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It'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-cl

It'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 ago
this 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 ago
  meta 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 ago
  Given 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)
  - 121789 6mo ago
    I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
    - Forgeties79 6mo ago
      You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense. The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me. I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
    - mswphd 6mo ago
      have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.
      - 121789 6mo ago
        who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
        Forgeties79 6mo ago
        I think we should care about poor stewardship at the top of a major company.
swader999 6mo ago
I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.
- thewebguyd 6mo ago
  Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months. The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
  - simmerup 6mo ago
    AI: actually an indian Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
  - kbar13 6mo ago
    why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever. unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
    - vostrocity 6mo ago
      I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
      - aprilthird2021 6mo ago
        I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
nh23423fefe 6mo ago
When is it ok to lay people off?
- gtowey 6mo ago
  Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
  - mirrorlogic 6mo ago
    BIG FAX
  - nh23423fefe 6mo ago
    class war is the only answer ever given
  - senordevnyc 6mo ago
    Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right? And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them. I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?
    - gtowey 6mo ago
      > Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year. The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would. So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics. This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.
dist-epoch 6mo ago
> It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.
matchbok3 6mo ago
Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
- bellowsgulch 6mo ago
  That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.
- sdevonoes 6mo ago
  With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you
  - matchbok3 6mo ago
    Care to explain? Rather than these jugemental one-offs?
    - sdevonoes 6mo ago
      You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think? The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
      - zimza 6mo ago
        Sadly a lot of people see profit as the only incentive.
      - matchbok3 6mo ago
        Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense. Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago
Imagine a world where people could just be happy with returns on investments. Even treasury bills. Can't we all just be happy?
- spicymaki 6mo ago
  If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.
  - hn_acc1 6mo ago
    It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
  - A_D_E_P_T 6mo ago
    It must be true what Schopenhauer said: "Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become."
  - only-one1701 6mo ago
    If you make 900,000 but your rent and healthcare are 850000, how rich are you?
kitsune1 6mo ago
[dead]
ineedasername 6mo ago
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs". That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
- bsimpson 6mo ago
  Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?
- asdfman123 6mo ago
  It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.
heathrow83829 6mo ago
Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.
- asdfman123 6mo ago
  Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.
- missedthecue 6mo ago
  I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
testing22321 6mo ago
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards. To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
- marcosdumay 6mo ago
  They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter. That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down. That said, IMO they are right...
  - testing22321 6mo ago
    > They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter Oh sure, but the MBAs running stuff don’t care about that. Their bonuses are tied to the now, so the system has optimized for that.
- jongjong 6mo ago
  This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people. They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics. I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked. The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...
ModernMech 6mo ago
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.

121789 6mo ago

this 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 ago
meta 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 ago
Given 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)
- 121789 6mo ago
  I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense. The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me. I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
  - mswphd 6mo ago
    have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.
    - 121789 6mo ago
      who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
      - Forgeties79 6mo ago
        I think we should care about poor stewardship at the top of a major company.

swader999 6mo ago

I'm guessing a lot of these large companies will have massive layoffs followed by slightly less massive re-hiring in 6 to 18 months.

thewebguyd 6mo ago
Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months. The domestic jobs aren't coming back.
- simmerup 6mo ago
  AI: actually an indian Seen in foreign workers remote driving ai cars, foreign workers training ai robots, etc etc
- kbar13 6mo ago
  why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever. unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
  - vostrocity 6mo ago
    I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
    - aprilthird2021 6mo ago
      I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here

nh23423fefe 6mo ago

When is it ok to lay people off?

gtowey 6mo ago
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
- mirrorlogic 6mo ago
  BIG FAX
- nh23423fefe 6mo ago
  class war is the only answer ever given
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes. Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right? And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them. I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?
  - gtowey 6mo ago
    > Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year. The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would. So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics. This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.

dist-epoch 6mo ago

> It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." Meta is working on "personal AI that will empower you". Saying they are firing people because of AI would be a bad marketing move.

matchbok3 6mo ago

Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do. There is nothing "cowardly" about it. Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

bellowsgulch 6mo ago
That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.
sdevonoes 6mo ago
With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you
- matchbok3 6mo ago
  Care to explain? Rather than these jugemental one-offs?
  - sdevonoes 6mo ago
    You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think? The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
    - zimza 6mo ago
      Sadly a lot of people see profit as the only incentive.
    - matchbok3 6mo ago
      Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense. Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?

HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago

Imagine a world where people could just be happy with returns on investments. Even treasury bills. Can't we all just be happy?

spicymaki 6mo ago
If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.
- hn_acc1 6mo ago
  It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
- A_D_E_P_T 6mo ago
  It must be true what Schopenhauer said: "Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become."
- only-one1701 6mo ago
  If you make 900,000 but your rent and healthcare are 850000, how rich are you?

kitsune1 6mo ago

[dead]

ineedasername 6mo ago

It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs". That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.

bsimpson 6mo ago
Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?
asdfman123 6mo ago
It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.

heathrow83829 6mo ago

Literally, what else can they possibly do that hasn't been done? there's just limited opportunity.

asdfman123 6mo ago
Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.
missedthecue 6mo ago
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.

testing22321 6mo ago

> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up. Cowards. To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.

marcosdumay 6mo ago
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter. That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down. That said, IMO they are right...
- testing22321 6mo ago
  > They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter Oh sure, but the MBAs running stuff don’t care about that. Their bonuses are tied to the now, so the system has optimized for that.
jongjong 6mo ago
This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people. They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics. I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked. The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...

ModernMech 6mo ago

Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.