It's different because nobody is in charge of snail mail which is merely a technology. Internet platforms have designs, incentives and people in charge for each aspect of their operation. They can chose what to amplify or not. It's been a convenient excuse of internet platforms to characterize themselves as generic technologies that nobody is responsible for or has ownership of, which isn't true.
The equivalent to snail mail is something like https, smtp or ssl, not FB.
I’m not really sure if I agree with this argument against Facebook. It’s true that Facebook had a part in this, but the same can be said for any kind of media for any given historical conflict.
A few years before these genocides, western media were praising Facebook for its role in the uprisings in the Middle East. It was seen as a force for good, allowing people to self organise against dictatorial regimes.
Hell, back in the day the printing press pretty much brought down all of the power structures at the time, because suddenly people had more free access to information.
I think there are some pretty meaningful differences here where Facebook has been repeatedly made aware of these problems prior to the fact and has consistently responded in the exact same manner by refusing to take any meaningful action and only trying to solve things in so much as it is a PR problem for them.
It wasn’t even indifference, they actively undercut and mislead all of the supposed checks and balances they assured everyone were enough both internally and externally. When confronted they have lied to their internal teams, they have lied to lawmakers, they have lied to investors. It is always the same response. There is no room left to leave this as a “mistake that fell through the cracks”.
It’s a pattern of behaviour that now spans many years and many incidents. All it has shown is that they appear both incapable and unwilling of reform and should be treated as such.
Yes, but evil people started cutting the internet and the show had to continue (more restricted) on other stages. They learned nothing from Cambridge Analityca scandal.
You don't have to like the man but, I think it's pretty clear that running any global social media company is miserable and filled with impossible decisions + people who will hate you no matter what choices you make.
It sounds like many social media CEOs would agree that it's like getting punched in the stomach every day
I had that for a while, thought it was bad till one day the giant boot got taken off and discovered it was hiding a rotten diseased foot. Now I dream about the good times when there was a boot on that foot.
What argument? I don't know why he does it. But I don't envy the role and I'm saying I think that his 'feels like getting punched in the stomach' statement is probably a true statement about what his role feels like.
He's too busy attending private gladiator-like fights (which the article mentions, btw). I know the FB pay is pretty damn good, but I guess it still sucks to see your CEO doing that while your job with the company might be on the line.
It is sad but also was inevitable. The market could only sustain $150,000 a year salaries for grads fresh out of college for so long before someone somewhere along the way ran out of money.
With rates going up there are places besides tech people can hope to park their money, the VC funding is going to disappear and with it some of the distortion of the market for developers. Just a reminder though this happened before in the 2000s with the dotcom crash, things worked out the world kept on spinning, society didn't collapse and many engineers were still able to eventually get new jobs and provide for their families. It will happen again.
Facebook stopped burning VC money a long time ago. They've been wildly profitable for years. Their success is largely because of paying high salaries to attract some of the best people, not in spite of doing that.
The real issue seems to be that they're losing $3bn a quarter building the Metaverse (eg Reality Labs) at the same time as losing ad revenue because of things like Apple's antitracking changes and failing to innovate Instagram allowing competitors like TikTok to eat a big chunk of their market.
"Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook got fat from advertising and monetizing the worst aspects of social media. Does that require the "best people?" What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?
Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments...
But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool.
And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.
I get the desire to look down on leetcode or on Facebook generally but do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They have billions of customers using their products all the time. This isn't done by useless people who know only LC and office politics. They have to solve technical problems that most other software engineers don't even know exist. Having incredibly influential open source projects (React, PyTorch) is just a cherry on top of everything else they're doing from a software engineering point of view.
> do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers?
They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.
That’s beyond question and if you are asking it you’re fooling yourself. You can take a look at the output of their engineers as an example (React, Native, Cassandra). We are talking billions. Your run of the mill software company isn’t building this kind of tech. You can hate on Meta all you want. But let’s not deny the facts.
I think it's a decent question, assessing tech talent is hard, oftentimes, building great things like React or Cassandra is also a matter of opportunity, working at big companies means you have hard problems that require you to spend time designing such systems. It's hard to say that others couldn't have similarly solved it, or even done it better.
That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.
Could the fact that they have higher salaries have anything to do with it? Offer higher salaries and you'll attract stronger talent, regardless of the leetcode hoops they have to jump through.
This mischaracterization of the discussion is curious, but it is certain that no two companies have the same problems in need of solving. Of course certain technologies could only emerge out of a place like Facebook. Only a place like Facebook would have a need, particularly with respect to resources, to pour R&D into these technologies to solve their particular problems.
But that's not what we're talking about. The question posed was if Facebook's good developers are better than good developers at run-of-the-mill companies. That is not clear. People at Facebook, with an average tenure of only 2.3 years, have almost certainly also worked at run-of-the-mill companies so that already suggests that you can find good developers all over the place.
That developers at Facebook solved problems Facebook had doesn't prove no other developer could also solve Facebook's problems if they also worked at Facebook. Solving problems is literally the job of a developer, so it seems highly unlikely that all other developers outside of Facebook cannot also solve problems. Of course developers are only going to solve the problems in front of them.
The projects you cite don't require 100s of FTE engineers.
Due to the absurd amount of SWEs on Facebook, surely someone or a team happen to working there will score a huge FOSS hit sooner or later just due to the numbers.
Like I said, the open source stuff is a nice bonus. The main testament to Facebook's engineering level is that they're successfully shipping several of the largest scale software products ever to billions of people. And you certainly need a large engineering headcount for that.
So there are no office politics or bad work environments outside FAANG? I've worked in both FAANG and run of the mill tech shops, and I vastly prefer the professionalism and less politics in FAANG environments. YMMV.
> "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary?
Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that.
> What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?
See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that.
Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.
Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice.
I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.
Not that it matters, but I interviewed at FB nearly a decade ago.
While the process was a trainwreck that I'd never entertain again, I will admit that while on campus, I met and talked to some really, really smart people.
I just remember being kinda sad that all this talent was being wasted on ads and holding attention.
Back to the point, I think anyone who has been there could attest it's not all just leetcode studiers...well, maybe some amount, but they employ a lot of really smart people.
Any metric you like. Facebook is massive and has a huge range of people. There'll be people who sit in the top 0.1% for literally every method of ranking them you can dream up.
I mean, despite my huge ethical disagreements with FB, they have successfully built one of the largest platforms (the largest by active users??) in the world. Scaling at this side is very, very difficult.
Not to mention creating some of the widest-used OSS libraries on the web.
Plus, it’s one of the few platforms our grandparents can use, and we all know how hard it can be to make software that older folks like to use.
So they are clearly not hiring terrible devs. (Well, sure some of them are, but that’s the case everywhere)
I can agree with all of that but still question how it requires so many supposedly “best” engineers. Facebook won the network effect lottery years ago, creating (or falling backwards into) an addictive platform that people join because everyone they know joined, not because their platform has obvious technical advantages over competitors. They scaled the platform organically over time because they had to, not because of some genius master plan.
My parents successfully use iPhones and iPads and GMail, along with Facebook. I can’t say they “like to use” Facebook, but if they want to see photos of their kids and grandkids they have to use it. I don’t know anyone who enjoys using FB, including my own kids. It seems users see it as a necessary evil — where else can they go?
> The market could only sustain $150,000 a year salaries for grads fresh out of college for so long before someone somewhere along the way ran out of money.
It seems a bit arbirtrary to pick high salaries as the reason for it. And to not blame spending billions on unprofitable projects like the metaverse, or having their profits affected by Apple's restrictions on tracking, or the steady decline in user experience. or the general image of the company being affected by a long list of scandals... <<< I would blame these factors before I point at graduates who earn above the market average.
I'd wager that astronomical housing costs are the biggest factor in these absurd salaries, followed by healthcare.
In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.
> I'd wager that astronomical housing costs are the biggest factor in these absurd salaries, followed by healthcare.
The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are also plenty of places with low rent that have higher tech salaries than places with higher rents (compare essentially any US city to Toronto).
> In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class.
At least in California, there's not that much overlap between tech company investors and landowners. The housing ownership is much more distributed, and often to "mom and pop" landlords. This is the flow of money in Silicon Valley (expressed in a slightly comic manner): https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1400165321609199620
It's a bit different in other locations with more consolidation in land ownership, but even there, I doubt there's much overlap (I have less knowledge of housing dynamics outside California, because they actually change, so I'm just guessing here).
> Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before.
I think it's actually both - when tech companies enter a new town, they tend to hire boatloads of people, placing pressure on local housing markets, and thus raising prices - and landlords or people willing to sell and relocate to take a quick and easy profit know that the new class of people has substantial money to pay.
What I was referring to was stuff like [1] or [2] - investors with no real option to park "dumb money" (aka funds that are structured to invest into low-ish risk markets) have discovered that soaking up residential real estate is a good way to invest that money.
Those projects aren't unprofitable because production costs are too high. The projects are unprofitable & failing because Facebook is struggling to execute on their grand plans, and are having their traditional core business eaten by a more nimble upstart competitor (TikTok).
I'm sure FB would love to be able to spend 2x on salaries if it came with a guarantee of turning the metaverse into a successful business venture, or of grabbing all the attention hours currently flowing to TikTok.
It could very well be that they didn't pay enough. My hypothesis for why tech pays so well is because success depends very heavily on the quality of the talent, and a few people can be the difference between billions of dollars in lost money vs. a machine that makes billions of dollars in annual recurring income.
It's hard to claim that a project failed because its budget was too big.
> Metaverse could be the next big thing and the long shot facebook needs.
I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.
Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.
Couldn't agree more. The headset at $400 will be a high barrier to entry. If the metaverse was built on top of the smartphone then it would get most probably pernetrate the market faster.
have you ever heard of the concept of iterations? do you remember how the first mobile phone looked like? do you remember how the first computer looked like? first laptop ? first electric car ?
that's the point of R&D and long shot, if it was possible already it's not a long shot :/
The headset is the reason why they are doing this in the first place. Nobody expected people to buy a $300 iPhone in 2007 or a $500 iPad in 2011, but when they did they gave Apple money-printing machine that can also bankrupt competitors.
Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before making a good product.
Oculus is the one to watch for Meta and it why they are betting on the AR glasses, not just only VR which everyone is missing. But it's not just Meta though, it is Google (thanks to North), Apple, Microsoft, etc all going for that.
We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.
Nobody bought an iPhone or iPad because of Facebook. You could also install the Facebook app on that, but you could also use your notebook or your desktop pc or your cheap Android phone or whatnot to use Facebook. Most people already had some "Facebook ready" device at home.
Nobody will buy an Oculus headset if its main/sole use is the Metaverse.
Sure, but almost nobody uses Facebook on their PCs anymore. Most Meta's users and revenues come from smartphones, which have an ecosystem controlled by Apple or Google.
Zuck is betting that more people will use VR in the future, and if you believe that hypothesis then it makes sense to invest infinite money in making sure your company becomes the Apple of VR instead of the Nokia.
How wisely that infinite VR money is being spent is another matter.
Name one new product that Facebook built from scratch (did not acquire), launched, and made a sustained success of since their original social network.
The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate.
I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach. Maybe they’re seeing that as a backup when VR fails, but the longer they leave it the bigger the risk someone else takes that market.
