It means nothing especially with 50% voting shares. The funny thing about these layoffs is how they just go by the C-Suites without even denting their value.
Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?
Why? He is making a correct decision from the business point of view, it is unclear who will be the replacement CEO, and there are similar layoffs across other tech companies. The board has zero incentive of changing the CEO now.
It's evidently clear now, his "correct decision from a business point of view" to increase investments during Covid was wrong as they resulted in these 11,000 people being let go. I think the same could be said for the increased investment in metaverse, which I imagine is predicated on the prior large growth of people moving online during Covid, which is now returning to the mean.
I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?
(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)
This decision is correct, given all the incorrect strategic decisions he made leading up to it. The markets have clearly lost a lot of confidence in his leadership, and I would have to imagine the remaining employees have too. Stepping down would be a drastic step, but merely stating “I take responsibility” is unlikely on its own to restore confidence in his ability to right the ship either.
When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.
I mean, if you get into a minor car accident, taking responsibility basically means paying for damage to the car. To me it seems like taking responsibility for hiring too many people by ensuring a nice severance package and paying for access to external hiring consultants for people who want it, is pretty analogous to how ordinary people take responsibility when they accidentally do something that wrongs someone else i.e. They try and fix the effects of the wrong.
Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.
Does it matter as long as he is the cause of them getting compensated?
Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.
To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?
My english is non-native but I would expect when someone says "I take accountability and responsibility" to means exactly that and I have a hard time figuring out what else it could mean.
The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
Accountability to me, means that your actions have consequences. Saying "I'm accountable" but it not having any material affect based on the outcome of your actions feels unfair to most people. Especially when it's really 11,000 people who are the ones to actually feel the consequences.
Zuck's net worth dropping from one unfathomable level of wealth, to another unfathomable level of wealth, isn't really a consequence here.
as i said in another comment, for 90% of the world's population, the level of wealth fo the average facebook employee is unfathomable too. so it's hard to play the "oh he's wealthy so there are no real consequences" card just for zuckerberg
So each time someone makes a mistake there should be a material consequence to the person?
Would this not create an atmosphere of fear and drive society towards a fixed mindset where everyone would in case of mistake try to hide their mistake?
AFAIK the biggest upgrade to global aviation safety happened when mistakes were de-penalized, and all stakeholders could honestly discuss what went wrong and how to improve things in the future.
IMO, the biggest issues is not punishment, but understanding that a mistake was made, and an honest attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
If a perpetrator fails to honestly see the harm in their actions, and perpetuate the same mistake repeatedly, then yes, they should probably face secondary consequences to make it understandable to every stakeholder that such behaviour is not acceptable. The reasoning here, however, is not some sense of global justice, but to simply de-normalize the pathological behaviour (if you repeat something without consequences it becomes 'accepted way of working').
Even "perpetrator" is harsh - overhiring is a business mistake, not some ethical or legal violation. It's part of the deal - you get hired, and you can get laid off later. It sucks for the employees to go through but they aren't victims.
I think you're dishonestly trying to equate a CEO having to fire 11,000 people due to his decisions, to something like an engineer wiping out a DB and having to restore from backups.
If suddenly, 11,000 people died today in airplane crashes in a single company's air fleet, you're be sure that their CEO would be under question. I'm not saying this is a fair analogy - but just as similar, your one wasn't either.
I suppose it boils down to how serious is the mistake of the CEO from the point of view of society, Facebook owners and other stakeholders.
I could imagine Facebook doing things that would indeed merit the sacking of CEO. For instance, doing something that leads to the death of 11k people would warrant severe consequences. I have no idea how Facebook could do that, but on the same par. They have all the data to do tons of nasty things.
I would view accidentally hiring 11k people from the point of view of the above interested parties indeed on the level of an engineer wiping db via accident (not negligence).
I imagine the mistake would be something like, you look at the market, you see it skyrocketing, you feed the numbers to your trusty excel sheet that has served you years and say, hey, we need more people. Only when market conditions normalize you realize the mistake.
Honestly, I really can't see the harm done here. People lose their jobs all the time. Corporation hire and fire. Why would this be any worse than standard practice in corporate america? (Of course it sucks to be laid off)
If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot. I know its a "cry me a river", "worlds smallest violin" type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people's livelihoods. I'm not implying Zuck has or doesn't have empathy, I don't know him. I'm just saying this likely has an impact. It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well. Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some? We'll know in a couple quarters.
Those people knowingly didn't escape the sinking boat and decided to work at Meta. We can say this for every social media platform company and their employees. I'd work at microsoft but not at snapchat or facebook. These apps are just trends and they go away in 10-15 years. They past maturity phase and in decline for the last 5 years already.
He's not my favorite person, but he did use language that said he, personally, predicted the business conditions wrong, overhired, etc. You don't have to look far to find layoff messages that blame covid or other outside forces and don't take any blame.
if we're going down that road, being fired is pretty inconsequential for a silicon valley software engineer. whoever your next employer is, relative to 90% of the world's population you'll still have a richer and more comfortable life than they could ever dream of
I suspect OP may have been going for a variation on the old "Programmer returns with zero eggs and 12 gallons of milk after having been asked to get one gallon of milk and if they have eggs to buy a dozen"-joke, but it falls flat in this instance since it relies on an interpretation bordering on deliberate misconstrual (i.e. applying the modifier "for each year of service" to the whole phrase "16 weeks plus two additional weeks" rather than just to the latter fragment "two additional weeks").
? No coffee yet this morning, but isn’t 5 years 26 weeks of pay for severance? And depending on how the severance contract is written, you might not be able to work elsewhere during part or all of this. Perhaps just 60 days due to WARN (in the us) where you are “working” for meta before the money is unencumbered. Read closely. If you have a lawyer friend, ask their opinion.
Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two
additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.
PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.
RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November
15, 2022 vesting.
Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for
people and their families for six months.
Career services. We’ll provide three months of career
support with an external vendor, including early access to
unpublished job leads.
Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult
if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before
termination and some visa grace periods, which means
everyone will have time to make plans and work through
their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration
specialists to help guide you based on what you and your
family need.
This is quite good even by European standards. If you were paid 4.5 months because the law said so then it isn't harmonized, because in my EU country it is only 3 months notice afaik.
Also not sure if the Meta severance applies to contractors as well, but many engineers work as contractors by which they of course opt out of worker protections.
4 months of severance + 2 extra weeks for every year of service i.e. 20 weeks (~5 months) if you've been there for the last 10 years. So ~9 months paid holiday in total. Not bad at all.
Is it if you are not a home owner still? The problem with not being a home owner is that you have very high burn rate because the market was able to optimize for housing profit extraction - that is, significant portion of the compensation of high earners ended up in the pocket of property owners.
Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).
I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.
Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.
There are a lot of people doing room share to take the cost of rent down or commute long distance. You can definitely balance between price, commute, comfort, privacy, grownupship and self respect. No surprise that many people really, really want to fully work from home so that they can better optimize.
9K is exaggeration of course, that would be quite irresponsible but it would be also the only way to put you in a lifestyle of a person who makes 5K a month.
Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.
But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.
Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.
The CEO is told they need to layoff by the CFO. The CEO agrees, then the corporate strategy team devise a strategy with the PR team. After the strategy is devised, the severance and headcount numbers are sent to the CFO for approval. The CFO should be the final go/nogo. Off course, the CEO can come in and change his mind, but that wouldn't be wise since the CFO has the best understanding of the economic situation and company's financial health.
I don't think it's a ridiculous idea that he penned it. Zuck is known for being very hands on at Facebook/Meta. No doubt a PR team and legal council etc... Looked it over before release but I have no problem believing Mark wrote this.
This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn't think Elon's mini submarine idea wouldn't work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.
Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.
Let's start talk about all Zuckerberg, Mcafee, Steve Jobs, and any other unfair acts committed by any tech millionaire? Let's talk how Jack Dorsey influenced the whole political engagement for the democrats (including the moderation process) at Twitter? Or maybe we can simply agree that people do questionable things when they have money, power and influence?
I think Dorsey, based on his politics view influenced how twitter (and who worked on twitter doing that) does moderation and per consequence lead to this discussion about how good the "censorship for good" is. I think highly controversy somebody that donated a lot of money to the Democrats to control the public discourse. In that matters, I think Musk - foreigner and genius - much less connected and skeptical with any side (red or blue)[1] than Dorsey or any other twitter leader before Musk.
All I know is we now have a guy in control of Twitter who:
- is calling his 100m or so followers to vote for GOP
- is repeating Putin's talking points
- Seems to be quite the vindictive narcissist, who doesn't really care about people or the environment quite frankly (e.g. trying to cancel a high speed rail project
Someone with that kind of power and ideology is not good for democracy - esp now that we have more people in the GOP that are actively trying to limit people's freedom.
I agree. He doesn't win me over because of this, but he deserves credit. I think many executives need to learn this from him.
Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don't think he's less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.
I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he's nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he's not superior in anyway... Etc.
Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you're no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.
It would be truly horrible if someone in the "life's achievement" position of Zuckerberg would layoff with communication similar to what as a hostile takeover daredevil would do, and it would be truly pretentious if a hostile takeover daredevil like Musk would layoff with communication mimicking that of a "life's achievement" builder. Both are avoiding the worst options.
> While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
Volume scale is too different. US workers might churn at .5%/month - that’s maybe 500k job losses. Even if Facebook pays 10x average, that’d be equivalent $ to ~3 days of normal churn.
11,000 people is around 0.003% of the US population. These layoffs alone will not meaningfully impact the US economy. Of course, these layoffs are not in isolation, and the economy is obviously cooling. But, alone, no, it is not a mechanically meaningful factor.
FB alone certainly not. Even if these 11k people would be earning on average 300k/year, their combined income would be only around 3B/year. The US national income is around 25.000B/year.
Corporations are like schools of fishes. They all swim in one direction until suddenly they swim in a different direction.
So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.
Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.
I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.
My opinion here is that tech companies are generally a lot more data driven and quicker to move. So I see these layoffs as them taking the possibility of a recession seriously and being well prepared for it when it does happen.
This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).
People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don't see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.
Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
> Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy.
Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it.
A few fallacies:
- Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive.
- Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus.
- Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt.
If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
While your comment is sarcastic, it is correct. It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
I think you're misunderstanding my point here so I'll be clear:
I think you and those truckloads of people you're referencing may be overestimating your technical prowess. If you were truly capable of the feats you claimed, someone would find an operator and CEO to handle all the messy parts for you and wait for their 10000x returns in 5 years.
> It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
... ah yes, if only they trust everyone who claimed this and gave them the money. Truckloads of trillion dollar companies.
Edit:
> When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
There are hard technical problems. Autonomous self-driving cars, for example. Waymo would love to hire you to deliver this in 5 years with a handful of friends.
VR headsets that are lightweight, wireless, and can drive high fidelity experiences is another example. Meta would love to get in touch.
Drones that can safely deliver packages at scale while following US regulations is interesting. Amazon would love to hire you or buy your startup.
I don't discount how hard operating is. I know though the long leash you have if you're truly exceptional.
I understand your point. As I said, I would have made the same point when I was half my age. I understand it all too well. Younger me would not have believed older me either.
I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well.
What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures.
And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity.
You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard.
I think you're saying "if somebody gives me <something that is essentially non-existent>, I can do something really cool."
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.
Yep seen the same thing. In terms of 10 people I'd go further give me 1-2 fantastic "unicorn" devs and enough time, I could build you just about anything.
It just so happens no one in any org gets that time and keeping those unicorn devs focused is very hard. Very small annoyances can cause them to leave and that's what they do.
I have seen people single handily build amazing stuff but it never lasts. Eventually someone gets left with the half built system and then a team needs to take over and bloat and ...
Been there, done that. It turns out throwing money at problems doesn't generally solve them. People will be motivated to keep getting paid obscene salaries. Keep their boss happy isn't the same as being aligned and focused on a common vision.
Indeed, in most cases, when people are aligned around a common vision, you don't need to pay them very much. People seem to do best when they're paid enough in order to not have financial stress so they can focus on work (with the caveat that the pay ought to be stable), but where the financial motivation doesn't replace intrinsic motivation. That's a rare scenario you only see in a few settings (e.g. sixties-era academia).
If throwing money at people worked to keep them aligned, FAANG would have hyper-aligned work forces. You can look at any of them.
Saying that Google has "thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades" visualizes this very nicely. Throwing people at problems and having people solve problems working together productively are two very different things. If I (or anyone else) could solve the latter problem -- making large numbers of people work together, aligned, and productively, I'd be richer than any tech mogul.
Throwing people at problems results in a lot of very fun play, though!
>Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed.
Is this unique to you, or can others do the same with the same 10 people?
If not unique to you, how come 7 billion people on the planet have not been able to do this over the past 25 years? Certainly this many people of that caliber get together often enough to do this, right?
If unique to you, then you really need to just find one person in that 7 billion to fund you so we can see another trillion dollar company get built in 5 years by 10 people.
Or, third option, this isn't reality, and you're missing some understanding of the issues involved.
No, that's the point. The people do exist, and aren't even uncommon. What doesn't exist -- at least replicably -- are the organizational structures around those people.
A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.
When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive.
Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.
My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too.
Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.
Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.
Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.
They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.
In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
"Managing" wasn't meant to imply "direct reports." I don't think I've ever met anyone with 100 direct reports (although I can see completely routine roles where that might happen -- Uber/Turk/etc. can exist with zero human management).
Yes that's what my comment was. Often it's 100 people below them. The % of time managing any of these people is low.
FYI twitter seems to be moving to a low manager high employee count. Musk himself said that a ratio of 1 manager per 10 coders is way too high. I suspect he wants it at 10x that amounts.
My current manager has 31 direct reports.
Sorry if this is confusing it's a hard subject to describe over text and I think there is a lot of nuisance lost over text here.
Kinda. Here's the problem. Let's say I'm managing a business with $1B in revenues and $1.1B in expenses. Am I doing well?
On one hand, those are astronomically high revenues. Great! On the other hand, I'm losing $100M per year. Suck! But I was brought in to fix things up after some idiot who ran things into the ground. I'm doing great! But it's a growth market; maybe it's because of that? Suck! But in fact, I'm bleeding money for growth. Great!
... and so on.
So all those other things can be spun. It's nearly impossible to objectively evaluate executive performance.
They definitely show up on OKRs and similar, which can be managed by setting low objectives.
Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.
Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.
Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.
Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.
That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.
Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.
That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.
So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO.
Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?
In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn't even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1/10 of it. I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.
If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.
While it might not saturate the US job market as a whole, it will saturate the parts of the local programmer market that can come even close to matching the sorts of salaries these people where probably paid.
If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.
I work at Stripe. I can’t throw a proverbial paper clip at this company without hitting someone who could be founding a company right now. There’s no way to lay off 14% of Stripe without setting free scores of future founders.
Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company
If you were that risk averse (that you didn’t act on your entrepreneurial instincts) when times were good, my money is that you’re more likely to double down in searching for safety.
I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)
I feel exactly the same. I would love to run my own tiny company, but it looks very tough to bootstrap. Everytime I hear someone say it is easy, I cringe.
OP isn't saying it's "easy". They are pointing out that forming a startup is achievable by a small (scores = several 20s ~= 60-100) number of people impacted.
Imagine thinking that starting a new company is a bad idea. It might not be easy, but the engine of progress is the birth of new firms, not the monopolization of markets through a handful of them. The vast majority of jobs are provided by small to medium-sized businesses, not companies like Twitter or Stripe. This is particularly true in Europe, but it's quite universal. We need new companies, even if some fail (or even most).
Not necessarily… a potential good startup founder is not necessarily a skill set that a FB needs right now. And many business ideas that aren’t “FB-scale ideas” can still be quite successful for a small founding crew.
That’s right—-any time you’re laying off thousands people at once, some of them will the “the wrong people”. There is no mechanism for mass layoffs that can accurately target only “low performers”. Even if these layoffs reflect good decisions, good decisions at corporate scale are not necessarily good decisions at the individual level.
Clean tech also seems big - even if the Republicans did manage to gut federal support for renewables (I’m doubtful given e.g. how much money Texas wind farms are making) consumer trends are looking solid and a lot of state policies represent locked-in market.
This is a valid concern in a recession but there are different niches and business models. Facebook has been very profitable selling ads but that’s not the only option, and there are opportunities which might be a good fit for a small company which a big one is structurally incapable of finding. After the dotcom crash, I knew several people who found solid niches selling services to other businesses - it didn’t have the hypergrowth potential of something like an ad-supported social network but most of those fail, and there’s a lot of money in less sexy industries.
Only if you can start a company that's cashflow positive from essentially day one. Burn rate provided by suppressed interest rates and cashed up venture capitalists is quickly becoming a disappearing concept.
The first dotcom crash was good that way: people make worse decisions when they have piles of VC funny money and anyone with a real business has trouble standing out when the field is full of competitors burning bright but fast.
Less competition, more available labor, the books start with a "this is hard" and get better when things get better (compare with starting when things are easy and then having it rough when times get hard)...
It should also be noted that a person recalled from the home office already has a hidden 20% pay cut if she or he has to commute for about an hour in each direction.
EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".
Definitely true normally but we’re in this weird world where a ton of people got to try a previously unavailable or unemphasized option. Full-time remote work used to be a bit unusual but a couple of years was enough for a lot of people to get used to the idea and now it feels like a cut to go back, even if they were used to being in the office in February 2020.
No, but commuting has other expenses: beyond the obvious cost of cars that often includes eating out more (often at pricier locations), extended childcare, wardrobe expenses, etc.
No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.
I’ve been here long enough to have seen the countless comments lamenting the current state of qualifications and ability in the industry. Here’s to hoping that meta and stripe laid off under achievers that would be wise to get into a different industry where they’ll perform better. Musks layoffs ignored since it seems clear that his were indiscriminate and hasty to the point of negligence.
Well to be honest 1/10 was a little bit of overstatement, but yeah every year there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers so it's about 1/8 or so.
We have this too in Germany, but it's usually not based on open positions but some "we would need this to grow the GDP further industry is saying they miss these number of people" from some lobbying group like Bitkom. But Chapeau! for your country.
> there's a governmental report about how this country is missing 150k programmers
You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.
Keep in mind that government reports have a time lag. It's based on someone doing research some time ago. The time lag could easily be months. If it was 100% true at the time of research, the current situation may be very different.
Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.
The problem is this statistics contains jobs ads that are not viable:
If i put out a job ad: Need a software develioer with skills in COBOL, latest react and assembly, to lead a team of 10 for $30k
And I cant hire anyone
It will still end up in government statistics for shortage.
This is lile if we all put out ads on Gumtree/craiglist 'will buy a Toyota, brand new, for $1000", and someone counts thise ad and concludes there is a shortage of Toyotas.
In that example, you still want a Toyota though, right? Just because you don't want one all that badly doesn't mean your life wouldn't be better with one.
Romania and Poland aren't exactly small by European standards, in fact they're some of the biggest by population and area. And Romania is not Central but Eastern European [1], so that's out.
Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland based on the most widely used definition of Central Europe [1]
I think we are both talking now about the first chart in the section “Different views of Central Europe”. The one with the caption “Central Europe according to The World Factbook (2009),[1] Encyclopædia Britannica, and Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (1998). There are numerous other definitions and viewpoints.”
Depends, Romania is either central, southern, or east european. Culturally is most definitely not eastern. Germany is by some considered central european. Austria and Switzerland see themselves as west european. Oh the delusion.
Every country changes their belonging to a region based on the perceived value bias of what is being discussed.
A user here humorously put it that Slovenians see themselves as Western European when it comes to how honest and hard they work, Southern European when it comes to weather and food, and Eastern European when it comes to drinking, partying and having fun.
But geographical location however is immutable, so let's stick to that instead of the other more biased definitions.
I would probably not classify Poland as small, especially noting how big of a population drop between Poland and Romania is. And if Poland were a US state, it would rank 2nd in terms of population, sightly over 1 million people less than California...
Yes, but you get a social security which is without par. Including one year Arbeitslosgeld (in most situations), health insurance, the works. I always find it funny that we compare these things. In the USA the salaries are superhigh, but lo and behold if something happens to your crystal perfect life. And in life shit happens. A disease, an accident, an unwanted pregnancy. There is so much that might go off, you can literally drown in debts before you even know it.
Agreed, this is actually pretty scary for me (living in the US for a decade now) - bankruptcy is potentially one accident away (especially if it takes away the ability to continue doing the high-paying job).
In the USA in Meta like companies you have good healthcare insurance, one year paid maternity leave and a lot of other benefits. 4 months salary at layoff. And you make 2 to 3 times more than in Germany.
At German car manufacturers? Absolutely not. The maximum compensation that an IC can commend at BMW is just above 100k€ -- and that would require more than ten years of experience.
Compare that to a new grad at Google Germany making 130k€. Somebody with ten years of experience there would be making closer to 300k€.
But that typically old-school setup where there is only one way to make more money is move up the career ladder into management or in German “Führugskarriere”. I have no pity for these types of companies who don’t understand that a senior engineer is worth more than a young group leader. A few companies have started to change but Germany has along way to go to adapt from this mindset, but in reality there would be enough money just another distribution is necessary.
Wealth/income inequality is addressed by wealth/income taxes, or marginal consumption taxes. Controlling prices (limiting wages) would be a terrible way to go about it.
The damaging wealth inequality is the hundred millionaire + class and the rest.
If prosperity distribution had kept track during the last 50 years (wealth has increased dramatically due to tech), the average salary would be 6 figures, so it’s actually better for wealth distribution to have tech folks making higher 6 figures to put pressure on the 8+ figure class.
The GINI coefficient for Germany is about 32 vs 41 in the US with the global average being 38. That's not so far apart, and the US is skewed by have a chunk of the world's wealthiest people.
It's hard to take two numbers in isolation that we don't really use day to day and make any kind of sense of them. It's only when you graph a few countries together[0] that you see:
1. the US is somewhat of an outlier, while Germany is grouped together with other wealthy countries
2. the US' Gini has been steadily growing last few decades - implying inequality is getting worse
3. Germany's Gini is very slightly declining in the last few decades - implying it's staying roughly stable
I don't think higher-than-average is particularly good at all - you're in the neighbourhood of places like Qatar, Iran, DRC and Argentina. In fact the only way you'd use Gini to suggest the US has a ok level of wealth inequality is if you presented two countries Gini coefficients side-by-side to someone who doesn't normally think about Gini, presented them without any other context and said "look, they're kinda close"
Sure, that makes sense. It's just worth noting that the U.S. are not an outlier amongst developed nations when looking at wealth inequality -- which, IMO, is the much more important metric.
What I'm getting at is that Germany isn't some paragon of equality, it's average. The US as I pointed out is skewed by the high number of staggeringly wealthy people and a trend of people moving from the lower to upper levels of what you might call middle class. In the US wealth held by people form 50% of the distribution up to 99% represents about $91T vs $18.2T for the top 0.1% and $4.4T for the bottom 50%. The coefficient really hides the vast middle and upper middle distribution in the US.
Also this obscures the fact that it is far better to be poor or working class in the US than somewhere with a similar Gini coefficient.
> The US as I pointed out is skewed by the high number of staggeringly wealthy people
I think you might want to lookup what Gini tries to measure. You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad, and now you're having to backpedal and say that actually Gini kinda sucks but the USA isn't so bad.
> You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad
No, I'm pointing out that at lot was being made of a small difference in a ratio that's really sensitive to marginal differences. I'm noting a marginal difference that makes the US look more different than other OCED nations than it is in fact and more like autocratic developing nations than it is in fact.
I'm also pointing out that it isn't a good measure at all. It's as coarse as GDP and more misleading.
Not really. The US attracts wealthy people from around the world, has a gigantic internal market, and is friendly to financial business. If you don't consider the top 0.1% then the picture looks totally different. The VAST majority of wealth in the US is help by people in 50th to 99th percentile range. The Gini coefficient makes the US look superficially more like Qatar, which is obviously nonsense.
Some metrics aren't linear so w/o knowing more about Gini coefficient, my first thought is "I have no idea if the difference is significant or not". Can someone ELI5 this so that I can build an intuition for what "1 unit of Gini" means?
It's a curve reflecting income (not wealth) share of a population against a line of perfect equality, which is a 45 degree angle. A low disparity hugs the line and a high disparity hugs the X and Y axis. Gini = A/(A + B) where A is area over the curve and B is the area under the curve. So an increase of 0.1 in the gini number reflects a larger A.
It's not a very good way to measure what it is trying to measure[1].
I think the main problem is the lack of intuition of what "1 Gini means", except the "lower is better". Is difference between coefficient of 10 & 11 the same as difference between 30 and 31? The poster to which I responded said that "32 vs 41 is not far apart" - is it? Is difference between 10 and 19 the same as difference between 32 and 41 (delta is the same)? How about between 0 and 9?
That was me, and they aren't that far apart. Is 41% of the area under a lot more than 32%? Not really, see this example[1] Norway here has a coefficient of 27.5 and the US was at 41.2 but the graphs are barely different except that you can see that the US has a sharp bend on the far right hand side. The gini formula is really sensitive to that in a way that doesn't tell us much.
High tech-sector salaries are the result of extreme wealth inequality, not the cause of it. The 0.1% are not Meta engineers hammering a check and fretting about RSUs. They are the ones investing in every half-baked TechCo and startup because they already own a few small countries and a Blackwater detail the size of the 82nd Airborne, and they can't think of anything else to do with their money. It's this desperation for anything approaching positive real returns that has inflated US tech salaries.
Use profit margins to determine what wages should be. I wouldn't be surprised if the wages are fine on that basis, actually. But let's draw the right conclusions for the right reasons.
Strong disagree with that one and this is a fairly unambitious take. Most companies and employees themselves in the EU buy their own kool-aid of "yeah we are ok with getting paid $40k because we got health insurance" (which does not work as efficiently in practice as one would like).
EU - esp. Germany and some other European countries - have abysmal salary compared to rest of the developed world and a poor wage growth over the last 10 years or so.
Heck, even countries like India have experienced faster growth: netto, a senior tech professional in India can earn more than what what they'd get in Germany. And that's not even accounting for 3-5x difference in cost of living.
I thought about moving to Berlin and did some research. Median salary for a Senior Software Engineer is 86k EUR in Berlin according to Glassdoor. You will pay ~48% in taxes (depending on your Tax class), so it will be around 3700 net per month with an avg rent ~1500 EUR. So it's like 2200 EUR left, and you are supposed to have a life (and even make some savings) with that money. I don't know how this is fine to be honest. The only reasonable way to do it is to have this salary when you live in a more cheaper place with a better tax regime.
Nah. With 86K gross/year in Germany you get: around 4K for tax group 1 (single) and 4.7K for tax group 3 (married and your partner earns less than you).
Also, average rent in Berlin is among the cheapest (compared to other big cities like Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Munich). So, more like 1K/month for a decent apartment.
In any case, I agree with your overall statement: even if 86K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners in Germany, in reality it's hard to afford a decent house (not flat) with that salary (unless you wanna work until you're 67...)
For me it comes to an almost philosophical question: do you want to live like an average person in a developed country, or do you want to live better than average in a different place with a cheaper cost of living?
Thank you for the calc though, seems really helpful.
I have seen a previous manager at a company cannot compensate for FANG levels say for interview candidates "Don't put a high bar, besides we won't get that kind of talent because... you know... FANG".
But i don't see that being necessarily true and largely depends on type of software you build and the culture of the company. A lot of people are decent engineers and are not interviewing for FANG for a variety of reasons are for no reason in companies that may or may not deserve them. I think its hard to build street cred to get people to work for less, but interviews should always have a good bar.
One weird thing about the software industry is that the guys who design skyscrapers and the ones who put in drywall have the same job title
You don't need some Google genius to do a lot of this work, and sometimes a regular person will do a better job than some wonderkid who spends too much time and effort trying to automate it
Yes, but your salary will be 1/2 of what you're used to.
My brother moved from FAANG to Atlanta to work for Home Depot. His comp went down from 400k to 140k. Which is still great for Atlanta, but there is no situation where a move from FAANG to any other company comes without wage deflation
Roof over your head. Seriously? In Europe if keep it modest you can keep a roof over your head by working in supermarket. I don't think this should be your aim honestly.
Depends where in Europe you live, though. And in recent years, even that is not enough for most countries with a strong Tourists sector, as rent goes up year on year (they increase rent during summer then lower it, but it's still higher than before). That's been going on for at least 15 years in some regions of Croatia. Not to mention everything (except salaries, od course) is being rounded up to Euros, so that's additionallt going to affect Croats.
I don't think these people need either sympathy or pity. They will do fine. They're all smart. Most are also hard workers. People like that don't struggle for long.
Yeah, but that's still in the USA. The poster is talking about a totally different type of switch.
As an aside, you're talking about switching from a company that supposedly makes revenue selling ads but really is inflated with free money to one that makes revenue from selling hammers. People who made this switch before the free money are going to be fine. Now that 11,000+ people are going to try to make this switch, they're going to wish they had.
The other thing that happens with this is your job becomes much more practical and less oriented to whatever fads are sweeping SV and HN. Some like it, some don't.
High frequency trading pays better than FAANG if you got the right skills and can cope with the work environment (which is not as bad as it used to be from what I hear).
According to EU Commission's estimates whole EU needs ~600 000 more programmers, with Poland (where I'm from) needing 50 000. This seems conservative to me, everybody's hiring and salaries grow pretty quickly.
You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
With the fact that you got the demand/offer law not in your favor, these salaries will definitely go down.
Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries
In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy
Not really most contractors I know are just regular programmers, average in skill. Their rate is around 800eu/day, they all work in big bureaucratic enterprises. Hiring contractors is basically the only way a lot of those companies can get access to somewhat decent talent.
And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.
The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.
I don't know where you live, but 800 euro/day is not a standard rate for avg programmers in many parts of Europe. Is most probably half or sometimes less than that.
Not exactly, only the "living expenses" part of the salary can get this "equivalence multiple" applied. The rest of the salary should be counted 1:1 with the US because other purchases cost the same regardless of where you are (branded clothes, travelling, buying a laptop, buying a car, investing for retirement, stocks cost the same everywhere). So it's more like the first 20k are like getting paid 100k and the rest of the 80k will just be 80k, so more or less 200k equivalent.
It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.
But you will probably stay there for life so you have the benefit for life. "investing for retirement, stocks" are cheaper as you also need 3 to 5 times less.
With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.
I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.
I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.
It's good to look at the whole picture like that. A lot of "cost of living calculators" tend to implicitly assume you're spending every take-home dollar on eggs or gasoline, which isn't true for highly-paid software engineers.
I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.
I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.
You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.
> But you will probably stay there for life so you have the benefit for life.
Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow
Traveling is cheaper in EU simply because more interesting stuff is very close, flights are crazy cheap (usually you can find flights under 100 USD both-ways inside EU), and you can do it a lot while being paid (20-30 days of paid vacations per year in most countries).
Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.
I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).
Not quite; an iPhone costs more in Prague, a Tesla much more, a laptop can be double the price. You don't purchase lots of iPhones, but the global goods generally have higher prices in Europe than EU, partly due to VAT, partly due to market conditions. Energy and gas are much more expensive in Prague.
Nobody denies it. Again is the offer and demand law. Probably high delocalization brought new jobs which ended up and saturating the market and growing salaries to fight for the very same talent pool.
Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations
> With the fact that you got the demand/offer law not in your favor, these salaries will definitely go down.
Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).
When you take into consideration taxes and social security; you will be taxed at an effective taxrate of around 40% for a salary of 40k euro. To get around taxes, you need to work as a contractor, and use some copyright law on the time you spend coding (you create something) which cuts the taxrate for that time in half.
Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.
50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.
It’s usual to talk in “brut” in France, and it means mid-tax. 60k€ “brut” = 90k TCO = 45k€ in the pocket of the employee.
That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.
In Poland you'd be usually talking post-tax per month but I converted for American standards, so pre-tax per year. You can get more, mind you, that was just the average.
You're right but its not as if only Meta are firing or we're anywhere close to this recession ending. There's gonna be a bunch of pain to come still unfortunately.
I think the pay will go down its the meta and google etc that have been pushing up the salaries without the demand from them the pressure on salaries will bring them down.
> I'd be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.
Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.
Going off the article it sounds like most of the layoffs are in business and recruiting so I suspect a small-ish fraction of the layoffs will be programmers
Yeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :D
Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.
I hear you, but things will be different this time around. It would take me 20 minutes to explain, but gist is there is a HUGE diff between senior engineer and senior tech, there was no H1B phenom until 2001, almost no senior level engineers (cough) remaining in the biz until around 2006 (thanks to dot-com bust nuclear winter) and balance wasn't even restored until recently (very recently) because, you know, engineers with 10 years experience aren't half as confident as techs with 5 years experience. If you're a senior level engineer who can write operating systems, firmware and glance at a data center blueprint and see RF signaling issues as easily as you can look at a schematic and see DMA inefficiencies, are you going to pledge allegiance to a turd like company run into the ground by the spoiled Boomers or are you going to start your own company (or throw in with some hungrah folks you maybe met saving from the supremely over-confident senior technician crowd)? This time around, those Strange Conditions don't exist anymore and, much as it was in the 80s, you can't buy/refi a house in the US unless you can show significant ATR and lastly, with tightening credit (that comes with higher interest rates and, for now at least, higher home prices), you are going to need to be compensated in greenbacks (not stock) and show stability (not 1-3 years per gig)...all things that are harder in startup-land. For now, find another gig with a large company, go overseas (Europe not Middle Eassssst) if you have to. I will write a book, but they won't let me publish until the movie is done roflmao
I reckon 11k would pretty well fill all the available tech roles in Czech Republic (which fits the "small Central European" description). God knows where they'd live though, rents + prices would explode
I don't see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day. The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it's been literally weeks since I had one. Lots of companies froze their hiring. The music is stopping, and there's a lot less chairs. Not everyone is going to find a new seat.
True, but these aren't ordinary engineers who'll settle for ordinary salaries. These are the top paid engineers in the industry - there are practically no places that can hire all 20,000 of them at their current salaries.
It does mean that a lot of folks will be looking for work, expecting really big salaries. Because they have become used to a very high standard of living, these salaries will actually be required.
MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.
I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.
Does the small EU country you are living in pay FAANG level salaries (200k and more) for their developers? Because in the small central EU country where I live, they always say skilled workers are in demand until you tell them your desired salary ;-)
“Oui mais vous avez des tickets resto” — Explanation: French people seem always very happy with low salaries as long as they have social benefits such as 4,60€ ticket for restaurant at lunch. And free healthcare, which they pay 800€ per month (for a 65k€ salary).
They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.
Similar here. Over the summer my country of 3m people, reached its yearly immigration quota in tech jobs of 16,000. And that doesn't include people moving inside the EU or refugees from Ukraine.
the effect this kind of thing has on the broader market is that it makes everyone else reconsider their hiring plans. I doubt there will be as many open positions after this announcement and it won't all be from hiring
The real problem to worry about is hiring practices, shitty HR people, algo-based auto rejecting and shitty fucking interviewers... THIS will have impact on these people suffering to find a new position....
So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.
There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.
Also a lot of those people are going to take time off. A large number of high earners that have worked at a place for a decade and now have ~9 months paid vacation.
These numbers are just the start of the avalanche... There have been a lot of pie-in-the-sky initiatives, especially as the result of the massive cash infusions during Covid.
Now all that easy money is going away.
The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.
It will probably spill over into the rest of the economy. No matter how generous the severance, a fired worker isn't going to be buying new cars, buying houses, or taking expensive vacations.
It says those will be “disproportionately affected”, but that could just mean that they represent (say) 10% of the layoffs even though they make up 5% of the team. It doesn't mean that the layoffs are mostly those folks.
Programmers don't make up more 10% of fb's employee base anyway (a guess) so if you assume that fraction at both fb and twitter you're looking at about 1500 additional people looking for jobs not 15000. Suspect this has little to no impact
If that’s the company-wide number, I imagine it’s even higher in the Family of Apps and Reality Labs groups (the ones affected by layoffs), because it doesn’t include cross-org functions like facilities or accounting.
It says about 12k are software engineers. Now it does say 40k total employees instead of the real number but I suspect software engineers are much more likely to be on linkedin. Still fairly confident that its closer to 10% than 33%.
The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.
Well Meta severely downsizing their HR department shows you they're not gonna recruit much if at all. It's not a great sign for someone looking for a job...
