Zuckerberg Says Meta May Not Be Through With Layoffs (marketwatch.com) 43
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said the embattled company may not be done with layoffs even as it goes through its latest round of 4,000 this week and braces for another batch in May. MarketWatch reports: The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which announced its intention to slash 21,000 jobs late last year, is also likely to dramatically slow down hiring, Zuckerberg told employees in a town hall on Thursday, according to a Wall Street Journal report. "I just kind of think that for where we are in the efficiency that we're able to get from new technologies, that's probably the right model to expect going forward and that will be a different operating model and I think we can do it well," Zuckerberg said in a virtual Q&A session, the report said.
Meta, which announces quarterly results on Wednesday, faces an uncertain future over the next few years, Zuckerberg said, and there are no guarantees the workforce reductions are over. "I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don't want to kind of promise that there won't be future things in the future," he said. "What I can say is that there's nothing that we're planning now, and if we do something, it'll be sort of on that time frame."
Meta, which announces quarterly results on Wednesday, faces an uncertain future over the next few years, Zuckerberg said, and there are no guarantees the workforce reductions are over. "I generally feel good about the position here, but just given the volatility, I don't want to kind of promise that there won't be future things in the future," he said. "What I can say is that there's nothing that we're planning now, and if we do something, it'll be sort of on that time frame."
Sooner than later (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sooner than later (Score:4, Funny)
Tens of thousands of people losing their jobs because of a handful, maybe 5-6 people, keep making ridiculous billionaire-brain decisions like "Lets sink one of the largest companies in the world by making Wish Second-life!". Society is broken.
Re:Sooner than later (Score:5, Interesting)
Some business owners in Iowa have been having trouble finding staff recently, so they have had child labour laws changed so that children can now work night shifts and serve booze for example.
We're not really people to those guys. We're just assets or liabilities.
Re:Sooner than later (Score:4, Insightful)
That's totally backwards. Tens of thousands of people temporarily had a very nice income doing work that would never be profitable to the company because of the bad business decision to dump tens of billions into the metaverse. But that kind of thing doesn't last forever. Everybody on /. keep saying it was stupid and Meta should knock it off. Well, they are.
Re:Sooner than later (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which announced its intention to slash 21,000 jobs late last year
Any time a company eliminates 21,000 people, the first person to be fired should be the CEO, because that is just complete and total incompetence.
No properly managed company hires that many people who weren't really needed. It's not like a factory that actually produces something got hit by an asteroid and was destroyed. All of these people laid off are nothing more than "vanity hires". People who were hired just to make the company appear to be bigger and more successful than they really are.
Re:Sooner than later (Score:4, Insightful)
GO DO IT. DAZZLE US WITH YOUR SAVVY AND BRILLIANCE.
Give any random software engineer the kind of money that is at Zuckerberg's disposal and we will. Heck, I could seriously change the world with even 1% of his wealth. I even have a rough business plan, though good luck getting anybody to pony up that kind of cash for a nonprofit....
Let's get real here. It doesn't take a genius to keep a company from completely catching fire, barring something truly catastrophic happening. All you have to do is not do things to piss people off, not do things to squander huge amounts of resources, keep finding ways to continuously iterate and improve so that you don't fall behind the competition, and keep trying new things. And even if you fall behind, you can usually gracefully fade away over the course of decades.
But Facebook really didn't do that. They've had significant problems for a decade, and instead of fixing their problems, they just kept buying their competition. Eventually, the antitrust folks started saying, "Nuh-uh," and then they were screwed, because they forgot how to innovate and improve in any meaningful sense of the word — only how to copy.
They're the Microsoft of the online world, gaining everything interesting through acquisitions rather than innovation. And when you acquire companies, you acquire people, and that makes you more and more overweight unless you are really, really careful about consolidating resources as you go.
And that's really the core problem with Facebook. Facebook has been wasting money chasing after ubiquitous VR/AR since 2014, when they acquired Oculus. That's nine years. And what do they have do show for it? Some gaming headsets that are very popular for a very narrow slice of the population, but that most people couldn't care less about. Even bringing the price down to the point where it is pretty cheap still wasn't enough to make most people care.
When you run a business, you try something new, and you try to fail fast. You don't come up with an idea, burn away capital for years, then say, "Well, we tried that and nobody wants it," and then dump all your people. When that happens, it means you didn't evaluate the market competently, you didn't get to a prototype stage quickly enough, and you didn't pivot when you realized it was infeasible.
Facebook's VR/AR experiment reallly should have ended years ago. But instead of realizing that it would never be more than a niche and selling it to a gaming company, they doubled down on AR/VR and kept pumping in good money after bad, and hiring more and more people for a doomed experiment. That, right there, is a colossal leadership failure.
In that respect, I agree with the GP. When something like this happens, the leadership should almost invariably be the first thing to go.
That said, I disagree that (most of) those people were vanity hires. They were hires based on planned company directions that the company leadership probably truly believed they could pull off. The problem was that their leadership somehow didn't notice that the last time Facebook truly created (rather than acquired) anything that truly stirred the world's passion was... well, basically the original Facebook site. So it wasn't vanity, but rather arrogance and probably a touch of Dunning-Kruger.