> Name one new product that Facebook built from scratch (did not acquire), launched, and made a sustained success of since their original social network.
Yeah agreed on payments. I kept asking this question when I was there in 2013. They had payments licenses everywhere and just fluffed it completely in a quixotic attempt to put ads in messenger.
Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.
Yes, the comments pointing out the supposedly too high salaries for tech workers are always hilarious + 150k is really not anything crazy wrt COL in large US cities
I've never understood that viewpoint. It's equivalent to claiming a cashier is underpaid because $7.50/hr is a tiny percentage of the sales that go through their register.
The world doesn't work like that. You're paid based on the cost of replacing you, not the value you deliver.
The more precise title from the referenced article from two days ago:
> Facebook is conducting 'quiet layoffs' by urging managers to label a certain number of workers as underperforming. The moves may lead to thousands of job cuts.
It's actually a very tricky question. If the bonuses, perks, etc. for everyone are lowered, such that those at the low end cross the threshold of wanting to leave, then it's probably legal. If people at that low end are singled out for poor treatment, then it might be "constructive dismissal" and thus illegal in most jurisdictions. Facebook is probably treading as close to that line as they can, or (even more likely) stepping just a bit over and relying on lawyers to keep it from becoming too expensive. This is the barrier that class-action suits are meant to overcome, BTW.
Does Facebook spend any sort of money on R&D? I just can't fathom a company that once had a near trillion dollar market cap, not spending any of their resources to try to find their next big revenue stream. They should have been able to pivot to a plan B, (or C,D,E... etc). If you point to their 3d ventures, well, I've never seen it in person, so they are doing a lousy job of marketing it.
What?! They built a phone, copied or bought every social media they could, invented lots of tech (DB, react-native…), they’re spending everything on the meta verse
The meta verse will be monetized the same way Apple monetizes the App Store and anything else that goes on through their platform. A percentage cut of all transactions.
That’s why a lot of companies are trying to make the meta verse work. If they’re successful in owning the meta verse they now have a nice big walled garden on which to extract continual rent from.
It’s also very much not what the average person wants so we’ll see how it goes
And they are doing everything they can to remain such. They have established themselves a reputation of a company which is shutting down services left and right, so it makes very little sense now too try any of their new offerings.
But many of the diversifications help cement the leading position of selling ads. Chrome, Android, Youtube are all critical to the continued success of ads.
It's even more direct. The diversifications are Google Ads, in a very real way. Google financial reporting splits Google ads revenue in an important way that hopefully allows people to see this. Total revenue of Google AdSense, on the non-Google internet, is about 7 billion. Nice, but Youtube ads is ~10% less than that ... and Google's own properties get 5 times more than that in ad income. Ads income from non-Google properties is called "Google network", ads income from Google properties is called "Google Search & other" in the financial reporting.
That's not even counting money someone actually paid to those diversifications, no ads involved. That's another 10-15% of the total ad revenue.
Google's internal websites, taken together, are just shy of 85% of their total ad revenue, and 90% of their total revenue. Google does not make that much money from people browsing the internet, it makes money from people browsing Google. Although not split out, it is widely assumed Google search is a whale here. But how much exactly? Not clear. People keep saying it's going down for a decade now. And of course, a business 1/10th as good as Google search is still a great business.
Yes, Google Ads receives the dollars, but it's the "diversifications" that "only cost money" that brings them in. Numbers like this make one thing clear, 7/8th of AdSense is a way to optimise ad income on Google's own websites, and only 1/8th of AdSense is an actual Ad Network. Google is not the biggest Ad Network, despite their reputation, by a very wide margin. Google is the biggest "TV Network".
So saving money on diversifications as a whole ... I'm going to say this is not what I'd like Alphabet to do. Now saving money on specific efforts, sure. But, frankly, the way to grow Google, even their ad business itself, it to spend more money on the diversifications.
RealityLabs is a $10billion initiative with only about $2 in revenue (Quest 2 headsets come from here).
RealityLabs Research is a large component and indeed the major R&D investment. This was spun out during the 2021Q4 earnings call when the different sectors of the company were reported separately for the first time, following the name change to Meta.
Think the OP is say - over the long term not since the recent somewhat desperate pivot.
Similar to sibling comments: copying your competitors is not R&D, and neither is building a software library that’s an incremental improvement on an existing OSS library.
RL has been there since 2019 [1]. Aside from the previously-mentioned (and not necessarily incremental) React, CassandraDB, PyTorch, etc there is work in terms of egocentric data which is far larger than existing datasets [2], even more fundamental research related to mathematical optimization [3], and of course FAIR (used to be Facebook AI Research), which is now part of RL-R, who recently published work on language models [4].
It’s not all that well advertised but there is a lot of research that gets open-sourced so it’s a bit (understandably) naive to call it copied or incremental work.
A bit off topic but it has to do with R&D, how twitter invest almost 2B in R&D and there are no visible new features with that investment (well this year it seems that they started to add new features, but they doesn't worth 2B, edit tweet, I saw something with gifs?). I'm not a twitter user, so I cannot 100% sure but to me it sees like the same twitter back en 2010 or 2012 (when I first used twitter.
So my questions, is the R&D money invested to keep engineers happy? I mean they can for sure experiment there without any worries.
amazon manager here: it's the same with us. our director gave told us to manage out more people this year to hit our revised headcount targets for next year. there are no layoffs, just larger-than-normal targets for managing out people. I talked with friends across various orgs and the targets seem to range between 10% to 25% for different teams (as opposed to 5% for normal years).
Amazon is a big company. Need to preface that with what department.
E.g. Alexa might be getting headcount trimmed. But other areas might see influx of investment. some Amazon teams had reduced PIP over the last year as well.
This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.
It could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc.
Right - it's actually far worse than outright firing or laying off people. As in, genuinely harmful to people from a psychological (and hence physical) point of view. All so the company can save a few dollars, and hit certain quarterly targets a bit sooner.
That's why there's a name for it (since long before the "quiet" meme), and legal precedents that are supposed to prevent companies from doing this (if any of them would take heed, which of course they won't):
So the question to our friend thrwawayacc up above is -- OK, so this is what the director told you to do (and thanks for for sharing, BTW). But are you actually going to -- go through with what you were told to do? Are are you going to tell these people at the director level some version of:
I understand your concerns, and the financial position that the company in. But at the end of the day, this isn't the right way to go about conducting what everyone can plainly see it as -- a layoff. Ultimately, if we go this route, it will be harmful to the company's reputation and long-term growth -- but more importantly, it will cause genuine harm to people who, until now, have been considered part of the Amazon Family.
If Corporate insists on going this route, there's no way I can stop them of course. However, for my part, in my role, I will not be be able to participate in this extremely ill-advised course of action.
Sounds like you're suggesting to him that he gets himself put on the "managed out" list. I get your point completely, and agree with it to an extent. But if I put myself in that position, what would I do? I'd like to think I'd take the honorable approach you suggested, but I've also got bills to pay, kids to support, plans I want to achieve. Getting myself "managed out" at the expense of all of those things would be hugely problematic.
If you're a manager at Amazon (which is already known for being barely a level above sweat shops in terms of employee treatment), and even more if you're part of their tech (which, if you're posting on HN, you most likely are), you're making so much money that if you can't afford to spend 6 months without a job, you're frankly irresponsible with your cash.
Getting myself "managed out" at the expense of all of those things would be hugely problematic.
Agreed - and corporate life often gets that way.
But another way of looking at the payoff matrix might be: "I've got kids to support - and that means having parents they can trust, and look up to in this chaotic and morally ambivalent world. Even if it means we might have to work a year or two more before being able to retire more comfortably, or we might not get to take that vacation to Tulum this year."
>I've got kids to support - and that means having parents they can trust, and look up to in this chaotic and morally ambivalent world.
that's a high level of Maslow's hierarchy there, especially in the U.S with few support nets heading into what will probably be a really bad recession.
Being psychologically stressed out at work is not in and of itself hostile work environment. Read the US law section in the link you posted. The employee actions have to violate preestablished rights or part of thr employee's contract. Not merely ramping up work expectations and duties to keep your job.
What if you are asked to do superhuman efforts, surely there is some limit no? Read this absolutely massive document and architect an implementation by tomorrow. Get it right! DOE doesn't accept mistakes!
There's a difference between "being" stressed out -- and your employer taking specific actions to make you stressed out so that you quit.
Ramping up work expectations
With the specific intent of causing the employee to quit, you meant to say. This in fact fits precisely with the language of the California Supreme Court in the section you referred to.
That would be “constructive termination”. It’s too bad the deck is stacked against labor such that it is so hard to actually prove. But that’s why I keep a detailed journal of my activities and make copies of the overwhelmingly positive peer reviews I receive at performance reviews.
Yep, it's exactly what I'm saying. Managing out people is the kind of thing that ought to be punished by law (and in many sensible countries, is). Just fire people.
It doesn't have to be this evil (although I have no reason to believe it won't at Amazon).
A good manager can do some 'managing out' simply by communicating to her team that there are reduced opportunities for promotion or new projects coming up, and that they may be layoffs. At any time in any workplace a certain fraction of people are actively looking for a new job, and another, usually much larger fraction are open to a move, might be hearing from recruiters, etc. A manager can create a mood of "if you have a decent offer, you should take it" without making people's lives miserable.
If you put corporate interests over the individual ones, your point sounds reasonable.
I'd personally prefer equality in such conversations. I believe corporate can survive with mediocre performers. Just like many of us live with not so great companies we work in everyday.
I recall reading somewhere that this is the way orgs get rid of tenured workers. They can’t be fired outright, so the org creates a lot of little micro-aggressions that cause them to yearn for release from the torment.
In the US, there's no federal law on constructive dismissal so there are variations, however, generally, constructive dismissal is not always the same as unfair dismissal, although we most often hear the term come up in conversations about an unfair constructive dismissal.
There are also a significant number of ways you can 'manage someone out' which are not any more 'constructive dismissal' than 'quiet quitting' is 'constructive resignation'.
For example, reducing flexibility in things like lateness policies, shift swaps, holidays, etc. is likely to be unpopular, but as long as it's applied fairly across all employees, would not likely be found as unfair, but may well result in people quitting.
I've long felt it was a pity that (in most places) employees and employers could not just have honest discussions about career path, suitability, and deliberate planned exits which are a smooth transition for everyone involved.
Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they need out of a job and folks are forced to just look for something better and then announce they're leaving with a 2 week notice.
Ironically, companies spare no expense when it comes to turgid, grinding performance eval exercises but ALWAYS kick honest discussions to the side.
At least facebook, it seems (?), is just cutting a bunch of folks rapidly rather than doing stuff like "managing out". That's better than the typical corporate 2-face behaviors.
Employment is a partially adversarial relationship. Both parties want to get the most of out their counterparties, while giving the least (or, at least, there's enough people and companies with such mindset, that it defines the game). Hence, honesty on either side doesn't pay off. It's smarter to play your cards close to the vest.
That’s never been true in my decade of employment. You just have to avoid working for companies/people with no ethic. I personally always avoid American companies for exemple because, well to put it frankly, American employment culture is trash.
Big companies offer packages when laying people off, n weeks of full salary once you are gone with m weeks before of time to find a new role internally or externally. This does not happen when you are fired for cause.