Honestly, tech companies that were formed in the last decade have very little to show in terms of value creation. Majority are unprofitable. Most will never make profits in a recession AND tighter monetary environments.
At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.
Were you around the dot com crash? It was much worse than what is going on, layoffs happened left and right. But the future would have never been better for tech jobs. So no, incorrect to say anything for sure.
I've long argued that it was the "creative destruction" of the dot com crash that made so many of the FAANGs possible.
For instance, Amazon in Seattle benefited as thousands of engineers found themselves out of work in 2000 and 2001.
In addition, AWS was largely inspired by the fact that Sun Microsystems refused to cut their pricing. Amazon was using a lot of Oracle databases and Sun hardware, and when Sun wouldn't negotiate their prices down, Bezos began to figure out A Better Way.
Bezos was particularly irked because there was a flood of practically new Sun hardware available (due to the crash) but Sun wouldn't negotiate on price, despite the market being awash in high quality used hardware.
Basically Bezos didn't want to spend $80,000 on a new Sun server, but he also didn't want to run hardware that was used.
The submission itself is such a link. Did you even read it, or just dive straight into the comments?
> Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
Add to that thousands of smaller companies laying of 10 people here, 100 people there. We will not hear about it, but it quickly adds up.
In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
> In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Hiring students is much cheaper so companies may still hire them whilst letting go of other expensive employees at a cost of quality.
cost of living in those areas means these guys live at best above middle class unless you want engineers to essentially never have children and live in an apartment all their life, then even 200-300k in these areas isn't much.
As an engineer living in Europe and inside an apartment I can confirm.
Also wanted to add that when we want to feel less trapped we can very easily escape to many other nice places that surround us in the near vicinity, I usually go for bookstores and coffee-shops (from where I’m writing this comment), other people also choose parks, bike-rides, stuff like that. We manage.
Without those soulless entities who over hired by a large numbers those people may not have their job in the first place. So sympathize, but with perspective.
The US has 2.7 million developers. Who knows? They may have to sully themselves and become “enterprise developers” like most of the other 2.7 million developers…
salaries rarely and hardly ever go down. however inflation does exactly that in real terms. This is an interesting article about it: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html
They are actually going down because of inflation and the lack of a full compensation for that. You get the same money but it's worth less.
As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.
I remember the dot-com (and Y2K) bust, when all the people who got into tech for the money (and not the love of it) suddenly decided to switch career. I hope the same happens now.
So you're implying only people who are passionate about tech should be allowed to work in tech? This does not hold water for almost any profession. Tech pays extremely well, and if you can do the work, who cares how you feel about it?
If you can do the work, awesome, no one cares how you feel about it. But that's the keyword: *IF* you can.
People who went into IT for the love of it are diligent by default (from my personal experience) and CAN do the work. Then you get people who enter IT for the money (nothing wrong with that) and not all of them can do the work.
Those are the show-stoppers usually which incur various debts (from tech-debt to actual financial debt) because you end up having to carry them.
Let's not pretend as if they don't exist, there's so many of them.
Absolutely, and it's hugely demoralizing to work with them.
A person like that was moved off of my team recently, and the general lift on the team from just having them gone has been astounding. Everything is up: velocity, stability, even just the vibe of technical planning sessions.
I once had to fire that person. I hated it, it was very hard to do because they guy was a personal friend of mine and he never talked to me again afterwards. However, it fixed the team and we went on to do a lot of very good work that we couldn't have done otherwise.
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
The other most interesting part of the book (while certainly dated), is the citations to see what came before and more material on it.
Weinberg, Gerald M. The Psychology of Computer Programming (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971)
Dunn, Robert H. Software Quality: Concepts and Plans (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990)
Christenson, D. A. et al, "Statistical Methods Applied to Software", collected in Schulmeyer, G. Gordon & McManus, James I. Total Quality Management for Software (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992)
(and so on)
And while one can certainly debate the "is the advice given in something that is 30 or 50 years old still valid" - that debate itself is interesting in considering what was going on in the minds of managers back then and how they tried to solve these problems.
There is a certain lack of institutional knowledge and a desire to throw much of it away with the phrase "we're agile" or some other management buzzword of the day... and yet Brook's Law is still as valid today as it was nearly five decades ago (gotta keep an eye on that... I wonder if they'll do a third edition in 2025).
Bit of a tangent, but it's kind of harder to hire as well.
Years ago when interviewing people I didn't have to wonder as often how passionate the candidate actually is towards the field, or whether they're just looking for a high pay job.
These days I get those doubts a bit more. I think most people are still at least somewhat passionate though (bad/awkward programmer tooling which we've gotten used to are somehow great filters....)
It is more fun to work with people that love the work they are doing, who get jazzed up on covering all the corner cases and really good test suites and efficient use of a computer. People who will listen to tech talk for ten minutes and then act like they are thinking, “how will this get me director or VP by thirty” are less engaged and less fun.
During the dot-com days, you could get a job if you can fog a mirror and turn on a PC. Now you typically need to get a degree to get your foot in the door so at least there is a vested interest. (Not to say there aren’t talented people without degrees.) I think the OP is talking about getting rid of some of the dead weight. We’ve all worked with someone who coasts along and wonder how the hell they have a job in the first place.
Excitement about what you’re doing brings excitement to others too and many great ideas come from people tinkering with side projects and the like. We shouldn’t stop anyone from going into tech on anything but competency but yes, given the choice to hire someone passionate about it or someone who sees it as a droll 9-5 with roughly equivalent skill sets, I’d pick the passionate one.
I dont really care why you got into it so long as you remain excellent while you're here. the Problem is the (seeming) correlation between money driven motivation and apathetic (sub)mediocrity.
For me it’s about how CV-obsessed our industry has become, which you could say that is also caused by the money factor.
Basic things like the KISS principle have been thrown in the garbage can, almost all that matters is how the tech we’re now using can further increase our career prospects.
It's not a given that everyone will be looking for a job immediately. They're getting a multi-month severance package. Some will look immediately - some will take a breather and start looking in a few months - some will take the time to switch careers or go back to school. Also, it is 15,000 people presumably located around the globe - not just 15,000 people in Menlo Park.
Comps will come down from the stratosphere but good devs will not be unemployed long. They may fall to less exciting roles at banks or other traditional tech, but there's still tons of demand.
>Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?
Well I predict two things:
One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.
Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.
It was obvious that those days were going to end eventually, it was never going to be sustainable. A few people I knew were deciding between job offers at beginning of this year and I straight up said take the most comp, this shit isn’t gonna last forever…
on the face, it should be pretty easily sustainable based on the profit per employee these companies make. i guess we just really hate anyone but shareholders actually getting a piece of the pie.
I checked a few days ago and the revenue per employee at big tech is eerily similar to "Biglaw" and non retail banking (Jones day, >200k entry level, goldman is similar) at 1-2mil per employee. One could argue the market for IB/trading has been saturated by applicants for years but they pay is still well above norms ~>150k entry level. Pretty interesting.
i would imagine other industries are going to suffer as well. my partner worked in fashion for a decade and realized it was horrendous and nothing was changing so she went to a bootcamp for UX design and got a job not too long ago. the pressure of the success of another industry would force bad industries to change certain ways of working for the better. when there is 0 competition, there is nothing stopping outdated and overworked industries from becoming any better. like it or not, the tech industry has helped elevate the broader market to a certain degree
Oh yeah you're right. I read it as "developers in the non-Bay Area"
Nonetheless, I don't think the point changes. One group getting less doesn't usually mean that it's going to transfer over and some other group will get less. Most likely, everyone is going to get less.
Rising tide lifts all ships as they say (and the opposite is true as well)
I think the folks who rode the ride a couple years back got it good: somewhere around 2012-2019 was great time for someone who had worked at marquee tech companies, had massive stock options, and commanded premium on the job market when they moved on from their orgs.
I just can't really believe this at all, unless these companies entirely crumble. It's just not feasible for the majority of folks to live comfortably in the Bay Area with a family at less than $200k TC.
I make ~$300k/yr and could probably swing $200k/yr if I didn't save anything (I save ~$100k/yr currently). I just can't imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.
1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world.
2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100/wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family.
3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.
As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000/mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I'd need $100k/yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.
We could downsize and save $10k/yr, but that's not really making a substantial dent long-term.
$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.
Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren't going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.
The housing costs in the Bay Area are primarily caused by 300k salaries from companies in the area. It's not going to crumble immediately, but I can imagine that if the (to-be-)recession drags on, there's be a downward pressure on both salary and housing prices (and other costs of living). Nobody is going to cut your pay in half, but those 8k/month rents are just a function of the demand (of housing) and supply (of money) in the area, not really a law of nature..
Not really. If anything junior engineers are not going to see comp like this going forward. But it's still incredibly hard to hire more senior folks even with big comp packages and they do command a premium.
Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.
Its also worth noting: Its easy to get scared by a number like "11,000", but just pulling estimates out of my ass; engineering likely represented less than 20%, and the bias toward those let go in engineering is likely junior. Not asserting no one senior was let go; just proportionality.
Here's what I'd add: Its extremely difficult to hire really talented senior engineers. Its easy to look at layoffs as "great, we should be able to find senior talent now"; but the opposite may actually be true. Layoffs, at least in otherwise "fine" companies, will predominately not impact senior engineers, and they'll also be less likely to leave. Moreover, the industry is effectively building a wall to breach into seniority; the pathway from junior to senior is harder and harder, even going back a year or two, and many of these junior/normal devs were massively compensated at these roles.
My heart goes out to the junior devs right now; there really are two industries and job markets.
My 2 cents is that it's going to be mostly recruiters, sales, customer success, and other misc operations folks. That's the pattern I've been observing since the post-covid layoffs have begun.
They can try. But it would be a better time to build a team without the overhead of renting office space. I guess it depends on whether companies see an opportunity to wind back leverage from employees or to embrace new possibilities.
The difference here is that it is all at once, and those same companies are slowing hiring. Net effect is that there are loads more people with prominent names on their resumes competing for those jobs that the recruiters are canvasing en masse with. Right now if you replied to one of those positions they'd likely turn you down after a screening call because the calibre of candidates on the market is really high.
if reports are to be believed, large swaths of these layoffs were in business and recruiting units, much less so engineering, so not exactly 15k+ new applications coming in
Per last job report in US, there were two positions for every person finding normal jobs. For IT, I would think that ratio is twice. However, the biggest issue that people have to deal with: (1) Meta paid 2X to 4X higher than regular employers so that’s massive pay cuts for the folks, (2) they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked for.
So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.
Meta does pay higher (maybe not 2x higher) and the message in OP says employees will get their November 2022 vesting, which implies they won't get any future vested stock.
Yes, which is what the GP post said, they lose their unvested stock. By future vested I meant, stock that will vest after they are laid off. Could've been clearer I guess.
I think the parent comment is talking about your general 5-year vesting schedule. In other words, for each of the past 4 years you worked, you will have some unvested stock today.
Will this saturate the market for all open programming/software engineering positions? No.
Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k/yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.
I think there's going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets/from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.
Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.
Im really curious how severance in non-US jurisdictions works in these cases. Both stripe and Facebook are offering WAY more than required by UK law for example. Do they offer similar packages to any UK staff laid off? Or do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?
> do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?
If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to 'get away' with anything like that? They could 'get away' with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn't. Maybe they don't want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn't also apply in other national jurisdictions.
> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.
Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that.
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
Of course. It's not about the best move or what looks better. Nobody cares for that.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
What does that even mean? He won't have to work for a few centuries instead of a millennium? Lol.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
It's not a logical inconsistency to point out that dollars matter a lot less once you have enough.
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
> If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
That wealth is not “immeasurable”. It’s just hard for someone to understand when their point of comparison is personal finances.
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
It has nothing to do with ownership being good or bad. It’s having people with vision and acumen for financially sustainable businesses setting up these projects for success.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Capitalism is just as often not the meritocracy you think it is, but just capital buying up production...
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
For better or worse (obviously for worse) his relationship with the company is fundamentally different than that of every other employee. He’s a founder and holds a majority of voting equity. That makes him inherently unaccountable in a way that is nearly without precedent in the modern corporate era.
Would telling the truth be better if the real truth was “We’ve been waiting for a good excuse to drop a bunch of people and boost the bottom line short-term so we can get some loans”?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
The tech industry labor market has been cooling rapidly this year, it's not only ad-tech companies, and certainly not only in companies who might have over-hired due to betting everything on metaverse.
Are you trolling? that would be worse for literally everyone involved. Have you held yourself to this standard in your professional life? it seems so absurd
Yeah, in 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. Told my team we'd all be laid off soon. I finished the project I was on first and was the first laid off due to no more work.
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office
wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it.
It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of
Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully
managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and
preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners"
(tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of
unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where
everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute
impunity for a day?
I replied by editing my original comment. I got flagged, so I thought it appropriate to edit my comment to motivate what I posted.
My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment.
I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
The overlords saw they were losing control with people opting to WFH and great resignation … so they said “What audacity … inflict pain and suffering on the mortals”.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Or, the dynamics behind the two events are very similar and there’s only so many different ways to describe it, so you shouldn’t expect significant variation in how they’re described.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
Exactly. GPT3 for conversations, some humain actor giving enough materials so the C suite can appears in all hands and the likes thought realistic model ( not the meta crap )
Why stop at the c-suite? We may not be close to being ready to disrupt software engineering but the trend is heading in that direction. We already passed a milestone for code generation.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I haven't seen inside very many, but when I was at university I participated in bargaining with the execs there; I've also interacted with execs of the small- and medium-sized companies I've worked at. Regardless of the purpose and scale of the organization, they all seemed to be emitting the same blandishments, always loosely correlated to context...
I experimented with making a GPT-3 excuse generator for getting out of work/school a while ago^. We can look forward to a future of incredible synergy, as employees dodge work with AI generated notes and are summarily fired by an AI!
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I dare say that once some are out the others look to them and copy what they can if it worked.
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
We must have massively different world views, or at least different definitions to colluding. This doesn't survive Hanlon's Razor. At worst, this is corporate corner-cutting, not collusion.
It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.
a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.
The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come).
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Yes, I agree, I don't think that $8B is a lot of money for the US, especially in the military context. I was just surprised at the number and shared some back story.
Only a fraction of that $8B in aid was direct cash payments to Ukraine. Much of it went to US defense contractors and was recycled into the domestic economy. Higher fossil fuel prices hurt US consumers, but most of that value is flowing to US energy companies and ultimately to US investors. The vast majority of fossil fuels burned here are also extracted and refined here; we only import a little.
> the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
>the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy.
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
First, while the death rates were highest among the oldest people there are still a ton of people who were not close to death anyway. It’s also not true that losing older people is necessarily neutral - economies do better when money circulates, not when it’s tied up in a lump sum going into someone’s retirement account.
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
> They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
Agreed. It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and that at best the restrictions could just kick the can down the road a while. It was also covered up by printing cash at enormous scale.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
> It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease,
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
3 weeks for me to get a remote GP appointment right now. This will be killing more people than Covid ever did, so we are in the red before we even get onto anything else.
It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
It wasn't blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, especially because it wasn't.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?)
think doing nothing would have been much worse.
They should blame Xi. All these economic decisions wouldn't have happened had there been no COVID. The Chinese government deliberately released this lab-made bioweapon/virus, to see how it would negatively impact most of the world. From economies struggling, to people getting polarized and more divided, and supply chains getting affected, their move has been a massive intelligence success for them.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
I think the whole "many predicted" statement that several large tech companies have used to thin out all the pandemic hires is cover for the fact that they boom-hired during the pandemic knowing full well they would very likely have to shed those hires when things went back to pre-pandemic levels and the opportunity for short-term profit was over.
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
That seems a bit unfair. Every successful founder is irrationally optimistic about their own business — that's partly how they became successful in the first place. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that Zuck, Lütke, the Collisons, and many, many others all made the same wrong directional bet and ended up over their skis for perfectly sincere reasons.
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
Who said anything about fair? When has fairness ever factored into business?
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
Most large fast going tech companies "predicited" this but that doesn't mean they really believed it. The alternative at the time was to say..."we grew 100% in the last two years but with covid restrictions limiting etc wr think that growth will be more like 80% and revenue down x%" that would have sent massive shocks to investors and stocks would have dropped overnight as companies like Meta had been setting a long precedent of "beat and raise" with their earnings calls. Essentially everyone was hoping it would continue as they didn't want to see equity and comp and valuations down. What's funny is that it all happened anyway over the course of the year. Believe me from first hand experience there were many people in these companies raising flags late last year that it can't continue but were essentially ignored. Hope is not a strategy!
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
I am talking best employees. People who will find good job no matter what. People you need to keep because they are actually the ones who make the show going.
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
Many large companies have pretty rigid comp review processes and cycles. If you’re a high performing employee who got a stock refresh earlier this year there’s a good chance you’re down 50% or more at many companies. Switch companies and there’s a chance you’ll get a new grant for the original gross value but at the new lower share price.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
Smaller / newer companies with investment money to burn who expect results. Although I can imagine investors are slowing down a bit as well - actually they have done so I believe for the past half decade or so.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
well it could be all of the above....what i find odd is that the Facebook CEO already knew that demand for ad revenue would already drop in 2023 and they were still hiring up untill now....they should have started cutting costs earlier
They claimed their monthly, daily, and total engagement are all up in this quarters earnings. Ads shown up 17% price per ad down 18%. Doesn’t seem like losing users.
Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.
In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.
The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course).
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different:
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
All social media companies hire too many folks and now cutting expenses to meet their target for shareholders. Yet, only Twitter seems to get lots of backslashes compared to other FANGS. Why? I wonder if this relates to Elon Musks' ongoing outbursts on Twitter regarding his political and other conservative views. I believe I answered my own questions. Ha!
I don't think you're looking at this objectively. The way Musk handled the layoffs was reckless and without much thought other than "reduce cost immediately", the proof is they backtracked and tried to hire people back after realizing what a poopy mess they've created. That alone is ridiculous and warrants the backlash Musk/Twitter received.
From the looks of it, Zuckerberg handled this better than what anyone was expecting. Talk about under promising and over delivering
Since you insist on tooting your own horn, I think you should put a timeline on your predictions, as well as specifics on how this "crash" differs from periodic layoffs that happen every decade or even more often than that.
