It's a little difficult with this article, to clearly understand the chain of responsibility. Does meta employ the vendor that employs the service staff? If so, who really decided to make staff cuts? And how does the union intersect with this?
Unrelated, there are approximately 200 service people cut, making approximately $20/hr. That's roughly $8M a year. Certainly that's a lot of money, but I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers? Or is this related to fewer people being in the offices now, so there's literally less work?
It seems like a compassionate capitalism approach, wherein there's a bit more preference for preserving the jobs for the lower economic class would be worth considering here.
> I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers?
It’s likely that meta sees less issue with removing janitors than engineers. One question they probably asked themselves is: would those missing janitors have any impact on any project or revenue stream ? Would it be hard ton re-hire and re-train them if we need to ?
With engineers, they would probably have to answer « yes » to the impact question and « no » to the re-staff question, while it is really hard to even notice few missing janitors and re-hiring them is trivial.
That sounds like a reasonable point, from a purist business perspective.
I have a tendency to assume the big players like meta have many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, and that many projects aren't very important (or even negative) to the bottom line. Maybe that's not true.
It still sounds like they are taking a low friction path, and a little more effort here might result in a decision that has better social outcome. There's not enough info to say that with real certainty though.
Unless the offices are empty, their kitchen areas are going to get rather grody if nobody is cleaning them up. And I can’t see the admins (if any are left) doing this, nor the engineers. Penny wise and pound foolish.
Many employees are WFH. There's simply less janitorial work needed as a result. Why would you keep paying people to do a job that doesn't need to be done?
I think a lot of people who have never run a company view business this way.
If the discussion was purely about cost (and I assume it's at least partially), then you'd be right that laying off 20 engineers would provide the same impact to the cost bucket.
However, how much revenue is generated on average by each facebook engineer? I can't find an exact amount, [disclaimer: fuzzy math ahead] but looking at their q2 2022 earnings (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...) they employed 83,553 people and had a total revenue of $28,822,000,000 for q2. Presumably each of those employees contribute in some way to the revenue, on average resulting in $344,954 in revenue per employee per quarter assuming that's static (it's not) that's $1.379mm in revenue per employee per year.
How much revenue do janitors cleaning empty offices generate for Meta? Roughly $0, there might be some extrapolated value to a clean office you can indirectly attribute. But regardless, they're an $8mm/year cost with no revenue directly attributed.
So laying off 20 engineers you'd net $8mm/year in cost savings, but lose $27.58mm/year in revenue (hypothetically), leaving you with a $19.58mm net loss compared to laying off 200 janitors with $0 revenue lost. Obviously it doesn't work out 100% this way, but hopefully you this helps you to understand what math the accountants at Meta are doing.
I'm not suggesting that this is the right way to run a company, but it is the way public companies are run. I'm surprised no one in the comment threads so far has considered this, so I felt it necessary to at least mention it.
I know HN hates Facebook (I don't like them either), but isn't a simpler explanation that:
A lot of people are working from home, so there's less use of office facilities so there's less janitorial work needed, and whoever Facebook contracts this cleaning work to, decided to cut some staff.
I just don't see Facebook's savings as significant enough for Zuck to think about this.
I feel like I should tack on to this. I have a buddy that works for one of the companies that Facebook subcontracts with - that is, he goes into a Facebook building everyday and serves Facebook employees.
During the pandemic, Facebook kept paying him and everyone on his department even though there wasn't an office to go into and do work. Everyone just stayed home.
He indicated that Facebook was being more than fair. I feel like eventually Facebook needs to adjust to the "new normal" and these employees need to find different jobs.
Conveniently leaves out how they were all paid full wage during the pandemic despite the office being shut down. The real story here is that the world is becoming too unaffordable for most people, and it’s going to hurt everyone big time.