Re: (Score:1)
Or combine it with RP1's omni-directional and infinitely scrolling treadmills, if you think the engineering on that will be easier than figuring out non-invasive brain/computer interfaces (a partially solved problem that could benefit from someone dropping a few billion dollars on it).
Re: (Score:2)
I think the core problem is everyone is using VR wrong. You need to combine it with BCI, otherwise it's just fruit ninjas tripping over coffee tables.
Or combine it with RP1's omni-directional and infinitely scrolling treadmills, if you think the engineering on that will be easier than figuring out non-invasive brain/computer interfaces (a partially solved problem that could benefit from someone dropping a few billion dollars on it).
All of these things would help make it more usable by a larger percentage of people for gaming, which could maybe help move it from being a niche of a niche to being a niche, but none of them really solve the fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem is that these things are huge, bulky toys that you can't wear around all day or slip in your pocket. It isn't like a phone, where you can play games on it whenever. It's a giant headset. This problem, in turn, causes at least two other problems:
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Give any random software engineer the kind of money that is at Zuckerberg's disposal and we will.
Well, that's exactly what separates the execs from the plebs. The ability to hob-knob and fundraise.
If I had a hundred million dollars, I'd love to create my own operating system to show those Linux fanboys how it's done. But, for some strange reason, nobody is willing to dump money on to me unless I have some kind of "financial plan" or something. Bah, those investors! They only care about money!
Re: (Score:1)
Everyone wants the Metaverse. The product Meta is trying to sell is in no way a metaverse.
Meta's business plan:
1. Watch Ready Player One
2. "I want to own that! Why don't I already own that?!?!"
3. Change name of company.
4. "Wait.... how do i metaverse?"
5. Create marketplace and partnerships so that you can profit from other people creating a metaverse for you.
6. No one else knows how to create a metaverse either.
7. ???
8. NO PROFIT.
There's a chicken & egg problem to
Re: (Score:3)
A bit over the top don't you think? Sure Facebook isn't what I call a nice company with peoples best interest at heart. But there have been and still are organizations that actively seek the genocide of particular races. Facebook is just greedy like most companies, and a lot of people.
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Show me, on the doll, where the bad website touched you.
good... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Meetings and remote work are not synonymous. I have been working with non-colocated teams for over 15 years. Most of the time, I could not tell if people were working in an office or if they were working at home or even Starbucks.
Also, remote work was not even mentioned in the article.
Re: good... (Score:3)
Bullshit meetings have long predated work from home.
Shut it down (Score:3)
The correct number of FB staff is zero.
And while that chapter 7 is being filed, let's see one for Twitter, TikTok, and the rest of the social media trash.
Re: Shut it down (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> and the rest of the social media trash
Wouldn't you miss slashdot, just a little?
Re: (Score:2)
I agree not trash, perhaps tarnished a bit. Is 'hold my beer' the trash threshold for social media?
Re: (Score:3)
I've come here on n off since UIDs were 3 digits. I very much miss the older version when there were thousands of fucking Uber geniuses here from every field and I learned cool shit every day just reading random posts.
Re: (Score:2)
Can't argue with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Let me guess, you also miss the GNAA trolls.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Shut it down (Score:2)
You arent wrong. Sadly. I miss 1999 Slashdot.
Speaking of firing... (Score:3)
Re: Speaking of firing... (Score:2)
Ugh. Building a business plan around a business. (Score:3)
If you asked Mark Zuckerberg, "What do you do?", he'd probably stammer, then get angry, and then fumble out his lawyer's business card.
Facebook doomed to slow decline before meta (Score:4, Interesting)
Meta just seems to be accelerating the decline.
When it's no longer cool for young people to use your social media platform, when that platform is full of shitty ads and politically charged content, when all most people do is regurgitate shit-posts ... it's going to decline.
Facebook managed to get people hooked, sure, but the demographics are not what they once were.
Social media hype has died a death as it just melts into background normality.
So what's a Zuck to do? ...
Find another bandwagon to jump on
Unfortunately, he decided to hop on a bandwagon that is still probably a decade from being fully realised and bet the house on it.
Or perhaps we can say, Fortunately he did - I'd love nothing more than to see Meta and Zuck fail.
Indecision (Score:2)
He can't figure out whether to lay Suzie, or Jack off.
How much staff is needed now? (Score:1)
"Meta" stands for "Metastazise" (Score:3)
Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said the embattled company may not be done with layoffs
When it metastasizes, the cancer takes over, sucks the life out of everything, and leaves it but a shell of its former self.
That's why "Meta" is such an apt name for FB now.
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Now look out for that fanboi/troll (you know who you are) that's going to come and claim everything I just said is wrong.
Meta extreme rates of hiring correction (Score:2)
Is this guy a complete idiot? (Score:1)
I just kind of think that for where we are in the efficiency that we're able to get from new technologies, that's probably the right model to expect going forward and that will be a different operating model and I think we can do it well.
Holy shit The Zuck sounds like he's just graduated from an MBA program, is in his first pointy-haired manager job, and is still operating in fake-it-til-you-make-it mode.
How the eff did this corporate drone get to be the head of one of the biggest tech companies on the planet?
Although, it does explain why it's unraveling. Facebook is run by a bunch of empty suits who don't have the slightest clue how to manage a business.