Anyone can predict that things will be bad at some point in the future.
I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave…
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
Zuck did it himself too. No one told him to go all-in on VR. No one. All he had to do was tackle payment and maybe cloud. He first went for crypto and then is in the process of failing with VR.
FB briefly was in the cloud PaaS business when they acquired Parse.
The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies:
What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint.
If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.
Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
not a ton of market for that. and it changes the risk nature of their own facilities. already plenty of hyperscale datacenters with space to lease. what advantage does meta offer? surely they wont beat on price.
It’s probably not worth the hassle to FB, but it is funny to think about how big of a business this could potentially be. But even a profitable business unit might not make enough profit to actually make it worthwhile.
It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
They don't need to win, they just need to be there as another option. Every business I've worked at has been huge on wanting cloud diversity of some sort, and tons of startups act as middle men on this.
Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
SMB. They are effectively the webmaster for a vast amount of very small business, but also Meta's ad platform ends up being one of the larger expenses for many businesses. In fact, I doubt there is a single entity on earth that has more billable B2B relationships.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
>If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Why would there be any issue from an FTC standpoint? As far as I can tell, they're in completely separate businesses. I do agree it is a brilliant idea to Microsoft-ize the SMB relationships they already have to sell software services.
I support I feel uncomfortable about it, but maybe such a merger wouldn't raise antitrust flags. CloudFlare has an insane amount centralization. I love their services as a web user, developer, and operator, but WOW do they have a lot of power by nature of their business. I worry about a buyout by a less principled company that could do all manner of wrong with CloudFlare's assets. For example, a Meta Cloudflare could start to delay or block 1.1.1.1 DNS queries to their competition, and do so quietly and selectively. Any service that offers "Protection" ought not be part of a conglomerate.
Agree on VR, payments, disagree on Cloud. It's a saturated market, there are half a dozen operators who each have unique selling points. I don't know what Meta's would be.
Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
Interesting. Is that because payments are much lower margin than ads? Surely investors would be smart enough to see the additional revenue, and likely additional benefit to the ads business, as being worth it?
Very good lesson here for both Twitter, FB and any other upcoming startup. Never treat your 3rd party developers as shit. Look what WeChat achieved with their superapp and developer ecosystem. Twitter and FB tightened their rules a lot over the years, when they had a potential to become super app for West
A lot of apps want to become a social network but Facebook was in a good position to do so. Imagine someone posting a picture of their Brunch. They tagged the location. Some AI matches the picture of the food with the pictures from the menu (google reviews already does this to some degree).
That food looks good, imagine if they partnered with Uber or Grab so you can add to cart right below the picture.
Peer to Peer payments could have also been great, especially if you could check-out at a store by scanning a QR code to pay (think WeChat Pay, FairPrice in Singapore, or even Paypal's version of that).
Or even buying event tickets. They already have events on the platform, and they let you put targeted ads, but what about an integrated experience to purchase tickets right on the platform instead of there being an external link?
They could have done so much but the only major change/addition in recent years was Dating (a huge hit in countries that perceive Tinder as only for hookups) and those avatars that people use everywhere instead of text posts.
You have to make big bets to continue winning. It's easy for us to sit in our armchairs and criticize their failures, but for example their plays with going mobile-first in 2008 and the acquisition of Instagram in 2012 worked out very well.
It's better to make many small bets and when they start to take off, THEN put the foot on the pedal. Zuck has been notoriously bad at creating new products, so betting the company on that he'll manage it this time seems like a very bad idea.
That's a good point. The principle of proving a simple possible version makes sense. Just pointing out that those "small" steps Tesla took are already a lot bigger than most software projects.
hmm, maybe, but it seems like a golden age for tech where it was hard to fail from a strong starting position. MS, Google, Amazon, Apple, have all done much better than Facebook.
I thought this problem is less related to vr and more related to ads revenue that dropped because of apple. vr was just a way to create a platform from the ground where ads will continue to be their business model
I'm not looking to praise Zuck but he did at least try something new. That's how companies stay alive and vital and relevant. Innovation. He gambled big on VR and it didn't pay off. At least not yet. I don't think it will pay off but I have to respect that he went big on a new direction for the company.
I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.
TikTok is a Chinese company bringing in mountains of data on US citizens, including the ability to influence what people in the US see on a daily basis. The Chinese government would never sell that kind of leverage to anyone, let alone to Facebook, which is banned in China.
TikTok is incredibly popular in the US and there isn’t really a huge similar precedent where the US takes a page from China’s playbook and blocks a social media network completely. If banning TikTok was reasonable, and I’m not sure it is, I think it makes a lot of sense to be cautious about setting bad precedence.
If I put on my rose colored glasses, I still wish Facebook had just stuck to identity.
They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.
They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.
Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
They should have never given up on mobile. Burning a few billion a year on an android fork would have had much better returns than trying to go warp speed on VR.
Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse.
Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.
No, earnings have been going down because Apple fucked Meta with Apple's policy change on asking for consent to be tracked. Meta has even stated as much in various earnings calls since this happened.
This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.
The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.
Revenue has slowed from the Apple change, but the drop in Q3 profits can almost entirely be pinned on RL as staff and other investments has accelerated.
> company’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the quarter.
> Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022.
The effects from the Apple changes are mostly in the rear view mirror at this point. You could attributed a 4% revenue hit to them, but those can also be attributed to a general slowing economy.
Earnings down 4% in bad macro conditions for advertising and compared to a pandemic when people spent more time on the internet. I don't think facebook revenue is going anywhere soon, a decade from now though who knows.
Their income and operating margin has almost halved, compared to 2021. Their free cash flow is 1/50th of the previous few quarters. Those are truly horrible results.
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
I don't think Mark saying "we're going to focus on the metaverse instead of making money for a few years" is a meltdown. They're still making money, their earnings are still sky high, they're just spending more than they need to.
Correct me if I am worng, but hasnt Twitter has seen more growth in the last week than it has in some time? 15 million new users isn't a meltdown, nor is thinning a bloated and wasteful enterprise. Also, if twitter goes completely belly up, Musk would still be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Grave? I'm game for some hyperbole, but not this early.
You being downvoted just shows even this community prefers emotional projections over simple facts.
There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere.
Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe).
There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
Financially twitter is in a rough spot. They were not really making money. Now they have loans to pay too. It isn't in meltdown but certainly there are things to look at there. Sure, Elon can keep it going for as long as he'd like. But he's a fickle personality. I mean he went back and forth several times just with buying the company. Who knows if he'll lose interest.
You're right, but Twitter basically has been in continuous financial trouble since eternity. In 2016 they almost went bankrupt. They tried to sell then but nobody wanted it. Just before Musk they were also in financial catastrophe mode. Under Musk, that will likely continue for at least a year. It's a fundamentally unhealthy businesses.
I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served".
Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back.
Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.
Yup, they are worse off in some ways, and better in others. There is a lot of upsides with having a single person like this calling all the shots, and love him or hate him Musk has been successful in the past.
The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.
Zuck is doing first ever mass layoffs for a company he started from his dorm room 18 years ago and grew to a ~trillion dollar valuation.
Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.
Allowing access to email until the end of day also seems an improvement over other US companies practices
> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
This is why you need real friends outside your workplace. When you get shoved out the door, at most your get the afternoon to be like "lets keep in touch!"
Ha, it's mostly notifications of updates and comments from either Workplace, Phabricator or Tasks. An email sent to me is going to be drowned in a sea of notification emails and it's very unlikely I would read it.
I'd set up filters to clean up the inbox, but it just so happens that when something of significance happens, it's usually on Workchat or Workplace, so I don't bother with e-mail.
and Zuckerberg is somehow real and authentic? First time i've ever heard that one.
Realistically this cut was probably done in time to offer a decent severance without hurting things on the corporate side -- to compare this to Twitter's post-Elon crash-plan is disingenuous, and i'm not even a Musk fan.
> Elon is a fake person created by VCs to fulfill their goals.
I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).
It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)
Ok, his rich family gave him some money to invest and got lucky with paypal. Then he became a hypeman for Tesla and routinely lied about full self driving in order to keep Tesla from bankruptcy and produced unsafe and poorly built cars. Then lied about trucks, roadsters, and solar roofs. He's speed running the history of tunnels and trains and will find out that, yes, putting independent cars in a tunnel is a dumb idea. Hyperloops? Seriously? Buying twitter blue checkmarks only to introduce another checkmark for verificaiton. Hm..Space-X is sorta futuristic? He hasn't proven reusable rockets have saved orders of magnitude of money.
i would never trust Elon's word and he has some big flaws as a person but his goals are so ambitious and risky, small thinking VC's would never invest in those , all VC's want are relatively safe software (SAAS) companies.
I laughed so hard at this comment, thank you for a little bit of humor in these ominous times.
Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.
That's a version of this which doesn't stress out employees so the best ones don't jump the ship at first occasion.
Our org went through something similar some 6 year ago, and it was a stark contrast with previous frequent firing rounds when nobody would be secure, sometimes even best within given team were let go (ie due to current allocation issues).
But this can replace small firing ie up to 10%, not when you are doing stuff musk-style.
Google's ad network is pretty ubiquitous since it spans almost all the known web. Facebook is pretty big too but relies mostly on its own platform (FB, Inst etc.). For sure Google is affected, but I imagine the impact is less.
Also one thing that shouldn't be missed: Google controls Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world (except US maybe) so it wasn't affected as strongly by Apple's clampdown.
The lesson to Zuck is clear: he absolutely needs to own the next digital platform, and in his mind its the metaverse so he's going all in. I question the decisions he makes but the reasoning seems pretty solid at least (unlike a certain Electric Car maker)
While I truly feel the best outcome for humanity is Facebook/Meta shutting down, I will give due credit to the PR and HR teams for managing to make Zuck look human in this moment.
I wonder why the two biggest recent layoffs were by the two largest (US-based) social networks, is this the end of an era? And where is all that advertisement money going now?
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
I think it was mostly a bubble and it finally has popped. The big social networks were funded blindly because they were growing on the market. But of course it wouldn't be eternal
The ios privacy change hurt Meta but honestly most financial reports I've seen from tech (Alphabet, Amazon etc) don't look great. It has to do with the macro environment we're in.
Which tech stocks had a stellar year? Not that many.
I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.
Not the OP, but what I’ve experienced is severance packages get worse across rounds at a single company. A previous employer started at 1 year pay / benefits, then six months, then six weeks + two weeks per year of service.
I've been through 3 lays offs years ago and after the 2nd one I got pretty good at predicting the 3rd. It's basically a cookie cutter approach.
Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.
Maybe less relevant now that a lot of companies are still remote. In the past when a company cuts back on office perks, such as snacks, it’s often a leading indicator of financial issues and possible looming cuts.
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
The writing is usually on the wall for a while before the layoff actually happens, so there's time for you to let your manager know that you wouldn't mind getting the boot.
If you're pretty close with your Director/VP, you can volunteer to be first on the list. Frame it as a sacrifice that you're willing to make to spare another member of your team.
It was petty, but I worked with a dude who got fired for doing that.
When he volunteered to get laid off (with the intention of getting a severance), the person he said that to fired him on the spot for "not being a team player."
Eventually, every last one of us were laid off. But it took six months and I used the time to find a new role and I also received a four month severance.
Sometimes voluntary buyouts are offered before the layoffs. And they typically will make it seem like the buyout option will have better terms than the eventual severance package, to entice people to take it rather than risk getting fired down the road.
Yeah this is what I’ve seen at previous companies. Basically, they need enough headcount for it to not eventually proceed to full layoffs. It actually seems beneficial if you meet the tenure requirements, are still relatively young, and have a good network. I saw several people make out like bandits from those types of offerings.
Yep. I knew several people at a previous employer who got 1 year full pay packages and had a new job lined up within a week. One guy took an early retirement package, worth probably $250k at the time, left for two years and worked at a startup for a while, then came back and within 18 months took ANOTHER early retirement package.
Sometimes voluntary layoffs are announced, but really you need to be able to read between the lines and smell that something is coming before the layoff is announced. (The reason is that layoffs are usually kept confidential because no one wants to incite panic.)
What I did a few years ago was have a 1-1 with a VP and basically implied that I was ready to do something different. I ended up with a great severance package right as the pandemic was taking off.
I've never understood why people in middle management seem to be blindsided by layoffs. I've even listened to a manager tell the CEO this. Are they that oblivious they can't see the writing on the wall? Or is it all just a weird act?
Let’s say you are an employee at a company that does mass layoffs. They do not lay you off like everyone else and keep you on. What is the best course of action to take at that point?
To expand on why, what often happens after these is there now a round of "cost cutting" which on the surface may look like ok we just don't get as many, or any of the cool perks we used to- which will be true, and you will suddenly realize that work doesn't feel like it has a fun aspect to it anymore. But that's really nothing compared to the next step- when they start squeezing you- and everyone for more hours.
And more hours may not be a direct request- anyone at the periphery of the dev process- in the past this was QA, now gets cut because devs can do it, SWE roles might have to start doing more ops work, etc...
When I last left the financial industry, it was so bad, that VPs- and that was back when it least had some meaning- at least it did when I first got the title around 2010, started having to do mundane weekend work like checking out the system after network/firewall changes, etc.
It can be death by a thousand cuts. Now the financial crisis was way worse because essentially everyone was hurting, and losing money- and interestingly I "got out" of that bad situation by going to tech. But that's just how these bad situations play out and deteriorate.
That said, companies are still profitable. There was a LOT of overhiring in the past few years. I don't expect things to get so bad, at all.
I wonder if this mean a dearth of positions (i.e. a tech downturn is fully underway) or simply loads of applicants and enough open positions, but the recruiters are a bit inundated by the sudden influx and it'll take time to sort things out.
Either way I hope those laid off land on their feet.
True but there are exceptions. At a previous job of mine, layoffs were happening and my manager was tasked with laying off one member of my team. He sat us in a room and told us about it and the severance package and basically asked for a volunteer. A more senior engineer volunteered and went on his way with a good chunk of cash.
Oh how I wish I had volunteered cuz a year later basically everyone including me had quit anyway.
The last job I had they offered very generous buy out packages to a few thousand employees to lower the head count. We got to decide if we took it or not. id you accepted they would then figure out your exit date which could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 months out depending on company needs.
I don't know if it's an industry specific thing but my parents worked for big defense contractors and they would often talk about layoffs in conjunction with offers that people could take to leave voluntarily. Always signed crazy to me. My mom took one in 99, worked private industry for a couple years then came back to defense after the dot com crash for way more money.
It depends on where you work. But I've definitely been at a place where the first email was "we've decided to reduce staff in key functions, please read the attached offering and submit directly to your manager". This was a reasonably generous package, in one case health benefits would be maintained for nearly a year even if you had only worked there 3 years.
The next round was a security guy waiting in your office with a box and a packet of information about how to apply for unemployment.
Ask if there are VRIF (voluntary reduction in force) options open to you. Most of the time there are unless you have some kind of "special" status.
I've never known a company that is in the process of layoffs not jumping at the chance to VRIF an employee because it is a far cleaner termination and honestly less stressful and upsetting for all involved IMHO.
But if the senior person is in a role that the company ultimately wants staffed, they're going to need to hire someone else to replace them, who will be new and less effective? (Though OTOH, given the current macro, maybe they can get away with paying the replacement less?)
In my personal experience some random senior employee isn't even pennies on the dollar when it comes to the total amount factored into the layoffs that are in the hundreds of millions.
The bigger factor is are you in a position that requires the company longer to replace you? If so you may just be in that shit position of being kept on another 6 months until the next round of layoffs and get a package half as good.
As the first poster said always get out first if you can as the packages never get better the worse a company does.
Never fool yourself into thinking you're too amazing to be let go and that is why you 'survived' this round of layoffs. The worst case is as I said, you are too good to be let go of yet.
I'd be nervous about asking this unless I'm 100% committed to leaving the company, even if they say "no". Otherwise, you ask, they say "no", but now you've signaled that you're not especially invested in staying at the company, which feels like a negative thing to signal if you're interested in staying.
(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
You don't need to ask your manager, why not go to HR and stress that this is a sensitive topic you don't want making back to your team? No guarantee they'll honor your privacy, but I'd say it's worth a shot.
HR is there to protect the company. Sometimes that aligns with protecting the employee but when shit hits the fan ask yourself does HR work for you or for the company?
I know I sound a bit 'down' saying that but it is an unfortunate reality that companies are not very loyal to their employees when times get tough.
In my experience, HR may act kind, but they are 100% aligned with the company and not you. Giving them a signal that you're open to leaving at a time when they're trying to reduce the cost of resources that are human is a terrible idea if you aren't looking to leave.
Find a trusted friend in the company who is a survivor and ask them. Survivors have strong information networks for office politics and know such info.
Don’t volunteer to quit if you’re not willing to lose your job is sound advice, even if it’s a bit on the obvious side.
Even in an economic downturn an engineer with Meta on their résumé is going to be well positioned to find employment inside of the three months or more pay and six month insurance runway this deal provides.
Having said that, if you're going to be worried about possibly/probably losing your job 6 months down the road what does it really matter if you have signalled you're not very invested in staying? The company has signalled they're not very invested either is how I look at it.
>(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
Of course I am saying this as someone in Europe where firing someone "normally" is a lot more complicated and time consuming and comes with a whole list of other issues a company needs to make sure they manage properly. They can't just turn round and fire you with no pay because you "showed you were not very invested in the company as you asked if you could be let go when we were letting go of several thousand people". That is a 100% guaranteed legal hell hole no company likes to be in by choice.
In America perhaps that is something you genuinely need to worry about I don't know.
You're definitely not going to get fired for that on its own. Maybe I'm over-estimating how much this ends up mattering. But I think it can matter in other small ways too that can negatively effect your career growth.
Once the redundancies have started, the clock is running: you no longer have career growth at that company. You need to start planning your next career move elsewhere.
But it does mean your options for promotion and salary increase are clearly limited. And in tech there's strong evidence that more career development happens when you move companies than within a company.
You may find there's nowhere better to go, but switching to "looking externally" rather than "looking internally" for new jobs is definitely a good idea.
Yeah that's kinda the rub right now though. Everyone's frozen, tons are laying off. If the only information you have is "my company did a layoff", it's not clear you're better off looking externally vs. internally vs. staying on your current team.
One bad case is you leave your company that just did a layoff for one that has yet to do one (but will need to soon).