Most people have a notice period so that’s normal. If you are ‘lucky’ you have garden leave so you can’t work/need to go to the office during this period
The law (in many places) gives protection to workers being laid off which it doesn't give to those being fired for inadequate performance. But when a company can change a target value and huge number of people are fired instead of being laid off people need to push back.
Is it any surprise, when the law creates an incentive like this for constructive dismissal, that constructive dismissal becomes the standard practice (even if it is supposed to be illegal)?
“Manage out” sounds suspiciously like “constructive dismissal” to me. Not only unethical but illegal to varying degrees across many jurisdictions. Could get pricey!
There's a massive difference between constructive dismissal and managing out. Managing out can often be as simple as a manager saying "Hey, your performance isn't great your not on course to get any bonus or raise this year" and the employee deciding "Fuck this, I'm off". Instead of in normal times, where you're trying to retain people and the conversation is often "Hey, you're making really good progress but there's just a few areas we need to work on which is why your compensation isn't quite where you would like it".
There's a thousand reasons people stay or leave companies and just slightly adjusting how much you're working to keep people can often be the difference in the attrition rate.
Do I understand correctly, you are saying that 5-20% of your employees will quit after having a conversation simply noting that he or she will not be receiving a bonus or raise this year, or similar? That’s really quite tenuous, especially in this economy.
I believe with the way amazon comp in structured, not getting a bonus or a raise is actually a pay cut for many people, because they have vesting equity that is offset by front loaded cash bonuses.
Even small pay cuts are pretty good at getting people to quit. (uh particularly talented ones that have many options ...)
As a minor anecdote, I'm a FAANG SWE and if I was told I wouldn't be receiving a raise OR bonus this year, I'd absolutely start looking for other work. Most FAANG employees get recruiters reaching out daily, the thought of greener pastures is always on their mind.
Don't flatter yourself. We're all getting recruiters reaching out daily. They're mostly ignored because 99.999% of the time it's a lateral move - doing the same thing at a different place. Not interested.
If anything, being a FAANG SWE puts you at a disadvantage for ever having stability. Financially risky startups would love to have you, but a lot of industry verticals simply won't take a look at you because they figure you wouldn't be interested or you're perceived as a flight risk. Thing is, if you plan to retire from this profession those are the kinds of jobs you're going to need.
Unless you think it's flattering to have recruiters reaching out, I don't see when I was flattering myself.
Based on your understanding, if other companies perceived me as being a flight risk because I'd worked in FAANG (?) I probably wouldn't be interested in them either, so it sounds like the system's working as expected.
I think it highly depends on the current economic environment. During the past 10+ years of bull market, suddenly losing your raise or bonus would immediately cause people to start looking for a new job. When a recession is on the horizon, with expected job market tightening, people are more likely to accept it, hold on to whatever job they have, and ride it out.
It’s not just that. It’s usually a combination of low bonuses/stock rewards, minimal raises, no promotions, uninteresting/less meaningful work, and less effort put into coaching them. Basically all of the stuff managers should be doing normally.
If someone’s on the receiving end of all of those things they’ll usually leave sooner or later. Who wouldn’t want to?
That was just one example of managing out that is clearly no where near "constructive dismissal". There are lots and lots of levers that management can pull to either reduce or increase attrition, and lots of them are about the employer choosing not to give extra support rather than taking away the basics. The normal attrition rate at an average company is already 10%, so pushing it a bit up isn't particularly difficult, especially at these big tech companies that traditionally have done a lot to try and keep people.
Well, if they didn't get a bonus for underperforming/not hitting the target, that's totally fine. Which is what is happening here, the target bar simply got raised.
As for an employee quitting on their own accord before the bonus dispersal date (which they otherwise hit the bar to receive), every tech company I worked for or have friends working at, they have pretty fair systems for dealing with it.
Generally, there is a cutoff date (which is usually about 4-6 months before the bonus disbursal/announcement date). If you leave at any point after that date, but before the bonus announcement/disbursal date, you still get your bonus in full. If you quit before the cutoff date, it gets prorated based on how many days you were an employee between the previous cut-off date and the upcoming one. There is also usually an extra nuance in math for people who just started working at the company and been there less than a year, but that detail is largely irrelevant.
For a specific example, at MSFT, they had a cut-off date somewhere mid-june. The bonus got announced early september and disbursed in mid-second half of september. If you quit at any point after that date in June, you get your full bonus. If you quit exactly 2 months before the cutoff date, lets, say mid April, you get full_bonus*10/12.
Constructive dismissal issimpky convincing someone to leave without the burden to your cowardice and the company’s revenue that firing entails. You are playing semantic games - your described practice is not something different.
It is dishonesty in the service of profit, the simplest type of corruption available. Euphemisms are always just euphemisms.
I work at AWS on EC2. It's really not bad. Very competent coworkers, technical leadership, plenty of principal engineers willing to help... Oncall's tough, and we definitely need more engineers but otherwise, you learn a lot
I also work at AWS on EC2 and agree with this assessment. Amazon is large and the culture varies across organizations. I’ve worked at multiple big tech companies and AWS EC2, while not perfect, is the best place I’ve been part of.
Lol, ex-Amazonian here, please cut the crap. EC2 is infamous for being one of the worst orgs in all AWS. Nasty stack ranking, abusing SDEs on visas, hiring L4s to fire them later, I personally known at least 3 folks that were let go from EC2 (Vpc) and then got into Google and Apple. Give me a break, there is a reason why recruiters have a hard time filling the headcount over there. And on top of that, ton of legacy code.
Maybe things changed in the last 3-6 months? But from what I have gathered, from people just talking in slack channels, Blind, and friends who work there, is not good at all. People have received emails from L4s having nervous breakdowns after being bullied by managers and peers. If you want , you can search your mailbox.
Again not sure if you are talking about dataplane. I met many people there (even many new grad L4s in fact), who are very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do in that team.
I haven't seen any such email. It definitely can be a lot of work at times, esp around re:invent, and I'm sure there are those with bad experience.
I'm just saying, it's worth giving a shot. You might like it. If you don't, switch orgs/teams. You can switch just a couple months after joining if it doesn't work out for you. I switched from my last org quite quickly cause while I had good work life balance, the work was just so boring.
The thing is , if you are on a visa the "you might as well give it a chance" doesn't work, does it? Because those people are usually the ones exploited by their managers, as they have leverage over them (when you are on a visa and get laid off , you only have 60 days to find another company that is willing to sponsor your visa). You are ignoring the pressure and mental burden that L4s on visas go through with unfair pivot processes, etc. I'm glad you liked your time there, but if you dive deeper, and ask around, you will see how many of these people are having a hard time.
In most large companies hiring and firing people are totally different, and rarely ever talk to each other. This is why in most companies if the top management wants to make a big layoff, they first let go the 'recruiting staff', and then work from there.
In smaller layoffs, I'd imagine they'd continue to fill in open positions, while eliminating positions they think they don't need.
There's also another thing where they want to fill in people where they think need for their newer/hot/important project which they think will give them better profits. And cut people/shut down projects which they think are not important/profitable.
Two of these bozos contacted me on a personal address that I have never used for anything work-related, but does happen to be the email I have registered as my Amazon shopping account. When I wrote back and told them to stop spamming my personal address that had nothing to do with tech work, they said it wasn't their fault, because they had just bought the email list from someone else who had done the work to cross-reference my personal email address with my professional identity. As if that would give me any more trust in them as a company!? To me it just made me even more resolute never to work at any of those "big tech" outfits. None of them seem to care one bit about people's privacy.
I’m not an expert at how facebook diversifies its income, but their R&D has produced a lot of insanely good outcome in engineering area. Meta ML, React, React Native, etc, howbare they not building income over these tools? Vercel or laravel seems to be making huge amount of money by building dev tools around their frameworks.
Regardless of what they have done, I hope everyone affected is okay
Yeah that make sense, but still a developer tooling aspect is huge and they can surely branch to cloud and other stuff as well across the stuff that they had found?
People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.
It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
They literally went on a hiring binge from 2020-2021, so... in my opinion, yes. Sure there's bleak outlook, but you have no idea how many people I know from different companies who jumped ship from some 2nd-3rd tier co to work for the big five or Zoom-like start up during COVID.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
>>35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience.
Indian here and can confirm.
This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India.
Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars.
Software on the other does demand training on bleeding edge tech almost every few months. We also tend to put lot of smart work[mathematically inclined work] than doctors.
After moving to US they still resent software people. It's not just money. They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people[due to their degree requiring long and expensive academic training] compared to engineers in general. Which isn't true.
And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel insecure that there are bigger things which they could have been a part of, and feel they kind of (bad)-lucked into studying medicine[which happens to be a expensive academic course to finish, and also take more time].
I once showed a relative who is also a doctor using logic programming to solve puzzles like Sudoku etc. He kind of expressed disappointment he was stuck in a profession that doesn't allow this sort of everyday involvement in solving problems, or building things. The money part just adds to their resentment.
I reckon a part of this is the relatively relaxed learning curve to coding (not software engineering). As someone who taught himself how to code last year, I can tell you that it wasn’t particularly challenging to put together a product that the average lay person would call “software/app”. So much of the work has been abstracted away by actual engineers.
I can imagine how someone who doesn’t understand the complexity involved in scaling software or managing millions of users would think of coding as “easy money”.
Its certainly much easier to make money quickly - you can go from a complete newbie to a fairly well paid frontend dev in under 2 years. A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
If the deal is making money there are better ways than even coding, you better off working a job in Gulf, or learning something like stock trading well. Coding just happens to be placeholder for a range of jobs that pay well currently.
>>A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
MBBS is just a basic diploma. In the first 50% academic time of MBBS they just teach you how a healthy body works, because often the biggest confusion in treating a patient is to know what's is normal and what is a disease. This is followed by a assorted set of courses which touch upon basic disease-cure scenarios. And some small introduction to chemicals and their side effects on biology.
These people basically spend something like 7 years just to get here. MD is a different deal in India. Because the academics aren't really all that great and its just a detailed introduction into some organ speciality for just 2 years. Most people even here just go by established clinical practices in hospitals(a.k.a cya work)
In all the actual training is just 3 years. Its not an engineers fault that their profession is just trivia, and if-else scenarios for the most most part. This is where the resentment part comes in. Most engineers, or atleast the serious ones which make good salaries have gone too far both intellectually and in productivity in those 10 years.
The vast majority of doctors in India work in their own private clinics earning little money, treating small time fevers and stomach aches because that is the maximum you can do with that kind of training. You will be shocked just how far behind they are generally in the knowledge. Most will struggle to give you basic fitness and nutrition advice.
> They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people
Are they aware of, or perpetuate the stereotype of the CS/IT student who memorizes braindumps to pass certification exams or post simple homework questions online or on StackOverflow, asking others to do the work for them?
As an aside, I work with a lot of engineers/PhD researcher types who think they are the smartest, nothing could ever be their fault, their systems etc are fine and it must be something simple that some other idiot messed up...
Those are not the type of engineers they resent either.
They resent literally the top engineers. Because they think they did better in entrance exams. Only geniuses are supposed to be doctors, and they also paid more fees and spent more time studying. So why aren't they making more money than those engineers?
> Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors.
