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chrisdh79 OP t1_jb9gddb wrote

From the article: Meta is not quite finished streamlining its workforce, with plans for another culling of thousands of employees being considered by management. In November, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company was laying off 13% of its workforce, equating to approximately 11,000 in job losses. It seems that another employment bloodbath is in the cards.

A new wave of layoffs are being planned, according to Bloomberg. Thousands more employees are expected to get let go, with the fresh round hitting as soon as this week.

While earlier rounds were apparently an attempt to flatten the organization's structure, complete with managerial buyout packages and cutting entire teams thought to be non-essential, the new round may be more money-motivated. People familiar with internal matters at Meta claim the next round is being driven by financial targets, and is separate from "the flattening."

As part of the process, directors and vice presidents have been asked to produce lists of employees that they deem could be let go.

The speed of the layoffs is in part due to Zuckerberg himself, with those working on the initiative aiming to prepare it all before the CEO goes off for parental leave.

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squeevey t1_jb9i4pp wrote

You know what's even more efficient - just shut down.

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AnBearna t1_jb9lkg5 wrote

I mean that Fb/Meta has been responsible for a lot of damage in recent years and it’s no better than a propaganda funnel for conspiracy theorists and contrarians. In that respect it’s got it’s parallels with Fox and I’ll be happy when both have gone the way of the dodo.

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whatweshouldcallyou t1_jb9u0jo wrote

Meta: if we call it efficiency instead of misery maybe people won't react so negatively.

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pathlessRoamer t1_jb9w4jn wrote

Maybe they don't need efficiency. FB usage has most likely fallen, which probably impacts work loads and revenue generation.

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dungone t1_jb9zi3b wrote

Think about it this way. People have such a low confidence in your intelligence, they basically concluded that your entire opinion is nothing more than what Facebook and Fox News told you to think. But if you think they are wrong, because you plan to still be an idiot even if these right wing propaganda machines didn’t exist, then you shouldn’t have any concerns about holding both companies accountable for their lies.

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dungone t1_jba0cic wrote

So how about them? They are all right wing outlets owned by conservative billionaires. But they are not as bad as Fox News and Facebook in spreading Chinese and Russian propaganda, instigating violent insurrections, and filling impressionable redneck minds with nonsense.

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dungone t1_jba2hp5 wrote

Yes, we already know the nonsense that Tucker, Hanity, and Russian intelligence services told you to think.

You’re probably going to need therapy once you realize that Fox News is getting it’s ass handed to you in court for lying to people such as yourself. If you are so smart that you think you can find proof of Jewish Space Lasers programming the minds of the “left wing” billionaire corporate owners, I suggest you sue CNN, ABC, NBC, etc., yourself. Will love to see your proof, will be very entertaining. Until then, actual provable disinformation and anti-American incitement is being spread by Fox News and Facebook.

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whatweshouldcallyou t1_jba2v4h wrote

Lol. Someone is a fan of dumb assumptions. The number of hours of cable news television that I have watched in the last year can be counted on one hand, without the need for any fingers.

But keep assuming.

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dungone t1_jba5921 wrote

Yep, I know. Brother, you don't have to convince me twice that you've cut out the middle man and gone straight for the fully concentrated good stuff. You're hooked up to the online feeds straight from Russia and China.

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dungone t1_jba69i1 wrote

We all know that without Fox News and Facebook, you would not have any friends. Your world would only be filled by people like me, telling you the truth, telling you that you're nuts. That's why it's so important to you to defend Fox News and Facebook. Literally like an addict when their family tries to throw away their stash. What would you do without all the right wing lies that you've built your entire world around?

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FreezingRobot t1_jba7lfp wrote

Zuck must be happy that Elon Musk has been taking all the heat off Meta for the past 6 months or so.

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Haycock-spiney t1_jbac7ye wrote

Seems like it was only a couple of years ago he was hiring like crazy for the "glorious" 3D immersive paradigm.

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pathlessRoamer t1_jbagy08 wrote

This is interesting, I'd like to see actual usage stats, rather than sign ups, which can easily be manipulated. Though anecdotal, I've casually surveyed people I know who still have an account, and they all complain about the same thing - not much content, only ads and suggested public posts.
Wonder who is still signing up, or possibly they are clumping it with Instagram users, who use FB's login credentials.

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morbihann t1_jbaiqo7 wrote

And between 6 and 12 months from now, the Zuck will be scrambling to find capable people to work for Meta.