I understand your concerns and certainly don't mean to minimise them, this is just my personal experience and opinion after all :)
Do what you feel comfortable with at the end of the day. My original reply was meant as one possible answer that I have seen first hand to work well for both parties.
I will add as another personal opinion though that I very rarely see people that choose to stay at a company going though layoffs hanging around very long.
More often than not those people experience a 'depression' (for want of a better word that escapes me as I write this) seeing their friends leave, not having the freedom the had back in the "good old days", little if any progression, the constant "sorry not this quarter, we're still recovering from the layoffs", living in constant anxiety that they will be in the next round of layoffs, etc. So they often leave within a year or two anyway.
Over the years I have played this game and now I am a bit more proactive about exiting before that 'depression' hits me. Of course what is right for me is not right for all, only you can truly decide what you feel is best given your situation.
This nervousness is what companies rely on to keep the ship steady during massive lay-offs.
In other words that same company that in its heyday relied on the person pulling an all-nighter 'for the good of the company' yet failed to ever offer a reciprocal 'sure, take all the paid time off you need buddy' in return gets what it earned.
Although you may hear the 'rats from a sinking ship' and 'you're deserting the company and leaving your colleagues to pick up the slack' shrieked from on down high by management - Fuck 'em. They didn't actually give a shit about you on the way up and they don't give a shit about you on the way down.
I don't at all mean that I feel guilty about abandoning the company or anything like that, I'm saying this 100% from a place of selfishness. Wherever I am, I want my manager to think I'm engaged, I want to seem like a team-player. I worry that otherwise, I won't do as well at perf, I won't get put on interesting/meaningful work, I'll be relegated to the side and not feel as integrated into the team.
It's possible some of these are unfounded/exaggerated fears, though?
If you're 100% set on leaving with or without severance, for sure ask. But if you think you might prefer to stay if severance isn't an option, asking feels risky.
I think what you are describing is both a reasonable worry and also exactly the kind of ambiguity the company encourages. You have no leverage if you're unwilling to leave, and it's foolish to initiate a discussion like that from a position of dependency.
I'm not suggesting issuing ultimatums, of course, I'm just suggesting that you mentally prepare for needing to quit first, otherwise it takes a real pro to have that conversation. I know I'm not good enough to do it unless I talk about things like that with my manager regularly already.
I do wonder if these are questions you can ask confidentially in a different way. Like I dunno how big your place is but you might find this information easily in a meeting with HR, but HR is there to help the company (not you) so it depends on their priorities a lot. It's a very reasonable thing to wonder about when tens of thousands of people just got laid off from similar positions... I'd think a reasonable manager or HR person would understand that. But I certainly can't argue that managers and HR people are all reasonable!
In general you're probably right. Though once upon a time I tried to volunteer about three different times and never managed to get a package. At one point my manager literally said "Shut up, you're not getting laid off so quit asking!"
Prep hard. My 2c below, not trying to tell you how to live life :)
1. Review your finances. How long can you skip work without feeling financially stressed? This should include full expenses (medical insurance, family, etc.) and will determine the level of risk you can comfortably take with your job.
If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk. Even if the job market and your company both collapse you can downshift for a year or two and work on a new tech as a personal project. Droughts seldom last more than a couple of years. If you have less than 3 months of cushion, look for the lowest risk options (a strongest company you can work for) and try to build it up.
2. Decide whether you expect your current company to do well with the reduced headcount. If your company is publicly traded, read financial statements and analyst opinions try joining an investor call. Look at the outside information, not the HR infomercials.
If the company is expected to do well you can stay. Layoffs in strong companies often mean shakeouts beyond actual layoffs (teams merging and forming, etc.) and you might even be able to move to a better spot. If the company is in trouble, start looking for other options ASAP.
3. Learn what is the job market for your skills and if any adjacent areas have significantly better prospects (if so, buff up your skills). This can change quickly. Talk to your tech friends, especially those in hiring manager spots, to figure out if they are hiring/frozen/RIFfing.
> If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk.
In my own experience I think this is a dangerous attitude: anny other HNers out there that thought this and failed, maybe add a comment about your own experience?
I thought I had cushion. However that attitude led to me reseting my equity to zero when I was about 30, and it took more than a decade of my life before I felt like I was starting to recover.
Perhaps sometimes we had some luck, so we get some savings, and we then think “that was easy, I could do that again” and try something risky. But the environment or our circumstances have changed, and we can’t always replicate our past.
The other aspect is that I think we underestimate risk: for example when I was younger I would think creating a business worth a million dollars would be unbelievably great. Now I see that opportunity costs of a $X00,000 loss of income require a 10x return ($X million) to break even (to only just cover your risks). Also you need wayyyy more return than 10x to cover the fact that your time investment is not diversified: a 10x return on a game you can only play a few times is a massive gamble that you end up with nothing. You don’t want to end up with nothing after say 40, because the world starts to randomly switch into extremely-hard-mode sometime after ~40 (and everybody is unaware they were playing on easy-mode until after the switch changes).
I wonder if we are talking about different risks. If I may ask, in your case did you go through your savings over several years by using it for regular living expenses or by pursuing a business/investment idea?
I have seen people go from a good sized bank account to zero quickly by buying something expensive (a house, a boat, etc.) or by trying to start a business. One can always lose money on risky investments or outright gambling.
But I have never seen someone deplete a 5-year savings by downshifting for a period of time. I was talking about the second case: I do not have to worry about losing a job if I have 5+ years of living expenses. If I lose my job and have to cool heels for a year, so be it; there are still have 4+ years of cushion. My 2c.
Sure. Travelling lots led to low equity, then I got involved with a business that went nowhere which led to “having nothing”, followed by cofounding another business (zero money investment but plenty of time investment). My income went to nearly zero and my spending went very low for a couple of years: for example I was living in an abandoned building with some dodgy people. I still had backstops (I could get a job, parents could have supported me, and I live in New Zealand which provides social welfare). The second business I helped found is mildly successful (I think it will pay me back for its risk plus a little, but it cost over a decade of my life plus some other even heavier costs).
My opinion is tempered by watching so many others flame out when trying to start businesses. Early flame out is often way better financially than many years of not quite succeeding (a friend just sold a business for peanuts after nearly a decade: costs and benefits but didn’t get the success they wanted).
Part of my comment is related to something I just read: a summary of Warren Buffett’s investing as:
RULE #1: don’t lose money.
RULE #2: don’t forget rule #1.
I”m not suggesting we shouldn’t chase rainbows - dreams are awesome even though they are usually social constructs driven by status. I guess my comment could be summarised as: don’t advise people to take risks. Either they are risk averse, in which case if they flame out due to your advice, that is bad. Or they are risk takers, in which case they need the opposite advice - try to be more sensible and less gambling.
I mean, the world needs founders, but I strongly believe it is not a financially sensible risk for the vast majority of people that become founders. I am assuming your comment was aimed at potential founders.
Here, SBF realized, was the rub: When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he’d get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus the decision to stick with Jane was a risk-averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between $50 and 50 percent of $100, and saying, “Give me President Grant.” SBF was risk-neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk-neutral career path—which, if we strip away the trader-jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn’t be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth trumps low risk multiplied by mere rich-guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he’d be a coin toss away from going totally bust.
I dont know the law here, but it seems you can ask to review your contract, and insist that they include a minimum employment term or guarantee a severance package. They have two ways to say no. They can fire you then, in which case you get the severance, or you're free to look for another job in the period before they're no longer legally obligated to give you severance.
It seems that you should take as much advantage as possible of your legal status.
Well, if you're in a 'critical' position and you want to take a more 'wait and see' approach, retention bonuses are usually a thing for folks they don't want to lose in a first-round layoff.
You approach that conversation like so, "I really love it here, but with the layoffs and uncertainty..."
I'm not saying there won't be more layoffs, but I don't think this advice makes sense for people at places like Meta. They are generating a ton of revenue and profit even with the current economic conditions.
In the case of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has set the controls for the heart of the Sun. It has no future because Zuck will lose everything in the quest for a product nobody wants.
There is VR and there is the Meta version of it. One can succeed despite the other, in fact, the Meta version of VR endangers the success of VR in general. Specifically, Zuck is working overtime and spending his shareholders money to convince people that VR is somewhere between Axie Infinity and watching paint dry.
Most of the VR advocates I know are no fan of Meta:
What is missing from Zuck's vision is any of the understanding that can be had from or had about fiction. If he was willing to listen he should take a sabbatical and go watch Ready Player One and all of the Sword Art Online anime and then he should buy a Switch or a PS5 and get a serious gaming habit. At some point he might get some insight about virtual worlds that aren't just a pale shadow of the real world but rather a place you might really want to work or play in.
Have you heard anybody say anything positive about Horizon Worlds?
If you believe that Superbowl commercial for Horizon Worlds is representative of what they think the market is it for people who feel like they are over the hill, the best is behind them, and they can recapture what it was like to live back in the day? (Is that you Zuck?)
I am very interested in getting a VR headset to help with some 3D GFX development I do, I like the Oculus hardware but I nuked my Facebook account a long time ago so it's not for me. I game plenty too but I try only to play games that are fun. (I am a little vulnerable to grindy RPGs, my son will smack me if he catches me…)
If your team lead can protect you they will but the employer at large is rather indifferent. Also further in your career those relationships to your team mean a fair bit while who you worked for as a company might not make that much difference.
I’ve gone back to work for a manger who laid me off. There were literally no hard feelings.
When he laid me off it was clear that he had to hit a hard headcount number, and I knew the project I was working on was “discretionary”. The HR meeting was “this is a headcount reduction and not a reflection on your work. Have a lawyer look over your severance and please accept or decline it within a week.” Really quite professional.
Others have pretty much covered the matter, you will always bump into former team mates, or it will be thanks to them that you will get some gig.
Employers themselves usually look into spreadsheets with a bunch of KPIs deciding who to lay off, without any regards for the effort you have actually placed into the job.
I'm close to deciding to go back to University to get some additional education that's likely to improve my work in the future. I can afford it without any salary. Based on your experience, do you think this is the right moment to do so? I'm employed at the moment.
If you’re going in order to get education that you personally want, now seems like the best time. The economy will recover and you’ll be able to get back in later.
If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career.
Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.
Nothing interesting will be reliably funded over the next 5-ish years given the current macroeconomics.
If we’re talking about where the opportunities (jobs) are going to be, then you’re probably looking at tech roles within non-tech companies. These companies have been dying to modernize but haven’t been able to hire engineers due to the tech bubble.
After that, tooling that enables non-technical companies to build software - whatever that looks like.
The really high paying jobs of the future (well, and really now to be honest) are going to be some sort of combination of Data Science + Speciality Science. Think biomedical engineering, material scientist, chemist, any engineering discipline because the thing we need the most right now are better medicines and antibiotics against the rising threat of resistant bacteria, COVID showed us we still don't have a shot against a really bad virus, we need better batteries, better power generation, better cars and modes of transportation, etc.
What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face.
> What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face
(No snark intended, my background is in science...)
The fields that would benefit society the most are not typically the fields where the most money is to be made.
This was common on what a lot of people did when the dot-com era crashed to an end. Almost all my software engineering friends went to grad school, most for their MBAs and law degrees, a few stayed their course in software engineering and bit-twiddling.
I did that after I got laid off early 2009, although for me it was going back to finish my bachelors.
Spent two years in school and got to sit out the worst of the recession. However, (in the US) tuition increased a ton from when I first went to school and has only gotten more ridiculous since I graduated.
Personally I'm glad I did it, it just took a while to pay it all off.
From personal experience school is much better (and more fun) later in life, especially if you're genuinely interested in what it is you are studying. If you can afford it, or even better - get your company to pay, it's definitely worthwhile. You may have to pace yourself, as taking on a lot of credits and full-time work at the same time is not easy.
I helped a friend move after she was laid off, a couple years after the dot com bubble popped. One of the eeriest things was seeing all those shiny new buildings in Silicon Valley, sitting empty.
It was like 15% of the businesses just evaporated.
It was a Cisco building in particular that I remember.
I was over on that street recently and everything is occupied again, though many of the names have changed.
This is going to be a repeat of 2000, not 2008. There's seemingly no contagion and no secular stagnation. This is just unwinding of the cheap money era that flowed overwhelmingly into SV. You'll see a cooling off of red hot compensation, a lot of failed startups that no one ever understood and the ongoing crypto crash. This may end up being enough to trigger a mild recession.
We're like 2.5 years into one at this point and some people still don't acknowledge it. A lot of people just keep saying "we're heading into one." It's likely this one will pass long before people come to a general consensus on whether or not one really happened.
If this is a recession, its not one I am feeling. 2008, the .com bust, those were recessions that everyone felt acutely. Unemployment is still at record lows. If the GDP dial isn't where people would like it to be then fine, but overall jobs are plentiful and no one I know is scared like they have been during the previous recessions.
There was a lot of commodity-inflation in the early 2000s, the second biggest rise in commodity prices after the 1970s[1]. Unlike the 70s (supply shock), this was primarily a demand-pull out of China/Asia, so the net impact to the economy was much more positive.
The 5 year breakeven inflation rate today is 2.61% Since Treasury Inflation Protected Securities didn't exist in the 70s we can't compare, but the market thinks inflation is not going to continue like it did in the 70s.
Mild recession? How are you not understanding the global macro set up right now? Europe will see a ~10 year recession, possibly the worst ever. America may fare better but there's no way you're getting away with a "mild" recession.
Predicting the future is hard, but the labour market is still extremely tight, boomers are leaving the workforce due to retirement, and there will probably be (attempts at) on-shoring as the west tries to decouple from China.
Europe will probably get its energy sorted in the medium term with LNG, and they're going to need to build a lot of damn nukes, but I don't think it'll be 10 years.
Software engineering is far more saturated than it was in 2000 and 2008. In 2008, Amazon, Apple, and Google all had a seemingly endless room to grow. The iPhone, Android, AWS, and video steaming were still in their infancy. There's nothing like that right now. There are definitely a lot of exciting innovations in ML and VR, but I think it will be a while before these technologies find a mainstream consumer use case.
In 2000 some people still worked with paper rolodex. We need to keep things in perspective. The world changed massively in the last 20 years, everything is software and software is almost everything. There are a lot of contributing factors to this economy which are unrelated to the actual demand and value of software. There will not be an oversaturation of software engineering for a while to come.
If memory serves, Meta is cutting a lot of non tech jobs. Engineers might lose their jobs if entire projects are scrapped, but maybe a different position will be offered to them.
I hope that everyone is looking at Twitter and learning what not do: no company wants to beg some engineers to come back after being too quick to pull the trigger.
You'd almost think cities and metropolitan areas are being thoughtful when avoiding the demands from those following the latest gold rush. But surely, that would be an unpopular opinion around here.
It really depends on the Fed and the overall market. I would say the economy is at a much greater risk now than in 2000, for these reasons:
We have several fundamental inflation factors
- The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year.
- Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare.
- This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception.
- The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs.
- Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up.
- During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe.
- Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.
On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors:
- Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything.
- Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well.
- Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.
All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.
As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems.
- Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation.
- Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more.
- In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy.
- People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US.
- Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs.
- Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts)
- These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.
In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).
People act like there were no layoffs between 2010 and 2000 but there were plenty, if you were in the wrong company and/or the wrong sector. IBM comes to mind. There were still CEOs out there trimming the fat while everyone else was getting high on the hype. If you had exposure to this, you're ready, at least emotionally, for what's going on now. If you didn't, you're probably shellshocked right now. Don't worry, you'll get used to it.
I'm interested to hear your opinion: Do you have any thoughts on the current way companies are valued/how they operate vs how they were leading up to the 2000 crash?
Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.
This is literally nothing like 2000 unless in you're in something like crypto. Meta hired 30k+ people during covid and they are correcting that over hire mistake. They are fine financially.
In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.
Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.
Under what circumstance do you believe the current landscape would be comparable to the 2000's era? Certainly, I would hope that the same kind of foolish behavior wouldn't reoccur, outside of a very specific set of circumstances, but do you see any sort of comparison between the historical foolishness of the market, and the wastes of money that have been devoted to things like, Stadia, Zillow AI pricing, Quibi, WeWork, etc.?
When I see the amount of money spent vs brought in by the various big names out there (social networks, in particular) I can't help but see a thing essentially worth little outside of name recognition. I naturally assume it to be a house of cards ready to collapse at some point, I just can't really determine when or why that might be. Perhaps not anytime soon, or to the extent that it would have were it 2000, but certainly companies that has such a noticeably poor ability to create profit, that it seems assured to fail.
I've certainly been wrong about such things in the past. Twitter, for example, was a thing that I assumed around 2008 or 2009, would never catch on, and that whatever traction it had would fade within a few months. I had similar assumptions with Netflix being "doomed to failure" after they tried to split the steaming/DVD rental services. I've been laughably wrong on each of those things, so it's entirely possible that I'm just not appreciating that maybe the world itself works has changed in a way that I haven't grasped. I just don't see how tech companies which can't manage to turn a profit, let alone offer predictable income, are able to sustain longterm value investment. It just seems like a hopeful anemic.
Interesting question. I like the WeWork and Quibi examples. Imagine most of the Nasdaq being made of companies like that and you get an idea of 2000. 00 and then the GFC I think really hammered home business plans and path to profit in the broader market.
Crypto though I think is where we will see an 00 style collapse. Many of the companies are scams or lightly disguised gambling platforms. The technology is poorly implemented in many cases, leading to theft. There are also a large amount of drifters just taking people's money. Maybe crypto has protected the broader market by being a honeypot for all the exuberant behavior? IDK.
I think you should be careful discounting social networks. Meta, as one analyst I read said, is a cash volcano. IMO, ATT effects for Meta and Google are overblown because they have so many properties to gather data from. Ads on both platforms work and are valuable. Though they are not immune from general economic slowdowns.
Even though TikTok is private, the little that has leaked shows them doing extremely well. Twitter has been mismanaged for years. Musk is right that Twitter should be a decent business, but it remains to be seen if he can get it there.
While I'm pontificating, and since you also mentioned Netflix :) another spot I see about to implode is content spend. Look at how much Netflix, Disney, Prime, etc... have spent creating content the last 5ish years, and then look at how much they charge a family for the access. There is no way that level of spend continues. We have been living in a golden age for content with the variety and amount, and I think that is about to end. With the increase in rates and the market pullback overall, content spend is going to have to get cut.
