation so wrong the last time"? You mean Covid or 2008?
- pipes 6mo agoCovid. The ex head of the bank of England said as much.
- altmanaltman 6mo ago
- rickcarlino 6mo agoLayoffs.fyi is not looking good right now.
- heathrow83829 6mo agobut does it really cover all the layoffs? if a company just slowly oozes out employes via pips or attrition without rehiring, i don't think it will cover the full extent of manpower reduction. i think we need a better metric, that looks at net bodies on the job.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoI'm really surprised that they: 1) still have a submission form that doesn't require email 2) that they post my email-less submissions from my smaller USA city, too [farily quickly, as well!]
- LogicFailsMe 6mo ago"letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here..." is a sacrifice Mark Zuckerberg is willing to make.
- dnsb 6mo agoI came across this article recently and watching it play it out is wild: https://readuncut.com/the-survivors-paradox-how-layoffs-turn-companies-into-yes-machines/ https://readuncut.com/the-survivors-paradox-how-layoffs-turn... whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
- oxag3n 6mo agoWell, they could layoff 100% and world would be a better place to live. It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.
- doublerabbit 6mo ago> just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up. I'm up for building this. What dinosaur languages should we code this in? erlang, tcl and perl?
- rdevilla 6mo agoJust use lisp.
- kibwen 6mo agoYou may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.
- hn_acc1 6mo agoI'm still partial to Tcl from years in EDA - sign me up..
- guzfip 6mo agoHey, erlang is brilliant
- lbrito 6mo agoHaskell!
- rdevilla 6mo agoNow that I think about it, the Haskell Report did come out in '98...
- rbanffy 6mo agoEvery time something like this happens I think that at least one person made a very bad cash flow decision and now needs to cover a hole they dug out themselves. Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.
- marcosdumay 6mo agoThey are probably reacting to the general economy.
- rbanffy 6mo agoThe scariest thing is that people with this amount of responsibility was caught by surprise.
- ardit33 6mo agoI left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there. I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc). I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join. I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.
- the_biot 6mo agoRight. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause. I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
- dlev_pika 6mo agoIt’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
- yalogin 6mo agoI thought this will be 20% like we heard a few weeks ago. I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. It’s going to happen when mark finally lets go of this anchor
- giobox 6mo agoI wouldn’t consider this the end of the matter, and given the past few years experience with Meta yet more layoffs are absolutely possible. Related to the quest, the horizon worlds team was largely let go (around 1000 employees) earlier in the year and are not part of this latest 10 percent etc.
- yodsanklai 6mo ago> I am still waiting on the news that they are killing the quest headset though. That would be sad. I've never owned a Quest, but the technology is starting to be very impressive. I would consider buying a new generation one.
- ryukoposting 6mo agoIt's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoI think the Reuters article that preceded this said it would be 10% on 5/20, with more to come throughout 2026
- zeroonetwothree 6mo ago10% May 10% November
- dbgrman 6mo ago20% is the outlook for the whole year. Wait and see :)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- keithnz 6mo agoone thing with AI is it really seems great for small companies as it allows you to do more, but for big companies, not really sure it enables anything other than figuring you are overstaffed.
- atl_tom 6mo agoI bet they are worried about the class actions that the SC lawsuit opened up.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- hintymad 6mo agoLet's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
- pipes 6mo agoAre you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
- pembrook 6mo agoAs someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings. Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility. The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4. For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
- joenot443 6mo ago
- ptdorf 6mo agoThe firings will continue until morale improves.
- 4fterd4rk 6mo agoThe real question for me is how the hell did this company reach $200 billion in annual revenue? Nothing about our economy makes any sense to me.
- zeroonetwothree 6mo agoSomething something ads
- mlvljr 6mo ago[dead]
- maxrev17 6mo agoNeckbeards’rein is over!
- midtake 6mo agoDon't worry, these CRUD app software artisans will land on their feet somewhere.
- upupupandaway 6mo agoI don't understand this comment at all. Are you being sarcastic? Digging at the developers? At Meta?
- dlev_pika 6mo agoIs this what Zuck meant when he said he “takes full responsibility” for spending 80 billion in the wrong direction?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 6mo agoTaking responsibility doesn't mean paying people to do nothing.
- autaut 6mo agoIs he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down? What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader? The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.
- loeg 6mo ago> Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? More or less? The vast majority of his personal net worth is tied up in FB stock. As to the other questions -- the severance package is pretty generous.
- autaut 6mo agoHe is not putting the shares down himself. He is just subject to price fluctuations like everyone else — so how is he taking personal responsibility for it?
- _heimdall 6mo agoLayoffs don't necessarily lead to share prices dropping, in the short term or long term. It definitely wouldn't impact the loans he presumably lives off of by using said shares as collateral.