My uncle is one of the leading lung specialists in the country. When Covid happened, his expertise was crucial in setting up the processes and best practices for dealing with everything from patient isolation to treatment protocols.
It was because of hundreds of doctors like him that literally millions of lived were saved.
do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
Do you think your uncle’s expertise is worth more than the developers in Taiwan who set up the contract tracing system that prevented tens of millions of people from getting COVID?
>>do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
All due respects to your uncle and his life's work. But I was there during peak COVID in hospitals all round. My dad was a post operative patient. Doctors had totally vanished from the scene. They had quite literally dumped all the work on junior nurses, not even the senior ones. I even got abused by one doctor for just asking how my dad was doing, and this on a call, not even a face to face appointment.
Right after this mess, where nurses didn't have a remote clue how to deal with complicated cases and we were making it up on guess work, because the 'experts' were too high sitting on their Ivory towers to even be bothered when patients were dropping dead like flies. What followed next was the worst sort of testing and consultation bills. I have seen people cry outside the gates and sitting on chairs. Much to the heartlessness and carelessness of these people.
There's a reason why so many people just don't out right respect or appreciate doctors in India. Most doctors have a very exaggerated sense of self worth and capabilities. They think they are gods and must treated as such because they think their academic training is long and expensive. For this very reason they think they have a right to indulge in price gouging. They also harbour deep resentment towards professions like engineering where there is more intellectual heavylifting work involved than their own profession will ever arrive at.
In all most doctors are just angry with their own choices for opting into medicine, they resent people richer than them. They resent professions better than them. Its a concentration point for sadist people, who go to any extent to humiliate others and indulge in price gouging.
The funny part is that most of the dumbass crypto initiatives are largely in profit (mostly by dumping their tokens on retail investors) while the hyped unicorn startups can’t make a dime in profit.
On that issue I've never seen a LinkedIn message from a Tiktok recruiter, or heard messages about mass hiring. Anyone know if they operating on a much lower staff count?
Isn't it made in China? (edit: I know very little about social networks outside of twitter and finding security holes everywhere in FB back in the day because their engineering was pretty poor).
> There are about 1,000 engineers currently working for TikTok outside of China, nearly half of them based in Mountain View, California.
> “To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.
Because the timing is too early they are having to venture into mismatched products to support the endeavour, but when you stop to look at the longer timeline it is quite clear how it fits very well.
Similarly, it is safe to say that Netflix always knew it wanted to be a streaming service but had to mail DVDs until the timing was right in order to get there. Facebook is going through their metaphorical DVD mailing phase. Just another day in the life of business.
I'm not entirely convinced they can get to where they eventually want to go, but that's another story for another day.
Both the other commenters make good points. Meta is uniquely positioned to build the first metaverse. It may not be the only metaverse and it may not come out on top in the end but it will likely prove a lot of the technology and patterns that will continue to be used. That’s why I don’t think they’re mismatched, you might be right about them being too early. They’ll have to build a lot of it themselves and try to stay competitive in the market at the same time. Difficult, but other companies have done this. They’re off to a good start as well since their hardware currently dominates the market.
This exactly. Rather than falling for the headlines which many have done, the pandemic has shifted roles from the office to remote at $100K+ salaries and cheap money allowing this to be possible; but very unsustainably.
Now you have thousands of VC inflated startups and tech companies (including FAANMG) starting to do layoffs due to the market going the other direction. The majority of FAANMG companies including Meta will still be around regardless of the headlines where as the tens of thousands unprofitable VC-funded startups will realize that they need to be profitable 'now' to be able to survive for another decade or get another round of funding.
The tech 'hiring binge' of 2020 was going to go the other way soon enough. Even unsuprisingly.
Not to disagree at all with the broader point you're making but their last quarterly release says their headcount is like 83k. That roughly agrees with the original article which says 15% is 12k.
Laying off 15% of your staff is huge. If it's driven by a hire-and-fire approach, then that's even worse, because that shows Meta can't manage their way out of a paper bag.
In effect this is the end of covid season layoff. Peloton wasn't the only company who made investment mistakes during covid, just very visible. Many big companies greatly over hired during the same period. Now they need to correct course.
I’d be hesitant to call this an investment mistake. It was a gamble that covid would permanently change tech consumption habits and that would create new opportunities for big tech. So they hired people for those new unforeseen opportunities. maybe some of them didn’t pan out. Maybe others did but no longer need as many employees. Either way, hiring a bunch of people just to lay them off was clearly at least an option if not the main plan.
Ironically, if they’d gone for normal boring payments like the Asian messaging apps, instead of following the crypto fashion, they’d be a giant bank by now.
To be fair, apart from pesky regulations and “outdated 1980s banking rules”, I’d bet Facebook do a way better job of “knowing their customer” than any traditional bank does…
Seeing giants fall like this, where they achieve the highest peaks imaginable, but then struggle to find the next thing that is suitably big enough to satisfy expectations makes me never want to reach mega success status if I ever start a startup.
It’s like music. Most bands are capable of a great album, but the truly incredible artists can move from genre to genre constantly reinventing themselves.
To create an org that can do the latter (hello, Apple) seems incredible difficult, but it always seems to involve exceptionally creative leaders.
So the secret I think is to sell you mega status Facebook Borg and start afresh in a different area without the baggage of the previous app.
The fall is relative. Zuckerburg himself is still filthy rich. Only some of his employees suffer. So it is still worth to have a startup and make it mega, if you can pull it off.
It's a lottery ticket. You can be good, even very good, your whole life and do just fine.
But these kinds of once-in-a-generation moonshots, they're a product of wild ass luck, so if you find yourself with one, you grab it with both hands and ride it as far as it goes. Because it's not about you-- you need to be strong enough to hold on, keep the thing from exploding or crashing into the side of a mountain, but it's bigger than you and your level of control is partial at best. Honestly, it's usually the product of something big happening in the world that you've randomly managed to tap into.
I think it's not the bottom of the fall, but I do think it's a pretty clear fall.
Facebook is the new MySpace, and Instagram is not attracting the newer generations. The metaverse is a wild moonshot to invent a completely new market and platform that Meta alone would control and of sufficient size to replace the inevitable decline of Facebook/Instagram ad revenue.
Personally, I don't believe people want the metaverse, and if it succeeds, it'll come at the cost of coercion via marketing overload.
Do you want to build America's next top advertising company? Because that is what FB and Google did. Nothing else they have tried in ~20 years has come close to making any money.
Firing low performers isn't a layoff. Several major companies like Amazon do this every 6-12 months, and it doesn't exactly make the news. While 15% might be extreme (and there's no reason to believe that will be the actual number) I don't think anyone can argue that Facebook has a LOT of fat that they can trim without material impact to any of their projects. Same goes for every other large company (Google for example) that has been overhiring for many years now and pretty much never fires people outside of the most extreme cases.
It is when the performance definition changes. They are playing games to avoid the layoff label for political (ongoing perm lawsuit) and financial reasons (stock market signals and warn act)
Companies always justify layoffs as clearing out dead wood/firing low performers etc etc, but the reality is once you start this sort of massive layoff good people will get caught in the crossfire (what if your department has no dead wood but you need to cut 1 in 10 people?), your best people leave, everyone else is dispirited and fearful and morale tanks.
A contact of mine who works for Meta says that this has been coming for a long time and no-one is surprised. They're also rescinding internship offers (now THAT'S shitty) and freezing hiring.
Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time.
Blunt does not equal disrespectful. You are being flippant by making it personal. One can convey meaning without writing pages of text. I will keep doing so
Me, too. So many of my friends have said much the same thing, too.
Facebook has gone out of their way to be as horrible as possible. And their product is miserable, and they never update the user side. The last significant change was to add emojis six years ago, and that took them many years to do.
If they didn't have an effective monopoly, they'd be long gone.
Never updating the user side is a positive signal for a social media company. Redesigns, even objectively superior ones, are frequently catastrophically received by users, and significant alterations to app experience can cause user flight. The actual need to update the user side is questionable.
As someone who quit FB with a great deal of unvested stock, I've got more skin in the game than most as to the complex question of FB's culture, management, and impact in the world. I paid a lot of fucking money for a very nuanced answer to a very complex question about whether or not I felt I wanted to be there at that time.
So, from a position of vastly superior knowledge to the typical HN peanut gallery, I agree there are unfortunate things about FB, or at least were in 2018 when I left.
But as one person who gets out of line on HN sometimes to another: this is a negative value comment IMHO and I'd encourage you to strive for a more substantial critique.
I'm still working 20-something hours at pushing 40 precisely because that stock had been the retirement plan. I don't regret it, it was the wrong place to be at the time for me after thinking deeply on it.
And people with more knowledge throwing up a caution flag when people with less knowledge go all 1-bit is a pretty core value on the site. It's not a high horse, I get out of line on here more often than I'd like, but I also appreciate it when people tell me to cool it.
Well then, let us all break out our extra small violins, and play a somber tune, for the person in their late 30s who still has to work 20 hours a week.
A violin small enough to be played for me is shorter than h bar: no Silicon Valley engineer deserves anyones sympathy in a world where people are getting evicted from their homes via mortar fire. We all have it way too fucking good.
It’s more like 80-100 hours a week, which would put a strain on anybody: but I made my decisions and I’m living with them. I didn’t bring up the details in some lane bud for pity: I brought them up to establish my credentials on knowing my ass from my elbow on what happens at FB, which I do and most on HN don’t.
You seem to be suggesting that we're not entitled to opine about Facebook since we don't know the detailed internals or can't grasp the complexity, but I think that OP captures a broadly carried sentiment that Facebook's impact on society, on balance, is negative. And one internal I'll comment on, regardless of not being an insider: the downsizing through performance reviews feels very dishonest.
It’s just less interesting. If I want to see random people navel gaze about Facebook’s general impact on society there are lots and lots of places for that. HN is one of the few where I’m likely to hear from people that spent a decade there. Also interesting would be someone that studied the impact deeply from the outside. But a thread started with a slightly wordier version of “F Facebook” is just not likely to be very good.
In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it.
Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with.
But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist.
The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system.
FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test.
So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.
They going to carry that culture into any new company they go. You can already feel the likes of discord getting dark patterned, ABtested and starting to die. Sorry to say it, but no matter the skill, if you worked at FB, you might not actually be a culture fit for many companys, who want to grow beyond local minima.
...and yet, you seem entirely focused on front-end development. "Dark patterns" aren't even an operative concept in infra. It's "not even wrong" territory. I worked on storage at FB for 3.5 years. It was very little different than the work I'd done at a dozen other companies over three decades. For the first half it was literally the same role on the same open-source project I'd worked on at Red Hat. For the second half the only real differences were scale and some details of interacting with other infra (as would be the case for any job/project anywhere). How does any of that make me any less of a culture fit at another company than I was before?
It's a moot point for me personally because I left by retiring, but this "permanently tainted" attitude needs to die. It's the basis of every "ism" that afflicts society. Either people can change or they can't. If they can, they can change back or even go beyond where they were before. If they can't, then there was never an issue to begin with. Either way, permanent hate is not going to improve the world.
Community foundations, neighborhoods with neighbors who care about each other, recreational sports leagues, activity clubs, temples synagogues and churches. There are many, but they’re often not behind the piece of magic glass in our hands.