I survived two rounds of layoffs in 2008/2009 and they went as you describe. The first round had significantly better benefits. Which, ironically, ended up going to the worst performers.
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
Except the very last round, where you're the person left to handle sale of IP and so forth. Then they'll pay you well to stick around for a few months doing nothing.
> There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse
Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 504 ms ] thread"I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected."
So, keep him to downsize the company and replace him when it's time to start growing again?
I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?
(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)
Taking responsibility means trying to make it right. It doesn't mean taking a hit personally, unless that hit helps make the situation right.
Vengence isn't the same as justice. If you care more about zuck personally hurting than laid off employees being compensated, you are after the former not the latter.
To use the car accideny analogy - do you also think its a cop out for people to have insurance?
Yeah it sounds tough but if he'd hired a guy who oversaw what's just happened, he would have fired him.
It doesn't mean "this will have negative consequences on me personally".
It means "I don't blame anyone else for this".
The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
Zuck's net worth dropping from one unfathomable level of wealth, to another unfathomable level of wealth, isn't really a consequence here.
Would this not create an atmosphere of fear and drive society towards a fixed mindset where everyone would in case of mistake try to hide their mistake?
AFAIK the biggest upgrade to global aviation safety happened when mistakes were de-penalized, and all stakeholders could honestly discuss what went wrong and how to improve things in the future.
IMO, the biggest issues is not punishment, but understanding that a mistake was made, and an honest attempt to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
If a perpetrator fails to honestly see the harm in their actions, and perpetuate the same mistake repeatedly, then yes, they should probably face secondary consequences to make it understandable to every stakeholder that such behaviour is not acceptable. The reasoning here, however, is not some sense of global justice, but to simply de-normalize the pathological behaviour (if you repeat something without consequences it becomes 'accepted way of working').
If suddenly, 11,000 people died today in airplane crashes in a single company's air fleet, you're be sure that their CEO would be under question. I'm not saying this is a fair analogy - but just as similar, your one wasn't either.
I could imagine Facebook doing things that would indeed merit the sacking of CEO. For instance, doing something that leads to the death of 11k people would warrant severe consequences. I have no idea how Facebook could do that, but on the same par. They have all the data to do tons of nasty things.
I would view accidentally hiring 11k people from the point of view of the above interested parties indeed on the level of an engineer wiping db via accident (not negligence).
I imagine the mistake would be something like, you look at the market, you see it skyrocketing, you feed the numbers to your trusty excel sheet that has served you years and say, hey, we need more people. Only when market conditions normalize you realize the mistake.
Honestly, I really can't see the harm done here. People lose their jobs all the time. Corporation hire and fire. Why would this be any worse than standard practice in corporate america? (Of course it sucks to be laid off)
I don't think that's a bad thing. Its always worthwhile to apologize even if there is nothing else to be done.
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I was wrong here. I read it as 16 weeks per each year of service.
In my book that is 6 month's pay
Edit: Lol - OP posted less than 3 minutes ago & there were no replies. Before I finished my comment there are now a dozen others with the same.
Also not sure if the Meta severance applies to contractors as well, but many engineers work as contractors by which they of course opt out of worker protections.
Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can't instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).
I don't say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can't keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K/month.
Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn't fair.
Rent should not take more than 25% of your income, 33% worst case. In some countries/jurisdictions that's even part of legibility requirements.
If rent/utilities are in the range of 75% or more as you seem to imply, there would be literally no point at all to work in Big Tech.
9K is exaggeration of course, that would be quite irresponsible but it would be also the only way to put you in a lifestyle of a person who makes 5K a month.
Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.
But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.
Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.
The overall tone and high-level business decisions are much more interesting.
When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower
https://archive.ph/G3HpY
This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn't think Elon's mini submarine idea wouldn't work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.
Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.
But not sure about your comments about Dorsey. See https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk
All I know is we now have a guy in control of Twitter who:
- is calling his 100m or so followers to vote for GOP
- is repeating Putin's talking points
- Seems to be quite the vindictive narcissist, who doesn't really care about people or the environment quite frankly (e.g. trying to cancel a high speed rail project
Someone with that kind of power and ideology is not good for democracy - esp now that we have more people in the GOP that are actively trying to limit people's freedom.
Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don't think he's less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.
I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he's nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he's not superior in anyway... Etc.
"I take responsibility"?
Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you're no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.
> While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
It's not all engineers let go.
Though the US is ~3.3e8 people. Don't expect layoffs of ~1.1e4 to have a substantial national effect.
[Edit - 's/1e3/1e4/' correction.]
(Assuming there's a few thousand laid off in CA)
So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.
Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.
I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.
This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).
_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.
Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff.
You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus.
First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible.
Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right).
And so on.
Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt.
I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit.
As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done.
The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy.
Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it.
A few fallacies:
- Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive.
- Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus.
- Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt.
... and many more.
If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
I think you and those truckloads of people you're referencing may be overestimating your technical prowess. If you were truly capable of the feats you claimed, someone would find an operator and CEO to handle all the messy parts for you and wait for their 10000x returns in 5 years.
> It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust.
... ah yes, if only they trust everyone who claimed this and gave them the money. Truckloads of trillion dollar companies.
Edit:
> When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too.
There are hard technical problems. Autonomous self-driving cars, for example. Waymo would love to hire you to deliver this in 5 years with a handful of friends.
VR headsets that are lightweight, wireless, and can drive high fidelity experiences is another example. Meta would love to get in touch.
Drones that can safely deliver packages at scale while following US regulations is interesting. Amazon would love to hire you or buy your startup.
I don't discount how hard operating is. I know though the long leash you have if you're truly exceptional.
I'm not overestimating my own prowess. I've done it before, moved into management, executive, and now back into primarily technical / tech leadership. I've had multiple perspectives on this. I've also had plenty of technically exceptional employees who could, in abstract, do the technical part of this as well.
What you're clear underestimating is the organizational and human part of this. You can't just hire a CEO, and hope they'll magically solve it for you, anymore than you can't just hire a random engineering grad and hope they'll build you a self-driving car. And as I said, simply handing someone money, no matter how good they are and how much money you hand them will rarely result in any important technical problems solved without the right organizational structures.
And while there are some technically hard problems, like self-driving cars, that's not the majority of unicorns. I've also worked at a company that solved a problem of similar complexity as several of the ones you listed (with about 20 employees, and about a decade of funding). That one had *both* hard technical and human problems. Without solving the human problems, it wouldn't have had the right 20 employees, nor the decade of sustained funding. And those employees would not have solved the right set of hard problems to make an economically-viable entity.
You're completely missing where the hard parts of making a successful organization lie, or why they're hard.
There's a lot of wriggle room with the goalposts here, as they say it's basically impossible to falsify your statement, since you can shift the burden on the proclaimed "hard" bits (i.e. "human problems"). I'll just re-iterate the point made by others that what people normally mean by "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" is probably not what you purported to mean. Normally "10 motivated, aligned high-quality people" exists. You claim it doesn't even exist in practice.
The rest of the discussion is just people talking past each other.
It just so happens no one in any org gets that time and keeping those unicorn devs focused is very hard. Very small annoyances can cause them to leave and that's what they do.
I have seen people single handily build amazing stuff but it never lasts. Eventually someone gets left with the half built system and then a team needs to take over and bloat and ...
Rrrriiight...sure you will...they've only thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades should be easy to beat...
Indeed, in most cases, when people are aligned around a common vision, you don't need to pay them very much. People seem to do best when they're paid enough in order to not have financial stress so they can focus on work (with the caveat that the pay ought to be stable), but where the financial motivation doesn't replace intrinsic motivation. That's a rare scenario you only see in a few settings (e.g. sixties-era academia).
If throwing money at people worked to keep them aligned, FAANG would have hyper-aligned work forces. You can look at any of them.
Saying that Google has "thrown the best talent money can buy at the problem for 2 decades" visualizes this very nicely. Throwing people at problems and having people solve problems working together productively are two very different things. If I (or anyone else) could solve the latter problem -- making large numbers of people work together, aligned, and productively, I'd be richer than any tech mogul.
Throwing people at problems results in a lot of very fun play, though!
Is this unique to you, or can others do the same with the same 10 people?
If not unique to you, how come 7 billion people on the planet have not been able to do this over the past 25 years? Certainly this many people of that caliber get together often enough to do this, right?
If unique to you, then you really need to just find one person in that 7 billion to fund you so we can see another trillion dollar company get built in 5 years by 10 people.
Or, third option, this isn't reality, and you're missing some understanding of the issues involved.
Or the fourth option is that my post exactly outlined the issues involved, and you somehow missed that part.
Hint: They're human, not technical.
We can all do that, so I agree. If I had enough magic to make a better google, then I can make a better google.
If 1=0, I can make unlimited money.
If I had 2 supermans and 0.75 batmans, I can stop all crime.
Yep. Checks out.
Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.
Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.
Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.
Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.
They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.
In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
FYI twitter seems to be moving to a low manager high employee count. Musk himself said that a ratio of 1 manager per 10 coders is way too high. I suspect he wants it at 10x that amounts.
My current manager has 31 direct reports.
Sorry if this is confusing it's a hard subject to describe over text and I think there is a lot of nuisance lost over text here.
should/do they consider other metrics: revenue, active users, etc under management?
On one hand, those are astronomically high revenues. Great! On the other hand, I'm losing $100M per year. Suck! But I was brought in to fix things up after some idiot who ran things into the ground. I'm doing great! But it's a growth market; maybe it's because of that? Suck! But in fact, I'm bleeding money for growth. Great!
... and so on.
So all those other things can be spun. It's nearly impossible to objectively evaluate executive performance.
They definitely show up on OKRs and similar, which can be managed by setting low objectives.
Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.
Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.
Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.
Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.
That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
> In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdon...
If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.
If they're willing to move to anywhere in the US and/or take a 50+% pay cut then they'll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.
If you somehow forced someone to sit and practice drawing a hand for eight hours a day, they would get surprisingly far as an artist.
Being a founder isn’t too dissimilar. Determination tends to be decisive.
If you spent eight hours a day trying to make a small group of users love you, you’d get surprisingly far.
I think that’s what they mean about potential founders at Stripe. There’s a lot of potential energy that a layoff might release.
Starting a company is a risk vs reward calculation. If they were getting high salaries it wouldn't be unreasonable to want to minimize your risk by working on a project on the side while getting a bigger saving bank until a certain point. If you get fired the calculation is now whether you want to invest in job search or take the plunge and start the company
I don’t know that there are any stats on this so in the end it is juts your and my opposing instincts :-)
I'll bet a lot of those "low performers" just had a hard time jumping through hoops at the circus, but will do just fine out on the savannah
> It’s helpful to remember that we’re collectively doing about 1% of what we theoretically could be accomplishing.
Is this supposed to mean anything at all?
There's certainly less demand for Facebook's style of social media, for sure.
I don't think a recession with low demand and high interest rates is a good time to start a company at all.
It depends on how you define "startup." They don't necessarily have to keep staring at screens for their living.
It was mass layoffs of real estate and banking workers in 2008 that kick started the food truck industry.
EDIT: I mistakenly first wrote "each day" instead of "in each direction".
When I roll on to a new project and it is more/less work than my previous one, I don't think of it as a pay increase or decrease.
No, a FAANG employee probably isn’t suffering (although consider the pay outside of the prestige jobs) but everyone just got a multi-year reminder of those indirect costs.
Why would they perform better in another industry where presumably they do not have qualifications either (nor ability)?
You shouldn't take these governmental reports at face value. In my country, we see a lot of these reports too, and for all kinds of professions. Most of the time it just means that the corporate want more people willing to work for less.
Meta was hiring aggressively at the beginning of the year, as were many other companies.
If i put out a job ad: Need a software develioer with skills in COBOL, latest react and assembly, to lead a team of 10 for $30k
And I cant hire anyone
It will still end up in government statistics for shortage.
This is lile if we all put out ads on Gumtree/craiglist 'will buy a Toyota, brand new, for $1000", and someone counts thise ad and concludes there is a shortage of Toyotas.
Not all organizations get lots of value from developers.
It also means they're not losing a lot by not having a developer, so they're perfectly ok with having the position open until someone takes it.
If I want to hire a top proffeshional for minimum wage, its not a job offer, its just wishfull thinking.
Demand elasticity makes any report on the volume of demand irrelevant unless it also covers the pricing of that demand.
Small and Central European would be Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland based on the most widely used definition of Central Europe [1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe#/media/File:Cen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Europe
Have you seen the second map in the introduction?
Every country changes their belonging to a region based on the perceived value bias of what is being discussed.
A user here humorously put it that Slovenians see themselves as Western European when it comes to how honest and hard they work, Southern European when it comes to weather and food, and Eastern European when it comes to drinking, partying and having fun.
But geographical location however is immutable, so let's stick to that instead of the other more biased definitions.
Proceeds to using precisely biased, political, definitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_member_...
Compare that to a new grad at Google Germany making 130k€. Somebody with ten years of experience there would be making closer to 300k€.
If prosperity distribution had kept track during the last 50 years (wealth has increased dramatically due to tech), the average salary would be 6 figures, so it’s actually better for wealth distribution to have tech folks making higher 6 figures to put pressure on the 8+ figure class.
1. the US is somewhat of an outlier, while Germany is grouped together with other wealthy countries
2. the US' Gini has been steadily growing last few decades - implying inequality is getting worse
3. Germany's Gini is very slightly declining in the last few decades - implying it's staying roughly stable
I don't think higher-than-average is particularly good at all - you're in the neighbourhood of places like Qatar, Iran, DRC and Argentina. In fact the only way you'd use Gini to suggest the US has a ok level of wealth inequality is if you presented two countries Gini coefficients side-by-side to someone who doesn't normally think about Gini, presented them without any other context and said "look, they're kinda close"
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:G...
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530819
Also this obscures the fact that it is far better to be poor or working class in the US than somewhere with a similar Gini coefficient.
I think you might want to lookup what Gini tries to measure. You used Gini as a way to suggest the USA isn't so bad, and now you're having to backpedal and say that actually Gini kinda sucks but the USA isn't so bad.
No, I'm pointing out that at lot was being made of a small difference in a ratio that's really sensitive to marginal differences. I'm noting a marginal difference that makes the US look more different than other OCED nations than it is in fact and more like autocratic developing nations than it is in fact.
I'm also pointing out that it isn't a good measure at all. It's as coarse as GDP and more misleading.
It's a little bit funny to say that a metric is skewed by measuring the thing it is designed to measure...
It's not a very good way to measure what it is trying to measure[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Limitations
[1] https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/495/images/IZAWOL.462.g...
Use profit margins to determine what wages should be. I wouldn't be surprised if the wages are fine on that basis, actually. But let's draw the right conclusions for the right reasons.
EU - esp. Germany and some other European countries - have abysmal salary compared to rest of the developed world and a poor wage growth over the last 10 years or so.
Heck, even countries like India have experienced faster growth: netto, a senior tech professional in India can earn more than what what they'd get in Germany. And that's not even accounting for 3-5x difference in cost of living.
This salary calculator is extremely accurate https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
In any case, I agree with your overall statement: even if 86K/year puts you in the top 10% of earners in Germany, in reality it's hard to afford a decent house (not flat) with that salary (unless you wanna work until you're 67...)
Thank you for the calc though, seems really helpful.
But i don't see that being necessarily true and largely depends on type of software you build and the culture of the company. A lot of people are decent engineers and are not interviewing for FANG for a variety of reasons are for no reason in companies that may or may not deserve them. I think its hard to build street cred to get people to work for less, but interviews should always have a good bar.
You don't need some Google genius to do a lot of this work, and sometimes a regular person will do a better job than some wonderkid who spends too much time and effort trying to automate it
My brother moved from FAANG to Atlanta to work for Home Depot. His comp went down from 400k to 140k. Which is still great for Atlanta, but there is no situation where a move from FAANG to any other company comes without wage deflation
Of course, that's like $100k or less with current exchange rates, haha
I don't notice any request for sympathy in the GP comment.
Is this ignoring finance, promotions, or (until recent layoffs) private/public big tech/unicorn-like companies?
Like, even within FAANG the pay bands are huge for the same level.
As an aside, you're talking about switching from a company that supposedly makes revenue selling ads but really is inflated with free money to one that makes revenue from selling hammers. People who made this switch before the free money are going to be fine. Now that 11,000+ people are going to try to make this switch, they're going to wish they had.
The other thing that happens with this is your job becomes much more practical and less oriented to whatever fads are sweeping SV and HN. Some like it, some don't.
You'd be earning about 50 000 USD per year as a senior developer, but that's plenty enough to live a very good life here. Outside IT people earn about 10 000 USD per year, food and services are very cheap, and there's a comprehensive welfare state.
Impressed to hear that Poland pays well for developers compared to other jobs. 50k for a senior role would definitely be a good salary even in other EU countries
https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/react-jobs?contract=True
In the UK the rate is between 400 and 600 (450/650 euro) and is one of the market that pays the most in Europe. Many other countries are offer half that amount for a "react" guy
And it is not as expensive as it seems. If you live in a country with strong social safety nets hiring someone is crazy expensive.
The few contractors I know that work normal software jobs have lower rates, but they still make good money.
It's very hard purely on cost of living to match a salary of 500k anywhere in the world, because at some point the extra items / investments all cost the same regardless of geography.
With 100K in Prague you can retire/never needing to work for money after 3 to 10 years Depending on your habits. Not sure how many Bay Area employees can do that staying there.
I am somewhere close and earn 300K which is about 30 times of what you need per year. One year of works covers all my expenses living like a local for the rest of my life in capital returns even at a modest 3.5% SWR.
I take that over 500K Job (of which over 30% goes to US Gov, while i pay max 10%) any time, heck I take it over a 1000K Job in SF/NY etc.
I'd propose that you should also calculate how many years of 300k in the Bay Area it'd take to retire in Prague vs years making 100k in Prague.
I ran these numbers a couple years ago, and it was costing me about ~$8000/month to live in the Bay Area. I estimated we could live in Tokyo or much of the USA at a similar quality of life for $4000/month. With $310k/year (taking home $190k) that meant I was able to save about $90k a year. In Tokyo, I could only get companies to offer about $140k at the time, and it was about the same for remote work in the USA. That meant I could save about $50k/year.