- givemeethekeys 6mo agoWith the way people get added and removed from big tech, why is having worked at these companies still considered a badge of honor?
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoI don’t know if it’s a badge of honor, but it’s definitely highly desirable because they pay a lot. The term FAANG was originally coined to group together extremely high paying companies. Basically, if you are L5 or above and can survive 4 years at Meta, you’re guaranteed to be a millionaire by the end of it. Go to levels.fyi and do the math yourself.
- derwiki 6mo agoMathing that backwards, you’re saying L5 makes 250k/year? That seems very low for Senior.
- wolvoleo 6mo agoAgain??? Phew glad I don't work there. I hate that constant worry.
- nemo44x 6mo agoFor years the advantage big tech had was that capital expenditure was minimal and now with every big tech company trying to become an AI company they’re blowing gobs of money on data centers and everything that goes inside of them. AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.
- deferredgrant 6mo ago[flagged]
- sys_64738 6mo agoDoes the Facebook corporate campus still have the Sun Microsystems logo on the reverse side? I hope these 10% see that and welcome its significance.
- ButlerianJihad 6mo agoThe clockwise swastika? Yeah https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/sun-microsystems-sign-at-facebook-a-homage-and-a-reminder-45443ac55a30 https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/sun-microsystems-sign-at-...
- dehrmann 6mo agoAs of a few years ago, some of the restrooms in Classic still had purple and yellow tiles.
- blinded 6mo agoSystems are great, but the product has been very poor.
- janalsncm 6mo agoI wonder if the quality of YC applications will go up as more engineers find themselves in need of a job. It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.
- xtracto 6mo agoThis really should be the case. If AI tools are really making it easier to build stuff, we should see hordes of new startups solving all kinds of problems thar were difficult or expensive to solve before. I've been seeing this in the startup ive been for the past year. We are 20 people, and are solving fiscal reconciliation problems for HUGE companies in my country. Building thing that were just not scalable before. I'm waiting for all the cool startups in both b2b and b2c that solve health, time spending or money problems.
- byzantinegene 6mo agoin theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.
- xtracto 6mo agoUsing AI is fine. The key is to use it to build processes/Systems that solve problems deterministically. Instead of "asking them" to solve the problems non-deterministically themselves. It's way cheaper and robust. As an example, we had to be able to parse most uses b2b bank statements. That means understanding the structure of around 30 different formats, some with very subtle differences within them. The naive and expensive approach was to train an LLM to do it (after OCR). Instead we used AI to generate a generalized python parser that is "configurable" for different structures. (And also extracts data from PDFs without OCR, unless they are pure images). It covers the 99% of the cases. And for that 1% we pass it through AI for immediate solution, and to generate the additional deterministic config to cover it. But I digress (lol). The point is, there are so many interesting problems that can now be solved. We should have teams of 3 to 5 people doing crazy stuff.
- rambojohnson 6mo agoand they're going to start monitoring employee keystrokes and mouse movements to train AI. good luck guys. save up aggressively now.
- tech234a 6mo agoDuring mass layoffs, why haven't companies offered employees the opportunity to drop down to a four day work week? I'd think many would take the extra day off each week, even if it included a proportional reduction in pay.
- kjkjadksj 6mo agoBecause it isn’t scientific. It is about appeasing irrational investors who demand a blood sacrifice. This is why it is always a big even number, and not some carefully established number based on analysis of operational shortcomings.
- jen729w 6mo agoBecause the stock market won't care about that.
- plemer 6mo agoYou’d have to go company-wide to sync schedules and norms. Not just opt in. Many would not like a 20% pay cut. The best talent would disproportionately leave. Also, theoretically Meta is getting rid of their worst performers, so their cuts and declines in productivity would not be proportional, especially as the cuts inspire fear to motivate productivity from the remaining employees.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoDoes it inspire fear to motivate productivity? Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!
- danans 6mo ago> Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity? > Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.
- appz3 6mo ago[flagged]
- gslin 6mo agohttps://archive.is/3ZeOv https://archive.is/3ZeOv
- Chinjut 6mo agoAgain? Haven't there been waves of mass Meta layoffs already?
- sidcool 6mo agoWhy would any candidate consider Meta for their career when the CEO flounders money and then lays off recklessly.
- netcan 6mo agoBecause they offer an attractive job/package relative to other opportunities... same as any other job people take.
- loeg 6mo ago90% of employees aren't getting laid off and continue to earn top of market pay. Even if you think layoffs are distributed randomly (they aren't), that has positive EV.
- nazcan 6mo agoPositive EV for the employees vs. another company that pay less and has less lay-offs (assuming random)? I guess it depends on how much less pay the other company is...