The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity.
At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller.
It's interesting to see how Big Tech firms can struggle with innovation as they scale, but perhaps for different reasons.
Facebook has lacked innovation for quite a while, first relying on acquisitions, then brazenly copying other social media company innovations (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok)
Google innovates, then seems to give up on products way too early. It's almost as if their management culture has forgotten that new products need iteration.
Amazon, to their credit, have managed to innovate better than these two (e.g. AWS, Kindle, Alexa devices). They started off as a book store, yet somehow became a Tech conglomerate.
This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence.
As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the very worst programmers: in that sense of programming Peter-Naur called "theory building". An activity which is perhaps the most comprehensively demanding on the intellect. Not rehearsing the techniques and solutions of others, but innovating oneself in the face of ambiguity and ill-posed problems.
Perhaps the worst sin of IQ-test-like processes is that they use questions with answers to test intelligence -- which if it is anything at all, is what one uses in the face of the lack of questions with answers.
Probably if you filter by raw IQ (either yours or others definition) you would get a lot of imaginative people as most intellectual faculties are positively correlated with each others.
On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results
Exactly, I'd have no problem taking an IQ test for a role, and usually test high on those. Leet code grinding and interview "preparation" I just have no time and willingness for.
> On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results
That's a very useful signal still. Willingness to takes years of testing signals willingness to subjugate oneself to lots of unpleasant crap for money and prestige, which is something FAANGs are happy to see in their workers.
There's adverse selection at play in FAANG hiring, but I think it goes like this : any ambitious engineer would wants to "make a dent in the universe" is never going to spend months studying LC, system design, or whatever to get into these places. Not only do they prefer building actual projects on evening and weekends ; but they know their time at FAANG would be wasted anyway. In 2022, few people go to big tech because they really want to build things.
This comes up a lot in the international test score comparisons. You have places like Singapore, Japan and China that dominate the league tables as in the kids get the best test scores, but that does not translate into American style economic creativity. Now maybe all of the American style economic creativity is driven by high IQ immigrants but I don't think that is true.
Has anyone studied this? It is constantly referenced.
They hire the best people and then have them do effectively "menial" work - metrics reporting, etc. whilst strategy is decided by executives alone.
This makes them disillusioned.
I'm not sure what the solution is in big companies really, but it's a real problem when standard engineers can't get their ideas or features, etc. considered, or easily prototype stuff, etc.
I don't think internal company culture is the problem. The problem is that a lot of these companies' consumer products are based on the "attention economy", and the market has finally adjusted to see these things for what they are (essentially a system to put more ads in front of eyeballs) and thus considers them "underwhelming".
The "A"s in FAANG which aren't based on the attention economy (Amazon, and Apple until very recently) don't (yet?) have this problem.
The only reason I could personally see working at any of them is greed.
I've worked at large corporations before and from many accounts on here and elsewhere I get the sense that there are many of the same problems which essentially boil down to being a cog. You might be a cog in fancy wheels with catered lunches and bean bag chairs but in the end its probably difficult to see where contributions are helping actual customers.
I've also heard similar accounts about working for various government levels and suspect its the same conundrum. I think its unavoidable when humans organize a workplace into thousands of people.
It's really something to take heart and think about. "We only hire the best!" And yet the best are apparently not good enough. I don't think they have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that their hiring criteria is a joke.
Engineering ability has nothing to do with product management; critical feedback from engineers is even usually met with "Well, that's because you're not the customer." or "You just don't get the vision.". And, to be fair to them, their rate of failure is probably no worse than the odds of a tech startup failing (90%?), it's just more visible because anything a FAANG releases is trumpeted with fanfare.
All that the high level of engineering talent at FAANGs allows is for bad product management to drive themselves off a cliff faster. (But at least the engineers get paid handsomely for it.)
It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
Well Adobe has also done a lot of acquisition and (many of them they then failed to maintain those products, until a slow death. what they did to Macromedia still hurts.) let us not forget they purchased photoshop and most of what is there PDF software today came from the acquisitions of several companies.
Some call it price gouging and some call it a subscription to professional software that's constantly under significant development. Other professional tools in adjacent industries cost a LOT MORE. Nuke Studio, for example, costs 4k/quarter.
Sure Adobe should focus more on old usability issues in lieu of new features and many of their programs have such broad userbases that they couldn't possibly focus equally on everything their users want them to focus on, but when it comes down to it, people are mad because it's something they want, but not enough to pay for. Looking at their uservoice forums for 5 minutes dispenses with the notion that they're just giving these apps the bare minimum amount of work and using them as cash cows.
There are cheaper or FOSS alternatives that suit most non-professional's needs but if you want Adobe's professional tools and have those tools keep up with our ever changing technical landscape, that costs money. I professionally use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Acrobat, Lightroom Classic and XD, so the CC subscription is an absolute bargain.
Isn't a lot of retail apple stuff essentially outsourced? Apple sells a lot of stuff in Poland, but there are zero Apple jobs here. It's all "authorized reseller" and "authorized service".
I’m assuming you’re in Poland. In the US and in some countries neighboring Poland there are owned and operated Apple stores with Apple staff. When I visit my work’s Warsaw office I always seem to need an Apple Store for something and end up settling for an iStore or similar third party. Authorized Retailers are fine but they usually lack all the small spare parts Apple will carry. On these trips I always seem to break a specific part that I know an Apple Store carries and have to wait until I am in another country.
These stores were started in the early 00s due to Apple’s lack of control over how their products were merchandised in US big box stores. Prior to Apple Stores, I purchased all my Apple products and equipment from a catalog or the early E-commerce catalog websites A lot of the experiential sales in Apples world stemmed from the retail experience they created.
No one is going to challenge Facebook head on. Google tried and flamed out. Zuckerberg is afraid of new forms of social media that will expedite the death of Facebook. This is why he bought Instagram. Was it really a competitor? Nope. But it was the new thing the kids were flocking to.
I am in US, from an Asian community; & people in my circle who own an iPhone still prefer Whatsapp for like 100+ msgs a day. Never saw them using iMessage even for other iPhone users.
Presumably a lot of these are content moderation staff, often much cheaper than engineers. Facebook claimed to have made good progress in the last year automating moderation, but could also just be backing off on moderation to reduce costs at increased risk of regulation.
Often that kind of staff will be employed via agencies, so it's difficult to really compare between companies as we don't have the numbers. For instance, Apple presumably need a lot of staff to moderate apple pay, but if they have outsourced the rolls we won't know how many there are or see if they get cut.
That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1].
iMessage has a lot of users if you count people with iphones who very occasionally try to send a text but end up using iMessage. I count as one but it still is completely irrelevant to me. WhatsApp is where everything interesting is.
I'm always surprised when I meet someone who does.
None of my friends (+their family) or my family have ever used it. Nobody I hang out with will even say they have whatsapp. Maybe it's because we're "desktop people", which doesn't explain the lack of participation by someone like my wife. She uses her phone almost exclusively. shrug
there's still infrastructure in place to support you. there's a cost per user and cost per message, and you contributing to the former even if not to the latter.
>> Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash.
I agree, and I’m sure it’s adoption rate is increasing globally.
I’m just saying… WhatsApps global impact on an everyday basis is quite overlooked.
There are countries where people solely depend on WhatsApp to communicate externally. Todays’ green sms on an iPhone is equivalent to a WhatsApp text.
If that fallback, that Facebook controls and owns, didn’t exist or your country banned it—imagine not receiving messages from your kids because “WhatsApp is down”?
Anyways tldr; WhatsApp is cheaper than sms. The default communication for many. More affordable. More used daily as a necessity.
Facebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.
It's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.
You're probably right. Now management can reap the reward of sic'ing thousands of engineers on data collection rather than fixing the deficiencies in their product. Too bad for the engineers, though.
Says you. Lots of people like software that keeps working reliably over the years. I know I do. The only valuable updates to WhatsApp are when new emojis are added ;). For the rest it already works very well, why break it or redesign it?
The articles I can find with numbers show Whatsapp at about 2B users, ahead of WeChat and everything else. When I flew Southwest the other day the only apps the "free wifi messaging" bothered supporting were iMessage and Whatsapp.
There is actually something very cute and personal about WhatsApp.
I would go to Telegram to get movies or some restricted (conspiracy?) news feeds.
Spam, payment notes, etc. come via regular Messages/SMS.
But when something comes via WhatsApp... Dunno, it just feels more personal from me. As if, it's someone I personally know or care about / involved with.
I think some of this magic is preserved just because it does not add any other features that dilate the original use case and how it makes one feel.
In addition to 1-to-1 chats and group chats, telegram has channels, which are kind of similar to twitter timelines, 1-to-many communications.
There are a large number of channels that take advantage of the 2 gig filesize limit by uploading pirated media. It's actually more convenient than torrents for most things, but it's still a hassle compared to a good usenet setup.
You can find entire seasons of animes just by doing a global search for the name of the anime. Sometimes there's even a chat attached for discussing the anime!
Oh hell no. I'm glad that Whatsapp is being mostly left alone, or at least that's what I see as a user. They ship some improvements and extraneous stuff (Whatsapp Status) from time to time, but the core of the app stays as it is.
Most people don't look forward to every time their app is redesigned starting from the icon up. It mostly doesn't get better, it gets worse to satisfy a Product Manager's CV checkbox.
Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people.
Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.
Many businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business.
Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
WhatsApp and Instagram, both acquired by Facebook, were actually a gold standard in lean development. 1o to 30 people for a massively popular product.
If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.
So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
If you look from the outside yes, however there is low we don't know about FB and hidden works not producing a product etc just yet.They are very long term focused and very different from Tim Apple's idea of a company as an operational engine.
Isn't this the result of the artificial bloat that was in the US economy before the whole domination of the dollar as reserve currency thing came crashing down?
Just a few months ago, dollar was the uncontested reserve currency, allowing the US financial institutions - including the Fed - to inject cash into the economy in whatever way including fractional reserve lending. Inflation just didn't go up. A lot of money to invest. Resulting in a bloated stock market with immense 'valuations' with little profit to show for the valuation.
Now the Ukraine war, sanctions, various countries moving to trade in their own currencies, and voila - all the dollars that were being used to trade before are unused and they are flowing back to the US, causing inflation.
The bloated stock economy is going down, and the companies that used to float on the bloated value of their capital are feeling the squeeze - Facebook, Twitter, Google...
This may result in an adjustment in the economy with normalized valuations, salaries, prices and monetary compensation in the long run. It feels like its just cutting the fluff out of the bloated economy that ran on inflated stock values. But in the end, the resulting environment should not be too different than the former one - just without the bloat.
How would this affect the investment in tech, is an open question though. It would probably end up like how it is in other regions of the world - still high, profitable and lucrative, however, less bloated. Like in Europe, China and anywhere else.
Euro's crash is because of the pipeline sabotage - European industry is literally shutting down. And some manufacturers are moving their factories to the US. Hence the disparage.
However at large, countries in Asia, Middle East and the Global South have moved a lot of trading to their own currencies or using Yuan. This immediately caused the inflation in the us starting from a few months ago.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadMost thought Zuck was a fool to pass on that. He 300x’d it in 10 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The equivalent to snail mail is something like https, smtp or ssl, not FB.
