Meta Plans More Job Cuts, Report Says (engadget.com) 42
Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. From a report: According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March. In November, the company laid off 11,000 employees or about 13 percent of its global workforce. Those cuts were the largest in Meta's nearly 20-year history, affecting every organization within the company.
If I was in meta (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
in a perfect slice of what this story is all about the Meta shareholders would disagree, their stock price was up over $50 over 30 days and the announcement of more layoffs will probably drive the price even higher. ($137 on Jan 13th, a high of $191 on Feb 7th and rising again today at almost $180)
Re:If I was in meta (Score:5, Informative)
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taking breaks only for food and bodily functions
It's the "bodily functions" that will actually attract a critical mass of users to the platform... and Metaface didn't even want avatars to have anything below the belt. I can just imagine Zuckercluck in Data mode saying "they seem to have a need to simulate coitus"
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...ChatFPT-style controlling AI and reasonably priced headgear and full-body suit...
That sounds like the worst idea ever.
I'm proposing Facebook spend $50 billion on trying to achieve it.
If people point and laugh and they lose money they just need to invest another $50 billion and it'll be such a success.
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I'm personally shocked that people haven't bought in. I mean, who doesn't want to reduce their personal interactions with people to heavily surveilled sexless floating low-poly legless cartoon characters that look more at home in a Wii Sports game from 10 years ago while wearing a heavy chunk of plastic and glass on the front of your face, time-limited by the least of how long you can hold your head up, or how long the battery holds on?
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time-limited by the least of how long you can hold your head up, or how long the battery holds on?
And how long until you start feeling motion sickness.
Re: If I was in meta (Score:2)
Re: If I was in meta (Score:2)
A job is different than the product (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be happy to leave, I'd get as far away from that burning ship as possible.
In fairness, Facebook has a reputation for being a decent place to work among the people I've talked to with careers there. The job may be quite enjoyable despite the product being a flaming piece of shit. Career-wise, it's honestly not a bad place to be, so if I were there and had a good title, it actually might be advantageous to wait it out until the other big players are done shedding jobs. Twitter, on the other hand?...that's a ship I'd be desperate to get off of.
Re:Huh? 11K? (Score:4, Informative)
And janitors, accountants, lawyers, administrative assistants, efficiency experts, data center planners, HR folks, auditors, internal affairs... all the things that make any company heavier on the side of administration rather than execution.
I worked for a company of 12,000+ employees, only 250 of which were directly turning bolts with wrenches or manipulating production processes and schedules. That's not atypical.
job cuts until metaverse profitability (Score:2)
I'm calling for continued job cuts until the Metaverse is profitable. Cut 10% every month until Metaverse is profitable.
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What are they doing (Score:2)
Meta is short for... (Score:2)
"Metastasize", which is exactly what's happening with these layoffs.
a timeline (Score:5, Funny)
Past times: Move fast, break things! Teenage management rules!
Recent times: We shall dominate the world with our magical VR!
Modern times: Oh, stock down $50 billion? Er, let's lay off critical staff!
Future time: Meta announces sale to Nestle, to become the futuristic cereal sales technology division. CEO steps down in disgrace to retire in poverty with only $100 billion.
Netflix releases biography, starring Alex Baldwin as teen genius company founder.
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Walt, I can make that movie for you, would you mind if I make some Steamboat Zuckie clips? Also, what do you think about a cameo for Zuck, where our star actor practices cross-draws on him?
Hate to say it but (Score:2, Insightful)
Remember when everyone was criticizing Musk for the Twitter layoffs? Seems like he was just slightly ahead of the trend on that one, and the layoffs probably would've happened anyway. Big tech is in a big slump. Is there any major dotcom left which hasn't done a recent round of layoffs?
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Remember when everyone was criticizing Musk for the Twitter layoffs? Seems like he was just slightly ahead of the trend on that one, and the layoffs probably would've happened anyway. Big tech is in a big slump. Is there any major dotcom left which hasn't done a recent round of layoffs?
Musk laid off Twitter staff initially because he seemed to genuinely dislike the organization he just bought and later because he was losing piles of money after driving away advertisers.
Now there's a maybe recession coming to further dampen ad revenue, I wouldn't be shocked if there's another round of Twitter layoffs on the horizon (assuming he doesn't accomplish the same reduction through resignations).