- loeg 6mo ago> I guess it depends on how much less pay the other company is. Levels.fyi is a reasonable starting point for comparison.
- Ekaros 6mo agoMaking it 2-5 years there sounds like reasonable pile of money. And I don't think getting fired in one of these big layoff rounds is too big black mark.
- phantom784 6mo agoI've not worked at Meta, but I was at a similar scale of company for 2 years before being let go. Once you factor in RSUs, they essentially paid double what I've ever made anywhere else. Knowing how volatile those sorts of positions can be, I just saved & invested all the extra, which worked out quite well.
- bandrami 6mo agoThis is interesting because it's a case of "AI taking jobs" but not in the way people normally mean; these massive layoffs are happening not because AI is doing the work they used to do but because capex is sucking all of the operating money out of everywhere. The companies may be forced to replace some of the laid-off employees with AI (as far as possible) but that's an effect not a cause.
- riteshnoronha16 6mo agoYup feels like it.
- wisty 6mo ago3 and a half ways AI takes jobs: 1. By making workers unnecessary (largely hypothetical right now?) 2. By companies spending big on AI, but it didn't pay off yet so they need to cut back on something else. 3. AI is a good excuse for layoffs they want to do anyway. Also - the investors would rather hear "AI" than "oops we are in trouble so we need to do layoffs". For example, if you spent a lot of billions on a 2nd life clone with fewer players than developers ...
- Wololooo 6mo ago4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.
- hn_throwaway_99 6mo agoIt's #3 - it's always #3. All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs: 1. Correcting pandemic overhiring 2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name. So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.
- matt3210 6mo agoAI winter #3 incoming. Enjoy the cheep ram and gpus
- Magi604 6mo agoI hope you're right. What my RAM cost me $130 last year is $650 last week. This is ridiculous.
- shevy-java 6mo agoWill Meta also cut down on their use of lobbyists, trying to mandate more age sniffing? Something is seriously flawed here.
- SpaceNoodled 6mo agoNice to see that decimation is back in style
- weezing 6mo agoOn the other hand 8000 people can potentially do some jobs meaningful to society.
- Oras 6mo agoThe tech job market is in dark state now, really not much options to choose “meaningful”. I feel for the those who will hear the bad news, whether meta or other companies, and I hope they will cope and get other roles
- hackable_sand 6mo agoThere are plenty of jobs outside of software development.
- fevangelou 6mo agoFiring 10% of their workforce on the one hand. Tracking employee PC screens to supposedly train AI on the other. Get fired or get tracked. Well, isn't that convenient...
- schnitzelstoat 6mo agoIntroducing the tracking in such a public manner is probably a way to drive voluntary redundancies as it encourages people to leave.
- SJMG 6mo agoThis is my thought as well. Fewer severance packages.
- franczesko 6mo agoIf there's a number given, the reason is secondary.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- igleria 6mo agoI wonder if in a parallel universe without the extremely stupid metaverse sidequest this could have been prevented.
- danans 6mo agoI doubt it. Expensive and wasteful side quests are a symptom of too much wealth/power concentrated in too few hands. Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.
- androiddrew 6mo agoIsn't this the same idea of the old Roman decimation.
- gordonhart 6mo agoDepends on who's making the call for who gets cut. A key part of decimation was that the doomed soldiers were beaten to death by their comrades to give the remaining 9 a bloody, lasting impression of their dishonor. If Meta makes everybody sit in a group with their ten closest coworkers and debate until they decide who gets cut it's a lot closer to decimation than if management suddenly shuts off 10% of employee computers.
- threepts 6mo agoI thought they were doing this in order to allocate funds for their multimillion acquisitions on their superintelligence labs?
- greg_dc 6mo agoMeta will go down in history as the quintessential case study of late stage capitalism. A company that has provided a consistently worse product over time and produced consistently less value over time to the detriment of both their users and employees, yet somehow gets consistently more profitable.
- shin_lao 6mo agoAI is a scapegoat. These companies are bloated. That's why they are laying off people en masse.
- frrho 6mo agoMeta has been dead for years
- neuroelectron 6mo agoCan they liquidate 10% of their AI infra while they're at it?
- dbgrman 6mo agoThey’re trying that with meta compute
- alex1138 6mo agoAI or not, I can't wait until the tech platforms decide they don't need any workers to actually, you know, work on their product, and so it gets worse and worse Facebook is kind of a functionally useless product. The feed has always been a mess. You can get banned at any time, there's no account security, and so on and so on
- i_love_retros 6mo agoWe're going to need UBI really soon. I fear for society as we know it if it doesn't happen.
- ProllyInfamous 6mo ago-OR- a global meatgrinder to dispose of excess younger/impoverished males. Between you and me and the internet, I'm rooting for UBI.