2. https://www.cfr.org/blog/facebooks-content-moderation-failur...
3. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
Here’s an article describing the effect radio had on the rise of Hitler: https://daily.jstor.org/an-affordable-radio-brought-nazi-pro...
A few years before these genocides, western media were praising Facebook for its role in the uprisings in the Middle East. It was seen as a force for good, allowing people to self organise against dictatorial regimes.
Hell, back in the day the printing press pretty much brought down all of the power structures at the time, because suddenly people had more free access to information.
It wasn’t even indifference, they actively undercut and mislead all of the supposed checks and balances they assured everyone were enough both internally and externally. When confronted they have lied to their internal teams, they have lied to lawmakers, they have lied to investors. It is always the same response. There is no room left to leave this as a “mistake that fell through the cracks”.
It’s a pattern of behaviour that now spans many years and many incidents. All it has shown is that they appear both incapable and unwilling of reform and should be treated as such.
It sounds like many social media CEOs would agree that it's like getting punched in the stomach every day
He's had every chance to be a decent human being and he has rejected it.
Facebook has been a force for tremendous evil in the world, and now he's trying to push this bullshit proprietary metaverse crap on us, just because.
People hate him for who he is. He feels bad, and then continues doing the things that make us hate him, and that makes it worse.
You truly hate Mark Zuckerberg huh, you must live a great life
> many social media CEOs
"We experts of X recommend X."
It's not like he won't be a millionaire if he just owns a large part of Facebook instead of running it.
I don't understand your argument.
With rates going up there are places besides tech people can hope to park their money, the VC funding is going to disappear and with it some of the distortion of the market for developers. Just a reminder though this happened before in the 2000s with the dotcom crash, things worked out the world kept on spinning, society didn't collapse and many engineers were still able to eventually get new jobs and provide for their families. It will happen again.
The real issue seems to be that they're losing $3bn a quarter building the Metaverse (eg Reality Labs) at the same time as losing ad revenue because of things like Apple's antitracking changes and failing to innovate Instagram allowing competitors like TikTok to eat a big chunk of their market.
Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments...
But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool.
And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.
They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.
That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.
But that's not what we're talking about. The question posed was if Facebook's good developers are better than good developers at run-of-the-mill companies. That is not clear. People at Facebook, with an average tenure of only 2.3 years, have almost certainly also worked at run-of-the-mill companies so that already suggests that you can find good developers all over the place.
That developers at Facebook solved problems Facebook had doesn't prove no other developer could also solve Facebook's problems if they also worked at Facebook. Solving problems is literally the job of a developer, so it seems highly unlikely that all other developers outside of Facebook cannot also solve problems. Of course developers are only going to solve the problems in front of them.
Due to the absurd amount of SWEs on Facebook, surely someone or a team happen to working there will score a huge FOSS hit sooner or later just due to the numbers.
Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that.
> What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?
See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that.
Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.
I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.
While the process was a trainwreck that I'd never entertain again, I will admit that while on campus, I met and talked to some really, really smart people.
I just remember being kinda sad that all this talent was being wasted on ads and holding attention.
Back to the point, I think anyone who has been there could attest it's not all just leetcode studiers...well, maybe some amount, but they employ a lot of really smart people.
Any metric you like. Facebook is massive and has a huge range of people. There'll be people who sit in the top 0.1% for literally every method of ranking them you can dream up.
Not to mention creating some of the widest-used OSS libraries on the web.
Plus, it’s one of the few platforms our grandparents can use, and we all know how hard it can be to make software that older folks like to use.
So they are clearly not hiring terrible devs. (Well, sure some of them are, but that’s the case everywhere)
My parents successfully use iPhones and iPads and GMail, along with Facebook. I can’t say they “like to use” Facebook, but if they want to see photos of their kids and grandkids they have to use it. I don’t know anyone who enjoys using FB, including my own kids. It seems users see it as a necessary evil — where else can they go?
It seems a bit arbirtrary to pick high salaries as the reason for it. And to not blame spending billions on unprofitable projects like the metaverse, or having their profits affected by Apple's restrictions on tracking, or the steady decline in user experience. or the general image of the company being affected by a long list of scandals... <<< I would blame these factors before I point at graduates who earn above the market average.
In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.
The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are also plenty of places with low rent that have higher tech salaries than places with higher rents (compare essentially any US city to Toronto).
> In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class.
At least in California, there's not that much overlap between tech company investors and landowners. The housing ownership is much more distributed, and often to "mom and pop" landlords. This is the flow of money in Silicon Valley (expressed in a slightly comic manner): https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1400165321609199620
It's a bit different in other locations with more consolidation in land ownership, but even there, I doubt there's much overlap (I have less knowledge of housing dynamics outside California, because they actually change, so I'm just guessing here).
I think it's actually both - when tech companies enter a new town, they tend to hire boatloads of people, placing pressure on local housing markets, and thus raising prices - and landlords or people willing to sell and relocate to take a quick and easy profit know that the new class of people has substantial money to pay.
What I was referring to was stuff like [1] or [2] - investors with no real option to park "dumb money" (aka funds that are structured to invest into low-ish risk markets) have discovered that soaking up residential real estate is a good way to invest that money.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/investors-bought-third-us-ho...
I'm sure FB would love to be able to spend 2x on salaries if it came with a guarantee of turning the metaverse into a successful business venture, or of grabbing all the attention hours currently flowing to TikTok.
It's hard to claim that a project failed because its budget was too big.
It just happened that out of their control 1. Apple squeezed them out of ads revenue 2. Market went to shit
I hate Facebook as a company but I don’t see them making strategic mistakes…. Everyone is getting fired everywhere
I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.
Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.
that's the point of R&D and long shot, if it was possible already it's not a long shot :/
Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before making a good product.
We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.
Nobody bought an iPhone or iPad because of Facebook. You could also install the Facebook app on that, but you could also use your notebook or your desktop pc or your cheap Android phone or whatnot to use Facebook. Most people already had some "Facebook ready" device at home.
Nobody will buy an Oculus headset if its main/sole use is the Metaverse.
Zuck is betting that more people will use VR in the future, and if you believe that hypothesis then it makes sense to invest infinite money in making sure your company becomes the Apple of VR instead of the Nokia.
How wisely that infinite VR money is being spent is another matter.
The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate.
I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach. Maybe they’re seeing that as a backup when VR fails, but the longer they leave it the bigger the risk someone else takes that market.
Marketplace?
software - nope, it's all new, they can't do it
Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.
The market seems to be sustaining it just fine.
I've never understood that viewpoint. It's equivalent to claiming a cashier is underpaid because $7.50/hr is a tiny percentage of the sales that go through their register.
The world doesn't work like that. You're paid based on the cost of replacing you, not the value you deliver.
> Facebook is conducting 'quiet layoffs' by urging managers to label a certain number of workers as underperforming. The moves may lead to thousands of job cuts.
Like redundancies are treated differently from firing due to failing job duties normally.
It's actually a very tricky question. If the bonuses, perks, etc. for everyone are lowered, such that those at the low end cross the threshold of wanting to leave, then it's probably legal. If people at that low end are singled out for poor treatment, then it might be "constructive dismissal" and thus illegal in most jurisdictions. Facebook is probably treading as close to that line as they can, or (even more likely) stepping just a bit over and relying on lawyers to keep it from becoming too expensive. This is the barrier that class-action suits are meant to overcome, BTW.
That’s why they hired so many people
And what is the metaverse really? How is it monetized?
That’s OP’s point, aside from Facebook, everything they have is acquired - Whatsapp, Instagram, Occulus.
And even within Instagram, they constantly just copy other apps - Snapchat stories, Tiktok for reels, etc
Facebook can’t have an original idea to save their life
That’s why a lot of companies are trying to make the meta verse work. If they’re successful in owning the meta verse they now have a nice big walled garden on which to extract continual rent from.
It’s also very much not what the average person wants so we’ll see how it goes
That's not even counting money someone actually paid to those diversifications, no ads involved. That's another 10-15% of the total ad revenue.
Google's internal websites, taken together, are just shy of 85% of their total ad revenue, and 90% of their total revenue. Google does not make that much money from people browsing the internet, it makes money from people browsing Google. Although not split out, it is widely assumed Google search is a whale here. But how much exactly? Not clear. People keep saying it's going down for a decade now. And of course, a business 1/10th as good as Google search is still a great business.
Yes, Google Ads receives the dollars, but it's the "diversifications" that "only cost money" that brings them in. Numbers like this make one thing clear, 7/8th of AdSense is a way to optimise ad income on Google's own websites, and only 1/8th of AdSense is an actual Ad Network. Google is not the biggest Ad Network, despite their reputation, by a very wide margin. Google is the biggest "TV Network".
So saving money on diversifications as a whole ... I'm going to say this is not what I'd like Alphabet to do. Now saving money on specific efforts, sure. But, frankly, the way to grow Google, even their ad business itself, it to spend more money on the diversifications.
RealityLabs Research is a large component and indeed the major R&D investment. This was spun out during the 2021Q4 earnings call when the different sectors of the company were reported separately for the first time, following the name change to Meta.
Similar to sibling comments: copying your competitors is not R&D, and neither is building a software library that’s an incremental improvement on an existing OSS library.
It’s not all that well advertised but there is a lot of research that gets open-sourced so it’s a bit (understandably) naive to call it copied or incremental work.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Labs
[2] https://about.meta.com/realitylabs/projectaria/
[3] https://github.com/facebookresearch/baspacho
[4] https://ai.facebook.com/blog/democratizing-access-to-large-s...
So my questions, is the R&D money invested to keep engineers happy? I mean they can for sure experiment there without any worries.
From a financial reporting perspective, nearly all engineering costs will be recorded as R&D.
FWIW, I think you used a comma instead of a period in your snipe. Would read better as:
>Use proper capitalization or people won't believe "amazon manager here". Well... maybe they will.
Or even:
>Use proper capitalization or people won't believe "amazon manager here"... Well, maybe they will.
E.g. Alexa might be getting headcount trimmed. But other areas might see influx of investment. some Amazon teams had reduced PIP over the last year as well.
This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Right - it's actually far worse than outright firing or laying off people. As in, genuinely harmful to people from a psychological (and hence physical) point of view. All so the company can save a few dollars, and hit certain quarterly targets a bit sooner.
That's why there's a name for it (since long before the "quiet" meme), and legal precedents that are supposed to prevent companies from doing this (if any of them would take heed, which of course they won't):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
So the question to our friend thrwawayacc up above is -- OK, so this is what the director told you to do (and thanks for for sharing, BTW). But are you actually going to -- go through with what you were told to do? Are are you going to tell these people at the director level some version of:
I understand your concerns, and the financial position that the company in. But at the end of the day, this isn't the right way to go about conducting what everyone can plainly see it as -- a layoff. Ultimately, if we go this route, it will be harmful to the company's reputation and long-term growth -- but more importantly, it will cause genuine harm to people who, until now, have been considered part of the Amazon Family.
If Corporate insists on going this route, there's no way I can stop them of course. However, for my part, in my role, I will not be be able to participate in this extremely ill-advised course of action.
This is your moment. So what's it going to be?
Agreed - and corporate life often gets that way.
