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Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Mic
by rsanek 6mo ago
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
- jiggawatts 6mo agoMicrosoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.
- Macha 6mo agoGoogle and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
- pembrook 6mo agoThink about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc). Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc. Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta. Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
- kaladin-jasnah 6mo ago> No operating systems, no processor design, Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
- hintymad 6mo agoNot familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
- screye 6mo agoMeta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it. Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs. Different scenarios
- lmm 6mo agoThe only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.
- postexitus 6mo agoYou are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.
- canes123456 6mo agoMakes money, implies profit and not revenue
- postexitus 6mo agoWe have revenue breakdown. Where is the profit breakdown?
- squirrellous 6mo agoHa, probably nobody at Google even knows the exact cost of each of those business lines.
- postexitus 6mo agoYep - It's nearly impossible to assign profit to those things - we have X revenue from Android licenses, what's the cost of an android license? Is it all the R&D that goes to UI or hardware research? What's the cost of a Youtube Ad?
- oytis 6mo agoApple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
- fragmede 6mo agoWhatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.
- XorNot 6mo agoExcept those are both done. WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
- oytis 6mo agoNeither needs a lot of innovation, just some maintenance. How many developers do you think Telegram has?
- michaelt 6mo ago> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
- clickety_clack 6mo agoThat’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
- shpx 6mo agoWhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
- disillusioned 6mo agoYeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison. Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years). Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on. Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc. If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail... Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
- snitty 6mo agoApple also has an entire international retail arm.
- pembrook 6mo agoAnd an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution. The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors). Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
- coldtea 6mo ago>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. So? They likely already had too many in 2021. >They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
- pbreit 6mo ago"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft" That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
- seattle_spring 6mo agoHeck, I could build Facebook in a weekend!
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- compiler-guy 6mo agoBoth Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta. But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
- Aurornis 6mo ago> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long. Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies. Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
- Lammy 6mo ago> If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position. Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.
- akdev1l 6mo agoIt was. Not anymore. See: layoffs.
- PaulHoule 6mo agoThe usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.
- philjohn 6mo agoYou're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple). about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels. And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
- tootie 6mo agoMeta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.
- strongpigeon 6mo agoMeta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though
- gundmc 6mo ago> Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_. Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's
- pclmulqdq 6mo agoMost of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.
- rokob 6mo agoThis is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
- __turbobrew__ 6mo agoMicrosoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.
- wrigby 6mo agoI would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.
- disgruntledphd2 6mo agoMeta was over hiring engineers from about 2015, if we're being honest.
- wrigby 6mo agoThis is true, I just didn't want to admit it as someone who joined after 2015 but before 2021...
- disgruntledphd2 6mo agoHonestly, every one after about 2014 was too many (I joined in 2013). There was an old all hands I watched in 2014 where Sheryl talked about how around 8k was the largest they should ever get. More generally I think that while sales scales linearly, engineering and product should probably be sub linear.
- pizlonator 6mo agoI would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than: - a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race - a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
- Barrin92 6mo agochoosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
- Danox 6mo agoNot Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
- postexitus 6mo agoMicrosoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.