- i_love_retros 6mo agoCan't we throw billionaires in the meat grinder instead?
- ProllyInfamous 6mo agoI think Flock nationwide tracking is the best metaphor / reality against any sort of that talk. But as the Simpsons' favorite space alien duo observes: "why doesn't the workingclass, the larger of the two, simply eat the rich?" ---- This will seem random, but the advice is: if you're still renting, see if you can pay a few quarters/years ahead. Real estate is locked-up worse than any millenial has ever experienced, rents are stagnant (being generous), and the dollar is quickly losing OPEC-status for obvious reasons. Perhaps this can save you some cash (even negotiate for less?!), and then the landlord class can feed its forever-temporary quest for the_gainz. I am personally paid two years ahead, to a mom-and-pop local homeowner — at current undermarket rate. I save more money per month than most of my workingclass home-owning neighbors (I would NOT buy a house right now if you can find undermarket rents — increasingly commoner). -OR- buy some gold1oz/silver10oz -OR- rent out that 250sqft inlaw suite you thought'd be impossible to [if already house-trapped: it won't sell good rn]... and make both roof's occupant lives better. ---- Just some random thoughts from an absolutely jaded #ElderMillenial
- sharadov 6mo agoAs much as I hate Zuck - he's a ballsy CEO, he makes big bets, some work and some don't. Instagram and Whatsapp did! Heck in Asia and Latin America entire economies use Whatsapp for transacting business.
- snarf21 6mo agoI think it is hard to call IG and WA bets. He simply bought the competition that was set to wreck his platform.
- hx8 6mo agoMeta actually pioneered the Buy The Competition strategy in a brand new way. 1. Larger acquisitions. IG was $1B for a 13 employee company. WA was $22B. We were all talking about how big those numbers were at the time, but looking back they seem like mid-sized acquisitions. Before, most companies would have looked at these numbers and tried to build it themselves, or underbid, or just not pull the trigger. Blockbuster and Netflix. Yahoo and Google. 2. He meet the user where they were. He made no meaningful and instant change to the apps. There was no rebranding. They still have their own login screens and apps. Many casual users might not notice their major platforms are owned by the same company. Compare this to more old-school tech companies like Oracle buying Sun, or a national cellphone provider buying a regional one, or whatever happens with AOL-Time-Warner-Discovery.
- btian 6mo agoWhy didn't other CEOs buy them to wreck Zuck's platform?
- sharadov 6mo agoNot as easy as it sounds, most acquisitions are not integrated well. He was astute in determining they were going to be 100X what he paid( and he paid a lot by the standards of the day).
- upupupandaway 6mo agoAlso extremely astute to stay the hell away from buying Twitter.
- dbgrman 6mo agoI am sorry but people going and wanting to go back to meta after being laid off is exactly why Meta keeps getting away with it. I am in some ex-meta groups and people tell they got laid off and in the same sentence ask how/when can they apply again. If someone is laid off for supposed ‘low performance’ and they still want to go back because it pays 10-20% higher than others is just weak. Have some self esteem! On the topic of recording clicks and keystrokes: they have one of the most extensive surveillance-ware on employee devices since 2015. So its not new. Its posted publicly to avoid some law suits in near future. On the topic of training ai with this data: where do i even start. Meta is so delusional. NO ONE uses the ai in whatsapp, messenger, facebook, instagram. Many people don’t even try it. So regardless of the quality of the model, no one wants to speak to meta’s ai. Even if they produce a very efficient coworker, why would anyone touch meta’s ai? I wouldn’t want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo agoAlternative to archive.is Text-only, no CAPTCHA, no Javascript, no DDoS on blogger, no geo-blocking, no BS curl https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/meta-tells-staff-it-will-cut-10-of-jobs-in-push-for-efficiency \ |egrep -o "(type\":\"paragraph)|(type\":\"text\",\"value\":\"[^\"]+)" \ |sed '/Read More:/{N;d;};s/type\":\"paragraph/<p>/;s/.\{22\}//' \ |sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8><meta name=viewport content=width=device-width>/' > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
- ramon156 6mo ago> no DDlS on blogger Can you explain what you mean?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
- gmadsen 6mo agoWhat is the intended purpose of giving a generic notice like this to employees? Are they suppose to compete for job security or start interviewing elsewhere?
- cdrnsf 6mo agoEh. I haven't used any of their products in well over a decade and don't miss any of them. Zuck is spineless and totally unlikeable.
- hmokiguess 6mo agoI wonder if workers are now realizing that working for a corporation that predates on the vulnerability of humans through dark patterns isn't the best career move and have been trying to push for a better agenda internally, which leads to leadership shaving off to reset culture but framing it as "efficiency". Does anyone affected by this or that works at Meta would dare speak about it?