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mowotlarx t1_jbajanx wrote

Sign ups don't necessarily indicate usage. Meta did this interesting thing where a lot of third party sites - like Archive Social, a site that archives social media pages for federal/state/local government entities - require that you create a Facebook page in order to archive Instagram. Not only that, you must go through Meta Business Suite and create one or more new "profiles" to link to the Instagram. They encourage you to create more and more filler pages. Suddenly you have a single user with multiple "profiles" or "pages" they manage whether or not they are being used. It's a clever scheme.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_jbatxtn wrote

It really chaps my ass that the media keeps referring to it as "laid off."

They aren't being laid off; they are being mass fired.

These companies aren't hurting because of the economy. Meta is still posting profits; they just aren't growing as fast the do-nothing ownership class would like. They are still throwing tens of billions of dollars away every year to chase some pipe dream of a person who is deeply disliked by basically everybody for being a duplicitous weirdo.

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Laid off also implies no fault of the employees, but that isn't what the actual implication is. How many of us have seen reassurances that it is just the lowest performers being fired? That's not being laid off.

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"Lay off" the executive team for starters.

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It should be abundantly clear to everyone that workers assume all of the risk in enterprise.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_jbauc8u wrote

>I doubt it…there is a lot of dead wood in Facebook to get rid of.

You're correct; in Mahogany Row.

Firings should have started and ended there. Instead they will just fire everyone else and foist the work upon whoever remains behind so they can do the job of more than one person.

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mymar101 t1_jbauh75 wrote

As a programmer I’ve heard working at Meta is considered a black mark on your record and you could have hard time in the future getting a job. I don’t know if this is true or not.

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SlowMotionPanic t1_jbavgu5 wrote

These aren't sign ups; they are Daily Active Users. And even if that were the case, the trend from the last several years is clear; upward. Reliably upward.

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And what seems more likely? That Meta is attracting more DAU by forcing them to create basically interstitial accounts for third party activities?

Or that Meta is successfully converting people into DAU as they implement more features and relent on more dumb choices (like re-integrating Messenger back into the Facebook app rather than requiring you to use a separate app)?

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Reels, for example, has experienced explosive growth on Facebook. I don't understand why people use it given the user experience, terrible ad injection (including in the middle of short form videos), and basically rebranded content. But people are using it. A lot. And their profits show that. Meta is printing money still despite it all. They aren't firing people because of financials, no matter what they say. Their books are public since they are publicly traded, and their books say they are a growing moneymaking machine.

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Kirome t1_jbavwv0 wrote

Stupid: "Dese ppl are jawb creheyturs!"

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redddcrow t1_jbaxik8 wrote

after spending billions on his stupid Metaverse...

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filthmrchristian t1_jbaxlvd wrote

I’ve worked with FB for about 6 years. They went from lean to full fat bloat brigade in no time. Meetings went from things accomplished to clueless fucks who could not make a decision as they were trying to think what their line manager wanted. It became a mess. They could drop another 40k staff and they’ll be fine

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t0slink t1_jbaxn9k wrote

Facebook is a social media platform just like Reddit. Reddit doesn't stop you from posting misinformation - why should Facebook?

Solve the misinformation problem at the source.

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DoesntWantToBe t1_jbb5p02 wrote

To a degree this applies to a lot of FAANG (Exceptions Apple and, if you count them, Microsoft).

I've done a lot of hiring at mid-sized companies, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it a black mark, but it does create this sense of a candidate that's both very expensive, and possibly very coddled. The hiring teams at mid-sized companies definitely tend to assume that someone who's worked at FAANG may be missing what's considered fundamental skills at lower levels, where they assume other mid-sized company developers probably have those skills.

It leads to some more basic questions coming up in interviews for ex-FAANG candidates that might not be asked in the normal interview process. At some companies, with some interview groups. I want to be as clear as I can, this is something I've seen at some midsized companies. It's by no means an absolute truth or even a majority of companies.

At others it might be a full on black mark, at others it's probably a leg-up over the competition. There's really no accounting for personal biases, and it's not really worth worrying about building your career around them.

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filthmrchristian t1_jbb9x8t wrote

Sure. Marketing / creative/ Ops / retail are the immediate 4 that spring to mind. Meetings went from fast and slick to way too many people all sitting in meetings / zooms all talking platitudes and essentially saying nothing. Was shocking to watch given how much each FB person was paid. They were only interested in how much they were getting paid / perks. Basically they lost their enthusiasm and way.