Re: Hate to say it but (Score:2)
Musk laid off like half the company and they have been in disarray ever since. Other tech companies are merely laying off all the extra people they hired during the pandemic when SaaS suddenly became crucial. They over-hired thinking that this would be the new normal.
When you couple inflation and a slowing economy with a lot of extra workers you have a recipe for layoffs. Twitter, on the other hand, laid off the people most companies would keep and only kept those desperate enough to bend the knee to an ego
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You clearly do not look up at the horizon much.
The only people left at Twitter, are people that for whatever reason, can't leave - don't have another job lined up yet, here on H1B and can't quit or they're deported, etc.
Once they have another place to land, they're gone. And good luck replacing anyone that is in a critical position - anyone with any reasonable alternative to working at Twitter is going to option that alternative.
The beshittification of Twitter has only started. It's a slow burn, but it's
Start at the top (Score:2)
Hey Mark, apparently nobody wants to walk around with a VR headset and look like a complete dork, even at home. Metaverse is a flop. There, I've given you more information than the fools who refuse to tell you the truth to your face.
Start by laying off Zuckerberg and the stock would stand a far better chance for growth.
Re: Start at the top (Score:1)
This post will age like milk.
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Um, Ok. I'll see you here in 2028. My prediction is Google Glass will still be un-cool, countless billions will be spent on Meta-whatevers but it will still be as much a thing as brick shower curtains.
I'll double down and say Zuckerberg will be out of Meta by then, and they'll re-brand back as Facebook.
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Holy shit, I really hope this is a humorous reply in the same vein as the crypto-bro "guys with lambos" horseshit.
If you really believe in this MetaFace future of highly surveilled sexless low-poly legless cartoon characters interacting for a maximum amount of time dictated by how long a god damn battery lasts and requires wearing a heavy chunk of plastic and glass on your face, you have severely over-estimated the patience the general public has with new technological paradigms that are very obviously not
When I interviewed at Meta... (Score:3)
Over the years, Meta has knocked on my door a few times. At least 5 times, I refused all of them except one - the very first one. In that occasion, I did a technical screen with a person that was probably a couple of years after grad school and with very limited work experience but he was blessed with unlimited self-confidence. His job consisted of tweaking algorithms for the newsfeed recommendations, not all of the recommendations but a specific type of recommendation, and he literally felt like he was at NASA. He gave me a pretty straightforward SQL question to somehow test my ability to write KPIs from scratch. I answered the question and he struggled to read it, probably because he expected me to go crazy with standard functions and instead I leveraged a quick hack I learned over the years to use 0s and 1s to simplify queries and reduce compute. The guy was confused and told me my query wouldn't run because 'it was missing a groupby' and I unfortunately LOLd. A few days later, the recruiter sent me an email with lots of feedback telling me that 'my SQL skills were not at the level where managers need to be'. Funny thing, I had just literally coded an artificial intelligence bot in my job that served as a no-SQL interface for data insights for the entire company - but whatevs. I moved on.
That initial rejection didn't drop me off recruiting lists, and over the years Meta kept calling me, as I kept getting promoted elsewhere. At one point one of the recruiters convinced me to take a call with a hiring manager and I spent a good hour talking to a head honcho in an AR department. He described what sounded like a myriad of managerial roles with extremely limited scope and responsibility, yet crazy resourced with lots of boots on the ground, focusing on micro problems. Years long, like 5-10 year, hardware and software roadmaps, and an incredibly rigid, automated, and bureaucratic tech stack. It felt like you could make a ton of money, but narrow scope meant you had to stay on your lane, and not deviate from a very very narrow piece of responsibility. Again, an incredible amount of overconfidence from a lot of people with very limited experience.
I am so happy that all of my interactions with Meta always felt wrong. Unbalanced. Cringey.
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... I leveraged a quick hack I learned over the years to use 0s and 1s to simplify queries and reduce compute. ....
I like the entire story but now I am feeling unfulfilled. What is the hack?!
Never used commercial social media ... (Score:2)
... for anything mission-critical and never will. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., basically the entire social media craze of the last 2 decades seems like some bizarre Monty Python sketch to me. As a 80ies computer kid and seasoned IT expert that was doing DTP when the web just came about as some avantgarde IT experiment I never really got what FB and Co. was all about. I suspect it's just like that for most if not all real experts. Only in recent years have I time and time again run into regular people