But another way of looking at the payoff matrix might be: "I've got kids to support - and that means having parents they can trust, and look up to in this chaotic and morally ambivalent world. Even if it means we might have to work a year or two more before being able to retire more comfortably, or we might not get to take that vacation to Tulum this year."
that's a high level of Maslow's hierarchy there, especially in the U.S with few support nets heading into what will probably be a really bad recession.
Ramping up work expectations
With the specific intent of causing the employee to quit, you meant to say. This in fact fits precisely with the language of the California Supreme Court in the section you referred to.
A good manager can do some 'managing out' simply by communicating to her team that there are reduced opportunities for promotion or new projects coming up, and that they may be layoffs. At any time in any workplace a certain fraction of people are actively looking for a new job, and another, usually much larger fraction are open to a move, might be hearing from recruiters, etc. A manager can create a mood of "if you have a decent offer, you should take it" without making people's lives miserable.
I'd personally prefer equality in such conversations. I believe corporate can survive with mediocre performers. Just like many of us live with not so great companies we work in everyday.
Makes me wonder how they avoid being sued ?
There are also a significant number of ways you can 'manage someone out' which are not any more 'constructive dismissal' than 'quiet quitting' is 'constructive resignation'.
For example, reducing flexibility in things like lateness policies, shift swaps, holidays, etc. is likely to be unpopular, but as long as it's applied fairly across all employees, would not likely be found as unfair, but may well result in people quitting.
Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they need out of a job and folks are forced to just look for something better and then announce they're leaving with a 2 week notice.
Ironically, companies spare no expense when it comes to turgid, grinding performance eval exercises but ALWAYS kick honest discussions to the side.
At least facebook, it seems (?), is just cutting a bunch of folks rapidly rather than doing stuff like "managing out". That's better than the typical corporate 2-face behaviors.
I would seriously consider working remote for a European company if I could.
There's a thousand reasons people stay or leave companies and just slightly adjusting how much you're working to keep people can often be the difference in the attrition rate.
Even small pay cuts are pretty good at getting people to quit. (uh particularly talented ones that have many options ...)
If anything, being a FAANG SWE puts you at a disadvantage for ever having stability. Financially risky startups would love to have you, but a lot of industry verticals simply won't take a look at you because they figure you wouldn't be interested or you're perceived as a flight risk. Thing is, if you plan to retire from this profession those are the kinds of jobs you're going to need.
Based on your understanding, if other companies perceived me as being a flight risk because I'd worked in FAANG (?) I probably wouldn't be interested in them either, so it sounds like the system's working as expected.
If someone’s on the receiving end of all of those things they’ll usually leave sooner or later. Who wouldn’t want to?
https://employmenttribunal.claims/employment-law/bonus-dispu...
As for an employee quitting on their own accord before the bonus dispersal date (which they otherwise hit the bar to receive), every tech company I worked for or have friends working at, they have pretty fair systems for dealing with it.
Generally, there is a cutoff date (which is usually about 4-6 months before the bonus disbursal/announcement date). If you leave at any point after that date, but before the bonus announcement/disbursal date, you still get your bonus in full. If you quit before the cutoff date, it gets prorated based on how many days you were an employee between the previous cut-off date and the upcoming one. There is also usually an extra nuance in math for people who just started working at the company and been there less than a year, but that detail is largely irrelevant.
For a specific example, at MSFT, they had a cut-off date somewhere mid-june. The bonus got announced early september and disbursed in mid-second half of september. If you quit at any point after that date in June, you get your full bonus. If you quit exactly 2 months before the cutoff date, lets, say mid April, you get full_bonus*10/12.
It is dishonesty in the service of profit, the simplest type of corruption available. Euphemisms are always just euphemisms.
Amazon's hire-to-fire strategy is now widely known
EDIT: Added last sentence.
When was this? Just to confirm, you're referring to a data plane team and not a control plane team?
I'm just saying, it's worth giving a shot. You might like it. If you don't, switch orgs/teams. You can switch just a couple months after joining if it doesn't work out for you. I switched from my last org quite quickly cause while I had good work life balance, the work was just so boring.
Very dystopian.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/tech-roles
In most large companies hiring and firing people are totally different, and rarely ever talk to each other. This is why in most companies if the top management wants to make a big layoff, they first let go the 'recruiting staff', and then work from there.
In smaller layoffs, I'd imagine they'd continue to fill in open positions, while eliminating positions they think they don't need.
There's also another thing where they want to fill in people where they think need for their newer/hot/important project which they think will give them better profits. And cut people/shut down projects which they think are not important/profitable.
Regardless of what they have done, I hope everyone affected is okay
It’s very hard for a company of this size to find something to move the needle enough to make a difference.
Look at Google. YouTube is worth $120 billion with a B and it is dwarfed by their ads business.
It's virtually all ads revenue, something like 97% of their revenues is from advertising
[0] Facebook had a recruiting crisis in 2021: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...
[1] Facebook aimed to hire 10K Europeans for metaverse in 2021: https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000...
People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.
It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
All the while their companies remained unprofitable.
Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.
Indian here and can confirm.
This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India.
Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars.
Software on the other does demand training on bleeding edge tech almost every few months. We also tend to put lot of smart work[mathematically inclined work] than doctors.
And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel insecure that there are bigger things which they could have been a part of, and feel they kind of (bad)-lucked into studying medicine[which happens to be a expensive academic course to finish, and also take more time].
I once showed a relative who is also a doctor using logic programming to solve puzzles like Sudoku etc. He kind of expressed disappointment he was stuck in a profession that doesn't allow this sort of everyday involvement in solving problems, or building things. The money part just adds to their resentment.
I can imagine how someone who doesn’t understand the complexity involved in scaling software or managing millions of users would think of coding as “easy money”.
Its certainly much easier to make money quickly - you can go from a complete newbie to a fairly well paid frontend dev in under 2 years. A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
>>A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
MBBS is just a basic diploma. In the first 50% academic time of MBBS they just teach you how a healthy body works, because often the biggest confusion in treating a patient is to know what's is normal and what is a disease. This is followed by a assorted set of courses which touch upon basic disease-cure scenarios. And some small introduction to chemicals and their side effects on biology.
These people basically spend something like 7 years just to get here. MD is a different deal in India. Because the academics aren't really all that great and its just a detailed introduction into some organ speciality for just 2 years. Most people even here just go by established clinical practices in hospitals(a.k.a cya work)
In all the actual training is just 3 years. Its not an engineers fault that their profession is just trivia, and if-else scenarios for the most most part. This is where the resentment part comes in. Most engineers, or atleast the serious ones which make good salaries have gone too far both intellectually and in productivity in those 10 years.
The vast majority of doctors in India work in their own private clinics earning little money, treating small time fevers and stomach aches because that is the maximum you can do with that kind of training. You will be shocked just how far behind they are generally in the knowledge. Most will struggle to give you basic fitness and nutrition advice.
Are they aware of, or perpetuate the stereotype of the CS/IT student who memorizes braindumps to pass certification exams or post simple homework questions online or on StackOverflow, asking others to do the work for them?
As an aside, I work with a lot of engineers/PhD researcher types who think they are the smartest, nothing could ever be their fault, their systems etc are fine and it must be something simple that some other idiot messed up...
They resent literally the top engineers. Because they think they did better in entrance exams. Only geniuses are supposed to be doctors, and they also paid more fees and spent more time studying. So why aren't they making more money than those engineers?
There's a reason it's called "playing God".
My uncle is one of the leading lung specialists in the country. When Covid happened, his expertise was crucial in setting up the processes and best practices for dealing with everything from patient isolation to treatment protocols.
It was because of hundreds of doctors like him that literally millions of lived were saved.
do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
>>do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
All due respects to your uncle and his life's work. But I was there during peak COVID in hospitals all round. My dad was a post operative patient. Doctors had totally vanished from the scene. They had quite literally dumped all the work on junior nurses, not even the senior ones. I even got abused by one doctor for just asking how my dad was doing, and this on a call, not even a face to face appointment.
Right after this mess, where nurses didn't have a remote clue how to deal with complicated cases and we were making it up on guess work, because the 'experts' were too high sitting on their Ivory towers to even be bothered when patients were dropping dead like flies. What followed next was the worst sort of testing and consultation bills. I have seen people cry outside the gates and sitting on chairs. Much to the heartlessness and carelessness of these people.
There's a reason why so many people just don't out right respect or appreciate doctors in India. Most doctors have a very exaggerated sense of self worth and capabilities. They think they are gods and must treated as such because they think their academic training is long and expensive. For this very reason they think they have a right to indulge in price gouging. They also harbour deep resentment towards professions like engineering where there is more intellectual heavylifting work involved than their own profession will ever arrive at.
In all most doctors are just angry with their own choices for opting into medicine, they resent people richer than them. They resent professions better than them. Its a concentration point for sadist people, who go to any extent to humiliate others and indulge in price gouging.
> “To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-engineers-idUSKBN2...
Bear in mind this is from two years ago, but it gives you a sense of scale.
Similarly, it is safe to say that Netflix always knew it wanted to be a streaming service but had to mail DVDs until the timing was right in order to get there. Facebook is going through their metaphorical DVD mailing phase. Just another day in the life of business.
I'm not entirely convinced they can get to where they eventually want to go, but that's another story for another day.
Now you have thousands of VC inflated startups and tech companies (including FAANMG) starting to do layoffs due to the market going the other direction. The majority of FAANMG companies including Meta will still be around regardless of the headlines where as the tens of thousands unprofitable VC-funded startups will realize that they need to be profitable 'now' to be able to survive for another decade or get another round of funding.
The tech 'hiring binge' of 2020 was going to go the other way soon enough. Even unsuprisingly.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms
To create an org that can do the latter (hello, Apple) seems incredible difficult, but it always seems to involve exceptionally creative leaders.
So the secret I think is to sell you mega status Facebook Borg and start afresh in a different area without the baggage of the previous app.
Sounds a little bit like Nokia, more than Apple. Paper mill, cable products, rubber boots, tires, TV, mobile phones... ;)
- Robert Greene.
But these kinds of once-in-a-generation moonshots, they're a product of wild ass luck, so if you find yourself with one, you grab it with both hands and ride it as far as it goes. Because it's not about you-- you need to be strong enough to hold on, keep the thing from exploding or crashing into the side of a mountain, but it's bigger than you and your level of control is partial at best. Honestly, it's usually the product of something big happening in the world that you've randomly managed to tap into.
Facebook is the new MySpace, and Instagram is not attracting the newer generations. The metaverse is a wild moonshot to invent a completely new market and platform that Meta alone would control and of sufficient size to replace the inevitable decline of Facebook/Instagram ad revenue.
Personally, I don't believe people want the metaverse, and if it succeeds, it'll come at the cost of coercion via marketing overload.
Do you want to build America's next top advertising company? Because that is what FB and Google did. Nothing else they have tried in ~20 years has come close to making any money.
Companies always justify layoffs as clearing out dead wood/firing low performers etc etc, but the reality is once you start this sort of massive layoff good people will get caught in the crossfire (what if your department has no dead wood but you need to cut 1 in 10 people?), your best people leave, everyone else is dispirited and fearful and morale tanks.
Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time.
Good luck with your interview!
Facebook has gone out of their way to be as horrible as possible. And their product is miserable, and they never update the user side. The last significant change was to add emojis six years ago, and that took them many years to do.