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phasys t1_jbbcmsf wrote

This clusterfuck is going to be a bigger disaster than the dot com bubble in 2000.

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squirrelchips t1_jbbfbfp wrote

I love this so much, cause it doesn’t answer the question of the efficiency of WHAT? Their profits? Their “product”? Those are two different things. From the layoffs being pushed, it’s most likely their profits they are worried about, but only short term. They are thinking quarter by quarter and it shows with the decisions they are making. Layoff people today, make more tomorrow, then be fucked when you need more people and no one wants to work for a company that lays-off people for short term capital gain for investors.

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DoesntWantToBe t1_jbbkczk wrote

It's not so much about whether or not they do much work. It's about the breadth of that work. FAANG devs tend to be relatively focused in their skillsets, if they need to cover a different skill set those companies just hire someone full time for that role (or many someone's, creating a whole department).

In mid-level and especially in small enterprise companies there's a lot more of breadth than depth. You don't need someone who can squeeze milliseconds out of a particular framework or compiler, but you might need someone who normally writes code to set up a config for nginx or help data put together a report for the next board meeting.

The complexity of the tasks isn't necessarily as high in smaller companies as in FAANG, but the variety can be much higher. In some jobs I've done SSRS, Nginx, Excel, and worked in C++ in a single day. and that was as a Ruby/Rails developer.

Context switching and more general technology skills are things we've tested for/asked about when interviewing ex-FAANG employees, where someone coming to us from a nearby competitor or similar industry might get a more general set of questions about their experience with ancillary technologies, rather than being tested against it directly.

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coffeesippingbastard t1_jbbqr4l wrote

I could tell FB was getting super fat when most of their PMs were coming from business/finance/consulting- especially reality labs.

So much of the tech is still in development I have no idea what FB is doing bringing business people in to PM an incredibly young and technically challenging space if they have no idea what is going on in the tech.

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mia_elora t1_jbbv8sb wrote

Corporate Tech Jargon is always so laughable.

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IH4v3Nothing2Say t1_jbbz0bt wrote

I can’t wait for the news when Facebook is shut down and Zucc no longer makes the headlines. Better yet, I can’t wait to see the news that he’s passed away. I’ve yet to see a lizard person’s funeral.

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ryan2stix t1_jbcapz1 wrote

When you look at the trend of yearly cuts to increase profits, it makes you wonder what things are going to be like 10 years from now.. 50 years ago an average job could buy a house and support a family.. now people with schooling are in debt forever and hitting food banks..

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TrainsDontHunt t1_jbcjduw wrote

I don't know all the laws, but I believe a company is charged less for unemployment for a lay off but the counter is they can't hire for the same position for a year, or if they do it has to be offered to the lay off people first.

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whitexheat t1_jbckve9 wrote

I work at a tech company in a non-programming role and this is true for us as well. I ask a different set of questions for anyone coming from a FAANG to sus out if they've been scrappy and done a breadth of work. They're all smart and capable people, but like you said, they've often have more resources at their disposal and haven't had to wear 5 different hats in a day.

Also, in my field, a lot of people got hired at FAANGs straight out of PhD programs and there are some issues with that as well. Like clearly bright people, but don't always have the soft skill sets we're looking for so I tend to hire from similarly-sized companies.

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nubsauce87 t1_jbctau0 wrote

Tell us your company is failing without telling us your company is failing...

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Firechess t1_jbcww05 wrote

And McDonalds killed even more people with diabetes. Welcome to human beings becoming shitty through excess. But I bet you don't even know who McDonald's CEO is. Or even Nestlé. The only thing that stands out about Zuckerberg is that he made his company from his dorm room, and therefore he gets the dishonor of being more evil than Mao Zedong.

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FalseTebibyte t1_jbe0t1x wrote

Aside from the one-off person here and there, isn't it odd that these companies that layoff so many people... especially in those fields... we don't see more of them bitching about being let go online?

It's kind of like the numbers are like Hindenberg. All show.

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hiten98 t1_jbe6sqb wrote

Wut these people HAVE been bitching online in their communities, they’ve also been job hunting like crazy, LinkedIn is full of people looking for referrals.

There’s also the fact that tech workers who got laid off from meta are usually pretty skilled and a lot of smaller companies snap them up (at lower comp), so they’re not starved for choice like layoffs in other industries… the demand for software engineers is still pretty high

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