You can make a strong argument that saving $50k and living in one location is better than saving $90k in another, but it's good to have all the data at hand to make the best decision for yourself.
Hard to know this 30 years ahead of time. Maybe after 30 years in the Bay Area you retire to Hawaii? Or lower COL like Portland? Or even a town in Japan? You have tons of choice if you’ve been saving at 500k. If you’ve been saving at Eastern Europe salaries, your options narrow
Retirement/healthcare and education is paid by taxes already in most countries so there's less things to save for. Also cars are optional and distances are smaller.
I agree about the rest (but I wouldn't want to live in US anyway, no amount of money can buy you a walkable city or safety for your kids).
Something similar happened in Ukraine. I had friends in Europe that were running companies in there till when the wages became comparable to the original country. They still kept the Ukrainian office but eventually reduced the growth in favour of other locations
Doubt it. Everybody in my current team has several offers to change jobs with 5-15% increase in salary. Some from the same (American) company for which we work right now (but they don't know that cause we're hired through 2 subcontracting companies ;) ).
Low Cost of living is true if you find a cheap enough place to live, but due to Russia's invasion, housing just isn't that cheap unless you know where to look for and are from Poland. I called 20 people just to be able to check a single apartment out.
50k isn't good for a senior role either; new grad salary in Germany in 2020 was around 60k gross.
That’s already a good salary for a mature dev in France (Paris +20%), and going above requires being intrapreneur/team lead/low manager. Americans usually say it’s shit pay.
Most of meta enigneers won't be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.
Seriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.
just like we saw in the 80s, 90s, 00s, and 10s
MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.
I suspect a lot of "Reality sh*t sandwiches" will be in people's lunchboxes.
They really need some economy lessons. If I were a true capitalist, I’d teach them socialism for free.
So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.
There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in Lalaland.
The main thing is figuring out what's the full impact. If it's 10%+ of tech workers, the golden days are over for the vast majority of tech workers.
Proportionally these numbers would not make a difference in a small European country.
Now all that easy money is going away.
The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.
If recovery starts taking a few years, quality of life drops a lot.
This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.
At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.
For instance, Amazon in Seattle benefited as thousands of engineers found themselves out of work in 2000 and 2001.
In addition, AWS was largely inspired by the fact that Sun Microsystems refused to cut their pricing. Amazon was using a lot of Oracle databases and Sun hardware, and when Sun wouldn't negotiate their prices down, Bezos began to figure out A Better Way.
Bezos was particularly irked because there was a flood of practically new Sun hardware available (due to the crash) but Sun wouldn't negotiate on price, despite the market being awash in high quality used hardware.
Basically Bezos didn't want to spend $80,000 on a new Sun server, but he also didn't want to run hardware that was used.
So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.
> Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=56878
so double the numbers for a sense of how many people G actually employs.
In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Hiring students is much cheaper so companies may still hire them whilst letting go of other expensive employees at a cost of quality.
Keep in mind it's always about people, not about soulless entities.
Welcome to most of Europe.
Also wanted to add that when we want to feel less trapped we can very easily escape to many other nice places that surround us in the near vicinity, I usually go for bookstores and coffee-shops (from where I’m writing this comment), other people also choose parks, bike-rides, stuff like that. We manage.
1. Apartments can be perfectly fine for a happy life, everywhere across the world.
2. Conception and child upbringing do not mandate having a house.
According to the companies that's all that's happening here.
As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.
If you can do the work, awesome, no one cares how you feel about it. But that's the keyword: *IF* you can.
People who went into IT for the love of it are diligent by default (from my personal experience) and CAN do the work. Then you get people who enter IT for the money (nothing wrong with that) and not all of them can do the work.
Those are the show-stoppers usually which incur various debts (from tech-debt to actual financial debt) because you end up having to carry them.
Let's not pretend as if they don't exist, there's so many of them.
A person like that was moved off of my team recently, and the general lift on the team from just having them gone has been astounding. Everything is up: velocity, stability, even just the vibe of technical planning sessions.
> We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success.
And while one can certainly debate the "is the advice given in something that is 30 or 50 years old still valid" - that debate itself is interesting in considering what was going on in the minds of managers back then and how they tried to solve these problems.
There is a certain lack of institutional knowledge and a desire to throw much of it away with the phrase "we're agile" or some other management buzzword of the day... and yet Brook's Law is still as valid today as it was nearly five decades ago (gotta keep an eye on that... I wonder if they'll do a third edition in 2025).
Years ago when interviewing people I didn't have to wonder as often how passionate the candidate actually is towards the field, or whether they're just looking for a high pay job.
These days I get those doubts a bit more. I think most people are still at least somewhat passionate though (bad/awkward programmer tooling which we've gotten used to are somehow great filters....)
He said he hopes people voluntarily decide not to work in tech. Why suggest he wants to disallow?
Basic things like the KISS principle have been thrown in the garbage can, almost all that matters is how the tech we’re now using can further increase our career prospects.
Well I predict two things:
One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you're in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it's probably going to evaporate.
Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don't think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.
GOOG - $907k https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=GOOG+gross+profit+per+e...
META - $1.32M https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=META+gross+profit+per+e...
If bay-area comp drops, what do you think will happen to developer comp in the midwest? (refer to programmer compensation before 90s+ SV was a thing)
Nonetheless, I don't think the point changes. One group getting less doesn't usually mean that it's going to transfer over and some other group will get less. Most likely, everyone is going to get less.
Rising tide lifts all ships as they say (and the opposite is true as well)
I make ~$300k/yr and could probably swing $200k/yr if I didn't save anything (I save ~$100k/yr currently). I just can't imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.
1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world. 2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100/wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family. 3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.
As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000/mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I'd need $100k/yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.
We could downsize and save $10k/yr, but that's not really making a substantial dent long-term.
$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.
Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren't going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.
Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.
Here's what I'd add: Its extremely difficult to hire really talented senior engineers. Its easy to look at layoffs as "great, we should be able to find senior talent now"; but the opposite may actually be true. Layoffs, at least in otherwise "fine" companies, will predominately not impact senior engineers, and they'll also be less likely to leave. Moreover, the industry is effectively building a wall to breach into seniority; the pathway from junior to senior is harder and harder, even going back a year or two, and many of these junior/normal devs were massively compensated at these roles.
My heart goes out to the junior devs right now; there really are two industries and job markets.
Shit, I get messaged about a thousand software jobs per year and I'm just one guy.
There's jobs for everyone who was laid off, but unclear if they're as good/lucrative.
source: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/02/heres-where-the-jobs-are-for...
So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.
Are you assuming a 4 year cliff or why would one lose 4 years worth of stock?
Interesting point you're bringing up. Personally I wouldn't count unvested stock as part of my wealth.
Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k/yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.
I think there's going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets/from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.
Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.
If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to 'get away' with anything like that? They could 'get away' with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn't. Maybe they don't want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn't also apply in other national jurisdictions.
This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...
The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."
https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."
"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."
"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."
"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."
etc.
The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
Of course it has been done for millennia.
How does a CEO with enough class B shares to control shareholder voting take accountability?
Self flagellation perhaps?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
What you said, but in a Second Life clone.
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it. It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners" (tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute impunity for a day?
Which is actually average practice... and in most distributions that's definitionally not the best.
My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment.
I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
The rest is implementation details.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I've been priveledged enough to see the insides of hundreds of companies. The problem is ALWAYS the leadership! (or lack thereof)
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I guess GPT-3 has never played Numberwang
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
Who predicted this?
The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.
But my memory may be playing tricks on me.
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid.
>Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter.
The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.
Then, I checked Google. Yep, you are right: https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-production-by-country/
In my mind, I was mixed up with world's largest exporters. Last I knew, it was a race between Qatar and Australia. But wrong again! It is Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
Heck, it’s only four powerballs from last weekend.
¹2011 figure
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
Also, most forms of non-screen entertainment (bars, restaurants, sports, theaters, etc.)
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?) think doing nothing would have been much worse.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
Anyways you're changing the topic now. Glad I could help you understand how the ukraine war affected the US economy. Good day.
No, I'm not from the US, so the colloquial usage of "gas" as "fuel for cars" slipped my mind.
The US is also a net exporter of crude oil, so all I've said so far still applies.
How has the Ukraine war affected gasoline prices? Are you just talking about the state you live in, or US-wide?
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.
The laptop class genuinely believed we'd never do anything in-person again.
I mean, they probably believed what they wanted to believe, but that’s a very human failing.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
Stripe and Twitter took a lot of heat off of Meta; if they had done this in March it’d be a whole different story.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
For them that risk was much greater.
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
Input:
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
Results in:
"When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
Turns out Elon doesn't either lol. Also, he's not a conservative.
Yeah he's a regular old leftie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_and_unions
From the looks of it, Zuckerberg handled this better than what anyone was expecting. Talk about under promising and over delivering
This is the general 'Tech Crash' I was talking about before all of this happened in advance. [0] [1]
We'll see what happens after the news. No company is safe. Not even FAAMNG companies that HN has been screaming about for years was ever untouchable.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663119
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29508238
Anyone can predict that things will be bad at some point in the future.
Who will pay these house prices?
By what metric? Metas profits the first 3Qs of the year totaled ~$17B. They would have been higher if not for Zuck's insane spending on the metaverse.
As the letter says, Meta clearly over hired around covid to the tune of 30k+ people. It's normal to pull back some.
Engineers at these companies generate so much economic value, I would argue they are still underpaid at 180k.
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.
The problem is that the way Meta runs its data centers and software stack is tightly integrated with the products. It’s not really amenable to running third party applications or storing third party data.
I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.
Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
It could certainly work. But it would probably be too small a business for a company as large as Meta. The differences in scales is (I think) one of their problems. At Meta scale (somewhat a pun), many things are just harder/not worthwhile because of their size.
Another of the big boys offering a cloud product would guarantee it would pick up customers and give them another avenue they can plausibly hunt for competitive advantage in.
I agree that spinning up a pure-play public cloud makes no sense for Meta. Its not in their ethos, moreover selling various abstractions over virtualized compute is a commodity. Why would they get in line, behind IBM and Oracle?
Given that Office 365 is being counted as 'Cloud' imagine what Meta could do with some $100/yr SMB service. On the enterprise end, they have some of the very best big data and ML infra and could do well to bundle up extra capacity sell that on a metered basis. If they had started offering managed Presto in 2015 this conversation wouldn't be happening.
Their network infra (IP space, undersea cables, edge pops etc) is also rather vast and I could see a lot of SMB to F500 customers lining up to leverage it if bundled right. If they wanted to they could write a check for CloudFlare, I checked their balance sheet. Meta Cloudflare would be a juggernaut; so powerful that I pray the FTC wouldn't allow it.
Historically Facebook has been allergic to B2B outside of selling ads. Even within it they bought and killed Atlas, effectively handing a monopoly on ad serving to Doubleclick. Now they are warming up to it, offering Workplace, Kustomer, and Oculus for enterprise. I think that the Metaverse could be a novel B2B play and so do they, calling it "The Future of Work".
tl;dr: Meta could win the cloud business because it has the people, cash, differentiated tech, and existing relationships. They could beat AWS/GCP/Azure in many segments of IT spend by packaging their assets together into a novel kind of cloud.
Why would there be any issue from an FTC standpoint? As far as I can tell, they're in completely separate businesses. I do agree it is a brilliant idea to Microsoft-ize the SMB relationships they already have to sell software services.
Doubling down on becoming one of these "everything" apps could have been a good strategy. Become the app frontend for one of the less big food delivery companies in the FB app, tie in to payments. Perhaps even buy Square for Cash App and all the POS integrations to build a network of sellers, all tightly integrated from the consumer perspective into the Facebook app. I'd have hated it, but I suspect it could have worked.
I agree that it would have been a good strategy, but that's (presumably) why they never did it.
That food looks good, imagine if they partnered with Uber or Grab so you can add to cart right below the picture.
Peer to Peer payments could have also been great, especially if you could check-out at a store by scanning a QR code to pay (think WeChat Pay, FairPrice in Singapore, or even Paypal's version of that).
Or even buying event tickets. They already have events on the platform, and they let you put targeted ads, but what about an integrated experience to purchase tickets right on the platform instead of there being an external link?
They could have done so much but the only major change/addition in recent years was Dating (a huge hit in countries that perceive Tinder as only for hookups) and those avatars that people use everywhere instead of text posts.
He also started SpaceX with Falcon 1, not Falcon 9, and certainly not Starship.
I still think Facebook is evil and I feel like they should have tried to buy Tik Tok although I don't know how feasible that ever was.
>Meta really needs to be in the cloud business.
That's an interesting idea.
That's a crazy idea, if original. What do Facebook know about building and selling general cloud services?
Besides, Google is trying 50 different things but it didn't go full throttle on any idea like FB did for Metaverse. Huge difference.
You can't possibly know that. Try not to get caught up in your own speculation and speculation from pundits.
They could’ve been “the login for the social internet”… they even built that platform! They just were so paranoid about losing control of the graph they shut it all down. Twitter also failed on the developer/platform front for the same reason.
They could’ve been the identity platform for every hot startup in the last 10 years. They could’ve courted developers such that every platform add-on they did got immediate head start… like ads! They could’ve out-AdSensed Adsense.
Anyway, I’m sure that’s all terrible business strategy, but it’s what I wish they had done. Even though I’d probably be cursing their name now if they owned all of our logins.
Huh?. Meta's growth has slowed, but they are a money printing machine. Earnings have gone down because of the enormous bet Zuck has made on the metaverse.
Twitter has been barely scraping by for years. The two companies are not really even comparable.
This has severely hurt Meta's ad revenue, i.e., earnings.
The metaverse stuff is a bad bet, you are correct, but is not likely impacting earnings in any significant way.
> company’s rising costs and expenses, which jumped 19% year over year to $22.1 billion during the quarter.
> Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which is responsible for developing the virtual reality and related augmented reality technology that underpins the yet-to-be built metaverse, has lost $9.4 billion so far in 2022.
The effects from the Apple changes are mostly in the rear view mirror at this point. You could attributed a 4% revenue hit to them, but those can also be attributed to a general slowing economy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/26/meta-plans-to-lose-even-more...
FB was a money printing machine, but they trashed it.
> "We continue to anticipate that Reality Labs operating losses in 2023 will grow significantly year-over-year,"
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meta-lowers-expense-foreca...
Everyone wants to dance on Meta's grave, but it's way too soon. Yes, the Apple change gave them a top line haircut, but if the RL spend is excluded, they are making a ton of money. I'd also argue that the real headwinds are the general economy and TikTok.
Right, and not Apple's actions.
There is no Twitter meltdown. Before Musk it was already in grave financial trouble and would have made 800m$ cuts anyway. Musk most certainly is clumsy in his actions and communications, but Twitter isn't going anywhere.
Likewise, Facebook isn't having a meltdown either. There's a dent in ad spent against a backdrop of 2 years of dramatic overhiring (same as Google, Stripe).
There's a 4% decline in revenue on a 27 billion quarterly revenue. Meltdown? There's a handful of companies on this planet being this profitable.
I'd like to use a common Dutch expression to explain the Twitter situation: "the soup isn't eaten as hot as it is served".
Musk wants absolute free speech but that's just a random interview quote, not the actual plan for Twitter. Users are abandoning the service in droves. No, they are not. A handful of advertisers stop spending (conveniently part of an economic downturn) but that doesn't mean the vast majority do, or do so indefinitely. Twitter is an awful place now, whilst he hasn't implemented a single change yet. Checkmarks will get decimated whilst his original unhinged idea is already dialed back.
Everybody's jumping on all kinds of hysterical projections that are not supported by the facts. There is no meltdown.
November 7th: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589784134691741696
The questions are: can they monetize that, and will it continue? But as far as twitter dying, the opposite is currently true. It's never been more alive.
Musk is following the standard playbook of private equity takeover + gutting the company to squeeze out remaining profits and then sell for parts. There is no question of even a bit of emotion involved from his side.
> We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.
That many unreads makes it sound like everyone is using emails except you!
I'd set up filters to clean up the inbox, but it just so happens that when something of significance happens, it's usually on Workchat or Workplace, so I don't bother with e-mail.
Realistically this cut was probably done in time to offer a decent severance without hurting things on the corporate side -- to compare this to Twitter's post-Elon crash-plan is disingenuous, and i'm not even a Musk fan.
I'm gonna give you a bucket full of benefit of doubt and assume you mean nothing negative by this. I'm all for fake people fulfilling VCs goals if that means we can have better and more exciting future (which Musk has delivered to date).
It's worth mentioning that many other "real" people with "no" hidden agendas have done ... jack shit over the past 20 years. :)
Also, rockets.
Its kinda true though. He's been the poster "white night entrepreneur", egged on by every other nerd who still believes in the exceptional founder myth. That myth motivates a ton of folks to give up their lives and time to try and build something on pretty bleak terms.
Our org went through something similar some 6 year ago, and it was a stark contrast with previous frequent firing rounds when nobody would be secure, sometimes even best within given team were let go (ie due to current allocation issues).
But this can replace small firing ie up to 10%, not when you are doing stuff musk-style.
Also one thing that shouldn't be missed: Google controls Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world (except US maybe) so it wasn't affected as strongly by Apple's clampdown.
The lesson to Zuck is clear: he absolutely needs to own the next digital platform, and in his mind its the metaverse so he's going all in. I question the decisions he makes but the reasoning seems pretty solid at least (unlike a certain Electric Car maker)
I would be surprised to see layoffs there.
How can I view timeline of my companies headcount growth? Does LinkedIn have this info?
Edit: LinkedIn premium is required for this info
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
I know someone who had worked there for 17 years that got laid off and only got 4 weeks because of it.
They never got around to laying me off, I ended up quitting much later than I should have.
Watch out for emails that talk about "tough decisions" and "respect for our people". I actually took a company email, printed it and highlighted key statements and told everyone lay offs were coming. About 6 months later they were formally announced.
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
When he volunteered to get laid off (with the intention of getting a severance), the person he said that to fired him on the spot for "not being a team player."
Eventually, every last one of us were laid off. But it took six months and I used the time to find a new role and I also received a four month severance.
Sometimes voluntary layoffs are announced, but really you need to be able to read between the lines and smell that something is coming before the layoff is announced. (The reason is that layoffs are usually kept confidential because no one wants to incite panic.)