If they didn't have an effective monopoly, they'd be long gone.
So, from a position of vastly superior knowledge to the typical HN peanut gallery, I agree there are unfortunate things about FB, or at least were in 2018 when I left.
But as one person who gets out of line on HN sometimes to another: this is a negative value comment IMHO and I'd encourage you to strive for a more substantial critique.
Your choice to forgo your stock is neither here nor there. I hope your salary was enough to live comfortably after finishing
And people with more knowledge throwing up a caution flag when people with less knowledge go all 1-bit is a pretty core value on the site. It's not a high horse, I get out of line on here more often than I'd like, but I also appreciate it when people tell me to cool it.
It’s more like 80-100 hours a week, which would put a strain on anybody: but I made my decisions and I’m living with them. I didn’t bring up the details in some lane bud for pity: I brought them up to establish my credentials on knowing my ass from my elbow on what happens at FB, which I do and most on HN don’t.
In an effort to create some high-signal content on this thread that addresses your parent's concerns about the failure modes of the performance process I'd like to shed a little first hand light: TLDR it is broken. I'm a bit limited in respecting that certain things are proprietary, but so much of this is common to all "FAANG" companies that it's basically public domain. Joma Tech on YouTube knows all of this and does (great) comedy skits on it.
Longer version: companies like FB or Google can afford arbitrary amounts of qualified experts to study mechanism design, there are people at those companies who deeply understand complex incentive structures. It doesn't hurt that the ads business is like 50% game/auction theory to begin with.
But you only have to look at any political structure in sight to know that the wonk answer, the "right" answer via math, is rarely implemented, and basically never implemented by virtue of being "right". Adam Smith's utilitarian billiard balls are a very limited approximation to human beings. Mostly people want to do the "right" thing, but in large numbers respond to incentives, and the incentive for any bureaucracy is to continue to exist.
The Google "leetcode" interview and the Google "promo-packet" performance evaluation process are not optimal, they fall down in all kinds of ways. But they are better by far than a dart board, and pretty much all the big shops cargo-culted them. They're remarkably similar in being 1) well-intentioned 2) ostensibly quantitative and 3) in practice in 2022 basically a way to money-launder bias through a spreadsheet. A lot of people oversee this process, review it annually, tweak small parts of it and play down the error bars. These people have jobs, and career tracks, and where they can do some good in general, but it's a system.
FB has it's own tweaks on the "leetcode" interview and the "promo-packet" bi-annual performance evaluation, but it's still obviously a patch set on Google's shit. I've never worked at Google, so I can't be certain, but by my trained eye FB's is actually slightly more enlightened in a few ways (Google had an SAT score minimum for US applications for longer than they want anyone to remember), but it's still governed by humans, and apparently the only thing humans want more than food or sex is tribal affiliation: asking someone for something deep in CLRS in a 40 minute coding interview isn't a technical test, it's a "went to the kind of school I did" test.
So while we're all busy laundering classism, sexism, racism, and lots of other -isms through Floyd's Tortoise and Hare interviews? I'm fairly unmoved by laundering some downsizing through the same mechanism. It's the not the root of the issue.
...and yet, you seem entirely focused on front-end development. "Dark patterns" aren't even an operative concept in infra. It's "not even wrong" territory. I worked on storage at FB for 3.5 years. It was very little different than the work I'd done at a dozen other companies over three decades. For the first half it was literally the same role on the same open-source project I'd worked on at Red Hat. For the second half the only real differences were scale and some details of interacting with other infra (as would be the case for any job/project anywhere). How does any of that make me any less of a culture fit at another company than I was before?
It's a moot point for me personally because I left by retiring, but this "permanently tainted" attitude needs to die. It's the basis of every "ism" that afflicts society. Either people can change or they can't. If they can, they can change back or even go beyond where they were before. If they can't, then there was never an issue to begin with. Either way, permanent hate is not going to improve the world.
Copying TikTok won't save it from becoming irrelevant
Many online forums are kinda social networks.
At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller.
(The AI work is one exception)
Facebook has lacked innovation for quite a while, first relying on acquisitions, then brazenly copying other social media company innovations (e.g. Snapchat, TikTok)
Google innovates, then seems to give up on products way too early. It's almost as if their management culture has forgotten that new products need iteration.
Amazon, to their credit, have managed to innovate better than these two (e.g. AWS, Kindle, Alexa devices). They started off as a book store, yet somehow became a Tech conglomerate.
As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the very worst programmers: in that sense of programming Peter-Naur called "theory building". An activity which is perhaps the most comprehensively demanding on the intellect. Not rehearsing the techniques and solutions of others, but innovating oneself in the face of ambiguity and ill-posed problems.
Perhaps the worst sin of IQ-test-like processes is that they use questions with answers to test intelligence -- which if it is anything at all, is what one uses in the face of the lack of questions with answers.
On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results
I dont think there's much to be said about >115, other than by filtering on it, you at best reduce the variance in other abilities.
That's a very useful signal still. Willingness to takes years of testing signals willingness to subjugate oneself to lots of unpleasant crap for money and prestige, which is something FAANGs are happy to see in their workers.
Has anyone studied this? It is constantly referenced.
This makes them disillusioned.
I'm not sure what the solution is in big companies really, but it's a real problem when standard engineers can't get their ideas or features, etc. considered, or easily prototype stuff, etc.
The "A"s in FAANG which aren't based on the attention economy (Amazon, and Apple until very recently) don't (yet?) have this problem.
I've worked at large corporations before and from many accounts on here and elsewhere I get the sense that there are many of the same problems which essentially boil down to being a cog. You might be a cog in fancy wheels with catered lunches and bean bag chairs but in the end its probably difficult to see where contributions are helping actual customers.
I've also heard similar accounts about working for various government levels and suspect its the same conundrum. I think its unavoidable when humans organize a workplace into thousands of people.
All that the high level of engineering talent at FAANGs allows is for bad product management to drive themselves off a cliff faster. (But at least the engineers get paid handsomely for it.)
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
- a film & tv production business
- a massive physical retail store footprint
- a global e-commerce store
- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else
No matter how much people hate their price gouging :-)
Sure Adobe should focus more on old usability issues in lieu of new features and many of their programs have such broad userbases that they couldn't possibly focus equally on everything their users want them to focus on, but when it comes down to it, people are mad because it's something they want, but not enough to pay for. Looking at their uservoice forums for 5 minutes dispenses with the notion that they're just giving these apps the bare minimum amount of work and using them as cash cows.
There are cheaper or FOSS alternatives that suit most non-professional's needs but if you want Adobe's professional tools and have those tools keep up with our ever changing technical landscape, that costs money. I professionally use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Acrobat, Lightroom Classic and XD, so the CC subscription is an absolute bargain.
I agree that it's really bizarre how wasteful FB's operations seem to be compared to Apple's.
What an unimaginative company...
These stores were started in the early 00s due to Apple’s lack of control over how their products were merchandised in US big box stores. Prior to Apple Stores, I purchased all my Apple products and equipment from a catalog or the early E-commerce catalog websites A lot of the experiential sales in Apples world stemmed from the retail experience they created.
Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.
iMessage is only really relevant in the USA. Meanwhile, Whatsapp is huge in Latin America, Europe, Africa, parts of Asia
WhatsApp runs the exact same whether it's an iPhone or an android phone. That's not trivial.
Have you not used another messaging app?
Often that kind of staff will be employed via agencies, so it's difficult to really compare between companies as we don't have the numbers. For instance, Apple presumably need a lot of staff to moderate apple pay, but if they have outsourced the rolls we won't know how many there are or see if they get cut.
Because software used by 10k people needs as many features and infrastructure care and investment as one used by 3 billion people?
[0]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2022/09/10/why-apple...
I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Signal
I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Facebook Messenger
I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use LINE
I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Telegram
I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use QQ
etc.
It is true that WhatsApp seems to be the largest, but it's still used by fewer than 25% of humans, so you might be shocked often.
iMessage is the default SMS and messaging app on iPhones. It’s what most people use for texting as well as messaging on iPhone.
I agree, and I’m sure it’s adoption rate is increasing globally.
I’m just saying… WhatsApps global impact on an everyday basis is quite overlooked.
There are countries where people solely depend on WhatsApp to communicate externally. Todays’ green sms on an iPhone is equivalent to a WhatsApp text.
If that fallback, that Facebook controls and owns, didn’t exist or your country banned it—imagine not receiving messages from your kids because “WhatsApp is down”?
Anyways tldr; WhatsApp is cheaper than sms. The default communication for many. More affordable. More used daily as a necessity.
Better than chat for fostering async-style communication. Better than email at discoverability.
Siri,
iCloud,
ApplePay, Apple Card, Apple Pay Later, Apple Cash.
AppleNews.
Apple Fitness
Apple Arcade.
And the app doesn't look like it changed that much since it started being supported by 10,000 employees (guessing).
You didn't intend it, but that is a complement of the highest order. Thanks!
Those who've worked on large systems over many years will understand what I mean.
WA is being left in the dust by messaging platforms that actually care about shipping a quality product.
Other messaging apps introduce new features, like inline bots and the ability to not share your phone number to everyone you talk to.
There is actually something very cute and personal about WhatsApp.
I would go to Telegram to get movies or some restricted (conspiracy?) news feeds.
Spam, payment notes, etc. come via regular Messages/SMS.
But when something comes via WhatsApp... Dunno, it just feels more personal from me. As if, it's someone I personally know or care about / involved with.
I think some of this magic is preserved just because it does not add any other features that dilate the original use case and how it makes one feel.
There are a large number of channels that take advantage of the 2 gig filesize limit by uploading pirated media. It's actually more convenient than torrents for most things, but it's still a hassle compared to a good usenet setup.
You can find entire seasons of animes just by doing a global search for the name of the anime. Sometimes there's even a chat attached for discussing the anime!
Most people don't look forward to every time their app is redesigned starting from the icon up. It mostly doesn't get better, it gets worse to satisfy a Product Manager's CV checkbox.
Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.
So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
Just a few months ago, dollar was the uncontested reserve currency, allowing the US financial institutions - including the Fed - to inject cash into the economy in whatever way including fractional reserve lending. Inflation just didn't go up. A lot of money to invest. Resulting in a bloated stock market with immense 'valuations' with little profit to show for the valuation.
Now the Ukraine war, sanctions, various countries moving to trade in their own currencies, and voila - all the dollars that were being used to trade before are unused and they are flowing back to the US, causing inflation.
The bloated stock economy is going down, and the companies that used to float on the bloated value of their capital are feeling the squeeze - Facebook, Twitter, Google...
This may result in an adjustment in the economy with normalized valuations, salaries, prices and monetary compensation in the long run. It feels like its just cutting the fluff out of the bloated economy that ran on inflated stock values. But in the end, the resulting environment should not be too different than the former one - just without the bloat.
How would this affect the investment in tech, is an open question though. It would probably end up like how it is in other regions of the world - still high, profitable and lucrative, however, less bloated. Like in Europe, China and anywhere else.
However at large, countries in Asia, Middle East and the Global South have moved a lot of trading to their own currencies or using Yuan. This immediately caused the inflation in the us starting from a few months ago.
Is this to save money on unemployment payments?