The article didn't leave the fact they were paid during pandemic out. Perhaps they edited it after you read it? 100% the world's rich are getting a bigger piece of the pie. What is it now 1/10th of 1% own 80% of the wealth? I read today that the post office has around 800,000 employees. I bet none of them are worried about jobs. Too many people there, on Earth, at Faceblock? These are big questions. Who knows how to answer them. I do know that I spend way too much time watching my robots clean, and wonder how long this can go on. ;) Everyone of us should feel blessed if we have a job. Let's act local, and forget about the ultra-wealthy. They won't save anyone. A couple hundred janitors could easily find work at facebook employees' homes in the area cleaning up (if that's what they want). However, likely the employees won't step up to hire them or train them, and likely Mr BJJ won't either.
It's unclear if the jobs were cut by Meta, or the contracting company had their contract value reduced because most offices in Bay Area are working at a reduced capacity. It's likely that the contracting company fired these people.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadUnrelated, there are approximately 200 service people cut, making approximately $20/hr. That's roughly $8M a year. Certainly that's a lot of money, but I wonder why meta would choose to cut this cost and not some other. For example, why not lay off 20 engineers? Or is this related to fewer people being in the offices now, so there's literally less work?
It seems like a compassionate capitalism approach, wherein there's a bit more preference for preserving the jobs for the lower economic class would be worth considering here.
It’s likely that meta sees less issue with removing janitors than engineers. One question they probably asked themselves is: would those missing janitors have any impact on any project or revenue stream ? Would it be hard ton re-hire and re-train them if we need to ?
With engineers, they would probably have to answer « yes » to the impact question and « no » to the re-staff question, while it is really hard to even notice few missing janitors and re-hiring them is trivial.
I have a tendency to assume the big players like meta have many pockets of inefficiency with respect to engineering headcount, and that many projects aren't very important (or even negative) to the bottom line. Maybe that's not true.
It still sounds like they are taking a low friction path, and a little more effort here might result in a decision that has better social outcome. There's not enough info to say that with real certainty though.
This is assumed. The hard part is finding them.
So instead Facebook will have programmers fixing shelves and yanky doors.
So instead of finding anywhere between one E6 or a dozen or so E5s that are simply coasting, they decided to cut 200 who does actual work.
If the discussion was purely about cost (and I assume it's at least partially), then you'd be right that laying off 20 engineers would provide the same impact to the cost bucket.
However, how much revenue is generated on average by each facebook engineer? I can't find an exact amount, [disclaimer: fuzzy math ahead] but looking at their q2 2022 earnings (https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...) they employed 83,553 people and had a total revenue of $28,822,000,000 for q2. Presumably each of those employees contribute in some way to the revenue, on average resulting in $344,954 in revenue per employee per quarter assuming that's static (it's not) that's $1.379mm in revenue per employee per year.
How much revenue do janitors cleaning empty offices generate for Meta? Roughly $0, there might be some extrapolated value to a clean office you can indirectly attribute. But regardless, they're an $8mm/year cost with no revenue directly attributed.
So laying off 20 engineers you'd net $8mm/year in cost savings, but lose $27.58mm/year in revenue (hypothetically), leaving you with a $19.58mm net loss compared to laying off 200 janitors with $0 revenue lost. Obviously it doesn't work out 100% this way, but hopefully you this helps you to understand what math the accountants at Meta are doing.
I'm not suggesting that this is the right way to run a company, but it is the way public companies are run. I'm surprised no one in the comment threads so far has considered this, so I felt it necessary to at least mention it.
A lot of people are working from home, so there's less use of office facilities so there's less janitorial work needed, and whoever Facebook contracts this cleaning work to, decided to cut some staff.
I just don't see Facebook's savings as significant enough for Zuck to think about this.
During the pandemic, Facebook kept paying him and everyone on his department even though there wasn't an office to go into and do work. Everyone just stayed home.
He indicated that Facebook was being more than fair. I feel like eventually Facebook needs to adjust to the "new normal" and these employees need to find different jobs.
The angel that fb is bad to people who work for them is something I didn't came across.
And it doesn't make sense anyway. You don't want unhappy service stuff as it is a security risk to underpay them while having a ton of access.
Pretty much ANYWHERE ELSE has a lower cost of living and if it's a Red State, far more jobs.
I left despite being born and raised in California. Never coming back.