What I did a few years ago was have a 1-1 with a VP and basically implied that I was ready to do something different. I ended up with a great severance package right as the pandemic was taking off.
And more hours may not be a direct request- anyone at the periphery of the dev process- in the past this was QA, now gets cut because devs can do it, SWE roles might have to start doing more ops work, etc...
When I last left the financial industry, it was so bad, that VPs- and that was back when it least had some meaning- at least it did when I first got the title around 2010, started having to do mundane weekend work like checking out the system after network/firewall changes, etc.
It can be death by a thousand cuts. Now the financial crisis was way worse because essentially everyone was hurting, and losing money- and interestingly I "got out" of that bad situation by going to tech. But that's just how these bad situations play out and deteriorate.
That said, companies are still profitable. There was a LOT of overhiring in the past few years. I don't expect things to get so bad, at all.
Either way I hope those laid off land on their feet.
The advice to "take the first layoff" is weird, you rarely have a choice, if ever.
Oh how I wish I had volunteered cuz a year later basically everyone including me had quit anyway.
The next round was a security guy waiting in your office with a box and a packet of information about how to apply for unemployment.
I've never known a company that is in the process of layoffs not jumping at the chance to VRIF an employee because it is a far cleaner termination and honestly less stressful and upsetting for all involved IMHO.
The bigger factor is are you in a position that requires the company longer to replace you? If so you may just be in that shit position of being kept on another 6 months until the next round of layoffs and get a package half as good.
As the first poster said always get out first if you can as the packages never get better the worse a company does.
Never fool yourself into thinking you're too amazing to be let go and that is why you 'survived' this round of layoffs. The worst case is as I said, you are too good to be let go of yet.
(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
HR is there to protect the company. Sometimes that aligns with protecting the employee but when shit hits the fan ask yourself does HR work for you or for the company?
I know I sound a bit 'down' saying that but it is an unfortunate reality that companies are not very loyal to their employees when times get tough.
Find a trusted friend in the company who is a survivor and ask them. Survivors have strong information networks for office politics and know such info.
Even in an economic downturn an engineer with Meta on their résumé is going to be well positioned to find employment inside of the three months or more pay and six month insurance runway this deal provides.
Having said that, if you're going to be worried about possibly/probably losing your job 6 months down the road what does it really matter if you have signalled you're not very invested in staying? The company has signalled they're not very invested either is how I look at it.
>(edit: The idea being that you might get fired "normally" as a result, and not get generous severance.)
Of course I am saying this as someone in Europe where firing someone "normally" is a lot more complicated and time consuming and comes with a whole list of other issues a company needs to make sure they manage properly. They can't just turn round and fire you with no pay because you "showed you were not very invested in the company as you asked if you could be let go when we were letting go of several thousand people". That is a 100% guaranteed legal hell hole no company likes to be in by choice.
In America perhaps that is something you genuinely need to worry about I don't know.
You may find there's nowhere better to go, but switching to "looking externally" rather than "looking internally" for new jobs is definitely a good idea.
Yeah that's kinda the rub right now though. Everyone's frozen, tons are laying off. If the only information you have is "my company did a layoff", it's not clear you're better off looking externally vs. internally vs. staying on your current team.
One bad case is you leave your company that just did a layoff for one that has yet to do one (but will need to soon).
Do what you feel comfortable with at the end of the day. My original reply was meant as one possible answer that I have seen first hand to work well for both parties.
I will add as another personal opinion though that I very rarely see people that choose to stay at a company going though layoffs hanging around very long.
More often than not those people experience a 'depression' (for want of a better word that escapes me as I write this) seeing their friends leave, not having the freedom the had back in the "good old days", little if any progression, the constant "sorry not this quarter, we're still recovering from the layoffs", living in constant anxiety that they will be in the next round of layoffs, etc. So they often leave within a year or two anyway.
Over the years I have played this game and now I am a bit more proactive about exiting before that 'depression' hits me. Of course what is right for me is not right for all, only you can truly decide what you feel is best given your situation.
In other words that same company that in its heyday relied on the person pulling an all-nighter 'for the good of the company' yet failed to ever offer a reciprocal 'sure, take all the paid time off you need buddy' in return gets what it earned.
Although you may hear the 'rats from a sinking ship' and 'you're deserting the company and leaving your colleagues to pick up the slack' shrieked from on down high by management - Fuck 'em. They didn't actually give a shit about you on the way up and they don't give a shit about you on the way down.
Jump fast, jump early, beat the pack
It's possible some of these are unfounded/exaggerated fears, though?
If you're 100% set on leaving with or without severance, for sure ask. But if you think you might prefer to stay if severance isn't an option, asking feels risky.
I'm not suggesting issuing ultimatums, of course, I'm just suggesting that you mentally prepare for needing to quit first, otherwise it takes a real pro to have that conversation. I know I'm not good enough to do it unless I talk about things like that with my manager regularly already.
I do wonder if these are questions you can ask confidentially in a different way. Like I dunno how big your place is but you might find this information easily in a meeting with HR, but HR is there to help the company (not you) so it depends on their priorities a lot. It's a very reasonable thing to wonder about when tens of thousands of people just got laid off from similar positions... I'd think a reasonable manager or HR person would understand that. But I certainly can't argue that managers and HR people are all reasonable!
1. Review your finances. How long can you skip work without feeling financially stressed? This should include full expenses (medical insurance, family, etc.) and will determine the level of risk you can comfortably take with your job.
If you have 5+ years of cushion you can take a lot of risk. Even if the job market and your company both collapse you can downshift for a year or two and work on a new tech as a personal project. Droughts seldom last more than a couple of years. If you have less than 3 months of cushion, look for the lowest risk options (a strongest company you can work for) and try to build it up.
2. Decide whether you expect your current company to do well with the reduced headcount. If your company is publicly traded, read financial statements and analyst opinions try joining an investor call. Look at the outside information, not the HR infomercials.
If the company is expected to do well you can stay. Layoffs in strong companies often mean shakeouts beyond actual layoffs (teams merging and forming, etc.) and you might even be able to move to a better spot. If the company is in trouble, start looking for other options ASAP.
3. Learn what is the job market for your skills and if any adjacent areas have significantly better prospects (if so, buff up your skills). This can change quickly. Talk to your tech friends, especially those in hiring manager spots, to figure out if they are hiring/frozen/RIFfing.
In my own experience I think this is a dangerous attitude: anny other HNers out there that thought this and failed, maybe add a comment about your own experience?
I thought I had cushion. However that attitude led to me reseting my equity to zero when I was about 30, and it took more than a decade of my life before I felt like I was starting to recover.
Perhaps sometimes we had some luck, so we get some savings, and we then think “that was easy, I could do that again” and try something risky. But the environment or our circumstances have changed, and we can’t always replicate our past.
The other aspect is that I think we underestimate risk: for example when I was younger I would think creating a business worth a million dollars would be unbelievably great. Now I see that opportunity costs of a $X00,000 loss of income require a 10x return ($X million) to break even (to only just cover your risks). Also you need wayyyy more return than 10x to cover the fact that your time investment is not diversified: a 10x return on a game you can only play a few times is a massive gamble that you end up with nothing. You don’t want to end up with nothing after say 40, because the world starts to randomly switch into extremely-hard-mode sometime after ~40 (and everybody is unaware they were playing on easy-mode until after the switch changes).
I have seen people go from a good sized bank account to zero quickly by buying something expensive (a house, a boat, etc.) or by trying to start a business. One can always lose money on risky investments or outright gambling.
But I have never seen someone deplete a 5-year savings by downshifting for a period of time. I was talking about the second case: I do not have to worry about losing a job if I have 5+ years of living expenses. If I lose my job and have to cool heels for a year, so be it; there are still have 4+ years of cushion. My 2c.
My opinion is tempered by watching so many others flame out when trying to start businesses. Early flame out is often way better financially than many years of not quite succeeding (a friend just sold a business for peanuts after nearly a decade: costs and benefits but didn’t get the success they wanted).
Part of my comment is related to something I just read: a summary of Warren Buffett’s investing as:
RULE #1: don’t lose money.
RULE #2: don’t forget rule #1.
I”m not suggesting we shouldn’t chase rainbows - dreams are awesome even though they are usually social constructs driven by status. I guess my comment could be summarised as: don’t advise people to take risks. Either they are risk averse, in which case if they flame out due to your advice, that is bad. Or they are risk takers, in which case they need the opposite advice - try to be more sensible and less gambling.
The median return from people investing time into a business is probably nearer to zero than I would like to think. The average return is insanely skewed by the 1 in 1000 outliers. https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun...
I mean, the world needs founders, but I strongly believe it is not a financially sensible risk for the vast majority of people that become founders. I am assuming your comment was aimed at potential founders.
Edit: I just noticed this relevant note in https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlig... about Sam Bankman-Fried:
It seems that you should take as much advantage as possible of your legal status.
Most of the VR advocates I know are no fan of Meta:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ThrillSeekerVR
What is missing from Zuck's vision is any of the understanding that can be had from or had about fiction. If he was willing to listen he should take a sabbatical and go watch Ready Player One and all of the Sword Art Online anime and then he should buy a Switch or a PS5 and get a serious gaming habit. At some point he might get some insight about virtual worlds that aren't just a pale shadow of the real world but rather a place you might really want to work or play in.
If you believe that Superbowl commercial for Horizon Worlds is representative of what they think the market is it for people who feel like they are over the hill, the best is behind them, and they can recapture what it was like to live back in the day? (Is that you Zuck?)
I am very interested in getting a VR headset to help with some 3D GFX development I do, I like the Oculus hardware but I nuked my Facebook account a long time ago so it's not for me. I game plenty too but I try only to play games that are fun. (I am a little vulnerable to grindy RPGs, my son will smack me if he catches me…)
Quest, no pun intended?
When he laid me off it was clear that he had to hit a hard headcount number, and I knew the project I was working on was “discretionary”. The HR meeting was “this is a headcount reduction and not a reflection on your work. Have a lawyer look over your severance and please accept or decline it within a week.” Really quite professional.
Employers themselves usually look into spreadsheets with a bunch of KPIs deciding who to lay off, without any regards for the effort you have actually placed into the job.
But the company itself couldn't care less about anyone working there.
If you're looking for income growth and are already in professional position making decent money it's almost never worth it to go back to school.
If you’re going because you think it’ll give you better work opportunities later, I suggest thinking carefully about that. You’re already in your field. Even if you’re in an adjacent field but still in tech, you can usually transition — I’ve been a gamedev, worked in finance, been a pentester, and now I do ML. The question of whether I had a degree came up exactly once, very early in my career.
Academia can be a good fit if you’re going for the right reasons. Make sure you research what life is like at that university, and plan out what you hope to get from it and where you want to be five years from now.
If we’re talking about where the opportunities (jobs) are going to be, then you’re probably looking at tech roles within non-tech companies. These companies have been dying to modernize but haven’t been able to hire engineers due to the tech bubble.
After that, tooling that enables non-technical companies to build software - whatever that looks like.
What we don't need any more of is web cruft and CRUD apps, social networks, and people figuring out more ways to mine our data and shove ads in our face.
(No snark intended, my background is in science...)
The fields that would benefit society the most are not typically the fields where the most money is to be made.
Spent two years in school and got to sit out the worst of the recession. However, (in the US) tuition increased a ton from when I first went to school and has only gotten more ridiculous since I graduated.
Personally I'm glad I did it, it just took a while to pay it all off.
It was like 15% of the businesses just evaporated.
It was a Cisco building in particular that I remember.
I was over on that street recently and everything is occupied again, though many of the names have changed.
If we're lucky
[1] https://www.investing.com/indices/bloomberg-commodity
Europe will probably get its energy sorted in the medium term with LNG, and they're going to need to build a lot of damn nukes, but I don't think it'll be 10 years.
If memory serves, Meta is cutting a lot of non tech jobs. Engineers might lose their jobs if entire projects are scrapped, but maybe a different position will be offered to them.
I hope that everyone is looking at Twitter and learning what not do: no company wants to beg some engineers to come back after being too quick to pull the trigger.
What country are you referring to? I'm in the US-- the market here seems quite strong according to the BLS:
US Bureau of Labor Statistics-- Here are two examples, followed by the general IT occupation growth description:
- Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers
--> Job Outlook, 2021-31 25% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
- Information Security Analysts
--> Job Outlook, 2021-31 35% (Much faster than average)
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
"Overall employment in computer and information technology occupations is
--> projected to grow 15 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations"
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Long Covid alone is going to hamper any economic recovery. It's a mass disabling event. The sooner we recognize this and start tackling it, the better : https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-workforce-absenteeism-pro...
We have several fundamental inflation factors - The population is aging. A huge number of boomers are exiting the workforce every year. - Unlike in Japan, this cohort of people are likely to keep spending into their retirement, including a huge spending on healthcare. - This time, we don't have China to absorb the inflation. China is in the same situation. Also, most jobs that could be easily exported already have been. With the tech sector being a bit of an exception. - The prices for all sorts of jobs being done by people in their 60's will go up. This goes for everything from hairdressers and plumbers to accountants and lawyers. This will cause pressure on the salaries for these jobs, raising costs. - Decades of low interest rates have created a massive amount of cash (and cash-equivalent "value") in the system. As investments go down, more will find its way to consumption, driving prices up. - During the Covid lockdowns, many countries discovered that plenty of goods were becoming scarce or unavailable. Local production facilities are being built for anything from face masks and respirators to integrated circuits both in the US and Europe. Trade barriers and subsidies are used to support this. Local production will be more expensive than 1-2 huge plants able to serve the globe. - Covid also led to a mentality change, where employee loyalty to employers took a big hit. Employees (especially blue collared ones that can't WFH) that got laid off during Covid will be more likely to switch jobs more often, driving salaries and costs up.
On top of this, the war in Ukraine adds these factors: - Food, energy and fuel, as well as many minerals are scarce, driving up the prices of everything. - Such items are added to the list of goods western countries want to produce for themselves. And in the case of food, places that experience famine may switch back to food production over cash crops over a longer term, as well. - Western countries have started rebuilding their arms industries, sucking capital and labor from other sectors.
All-in-all, these factors lay the foundations for an inflationary pressure that could exceed the 1970's.
As central banks attempt to counter this by continuing to raise rates, we get the following problems. - Anyone with a variable or expiring interest rate will have their standard of living going down from interest payments AND inflation. - Huge swaths of people will demand that raises keep up with inflation. Groups with skills that see increased demand will get such raises, and possibly more. - In other sectors, employers will not have the income to raise compensation at the same rate. Employees in these sectors will become increasingly unhappy. - People will start unionizing at a greater rate than before. Especially in Europe, but also in the US. - Most likely, we will see large numbers of massive labor market conflicts, with strikes followed by lock-outs. - Tensions between countries is also likely to rise (though the war in Ukraine may mitigate that a bit, for as long as it lasts) - These conflicts will damage the supply side of the economy further, leading to even more inflation and a deeper stagflation, in a vicious circle.
In all of this, this is bad for any business without a significant positive cash flow, including much of internet "tech". Military "tech", on the other hand, may see a huge boom, and the same may come for anyone able to contribute within manufacturing or construction (such as through robotics/AI).
Personally, I see it as a cycle which appears to be repeating itself, especially after re-reading The Intelligent Investors assessment in the years after the 2000 crash, and comparing it to some of the current offerings out there. I would be interested to hear your perspective on the matter.
In 2000 entire companies were just disappearing. Companies had gone public that had no business plan. 100s of millions were thrown at companies who were gone in 12-18 months.
Big tech, who are making dump trucks of money, laying some people off is just part of the normal business cycle.
Under what circumstance do you believe the current landscape would be comparable to the 2000's era? Certainly, I would hope that the same kind of foolish behavior wouldn't reoccur, outside of a very specific set of circumstances, but do you see any sort of comparison between the historical foolishness of the market, and the wastes of money that have been devoted to things like, Stadia, Zillow AI pricing, Quibi, WeWork, etc.?
When I see the amount of money spent vs brought in by the various big names out there (social networks, in particular) I can't help but see a thing essentially worth little outside of name recognition. I naturally assume it to be a house of cards ready to collapse at some point, I just can't really determine when or why that might be. Perhaps not anytime soon, or to the extent that it would have were it 2000, but certainly companies that has such a noticeably poor ability to create profit, that it seems assured to fail.
I've certainly been wrong about such things in the past. Twitter, for example, was a thing that I assumed around 2008 or 2009, would never catch on, and that whatever traction it had would fade within a few months. I had similar assumptions with Netflix being "doomed to failure" after they tried to split the steaming/DVD rental services. I've been laughably wrong on each of those things, so it's entirely possible that I'm just not appreciating that maybe the world itself works has changed in a way that I haven't grasped. I just don't see how tech companies which can't manage to turn a profit, let alone offer predictable income, are able to sustain longterm value investment. It just seems like a hopeful anemic.
Crypto though I think is where we will see an 00 style collapse. Many of the companies are scams or lightly disguised gambling platforms. The technology is poorly implemented in many cases, leading to theft. There are also a large amount of drifters just taking people's money. Maybe crypto has protected the broader market by being a honeypot for all the exuberant behavior? IDK.
I think you should be careful discounting social networks. Meta, as one analyst I read said, is a cash volcano. IMO, ATT effects for Meta and Google are overblown because they have so many properties to gather data from. Ads on both platforms work and are valuable. Though they are not immune from general economic slowdowns.
Even though TikTok is private, the little that has leaked shows them doing extremely well. Twitter has been mismanaged for years. Musk is right that Twitter should be a decent business, but it remains to be seen if he can get it there.
While I'm pontificating, and since you also mentioned Netflix :) another spot I see about to implode is content spend. Look at how much Netflix, Disney, Prime, etc... have spent creating content the last 5ish years, and then look at how much they charge a family for the access. There is no way that level of spend continues. We have been living in a golden age for content with the variety and amount, and I think that is about to end. With the increase in rates and the market pullback overall, content spend is going to have to get cut.
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
Yep, was with a company that went out of business slowly - I was one of the last 10 employees to be let go (on the day the company officially went out of business). The first round of layoff severance was something like 6 months of salary. By the time they got down to the last of us, it was two weeks.
What's "ads signal loss"? Is that iPhone asking for permission to track activity across apps, causing less accurate ad placement?