> the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs
Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.
It is frustrating, because I really enjoyed my Valve Index and want a replacement and Meta has some of the best VR tech in the world, but I've waited 6 years for Valve to release their new headset to buy a replacement, simply because Meta can't be trusted.
> So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.
If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.
But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.
Meta's morality aside, it's so strange seeing bitterness about software salaries on HN - very crabs-in-a-pot. Especially considering that the vast, vast majority of software jobs don't enable a life of luxury due to differences in COL.
Instead of insisting that more businesses should share enough profit to enable more people to live the Little American Dream (have a small home, small family, somewhere reasonably nice), we say the opposite, "No. People currently achieving that need to give it up." The bar is so low that this is what counts as "spoiled".
Meta isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s on a slow and gradual decline into irrelevance. Ironically Zuckerberg has now broadly become the has-been geriatric business type he raged against so hard when Facebook began.
Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.
He was done with Facebook. Then he read Ready Player One and thought fuck it, why not?
It was a bet. It didn’t pay off. His billions might be tied to the value of the company but his millions are safe and secure. He can keep taking bets for a long time.
Meta is just an investment vehicle for him at this point.
Unlike a startup that pays with illiquid RSUs, Meta paid its people extremely well for its bets though. I dont think Zuck is a great leader at all, but he’s definitely willing to pay for talent.
I dunno I think AI is pretty cataclysmic for the ad supported web. For one, why go to any webpage instead of reading the LLM summary. For two, why look at an ad riddled page when an LLM can clean it up for you.
Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?
Same reason people work at any of these big companies, money and prestige. You can be a terrible engineer, but if you have a few years experience at Meta it's going to make people think you must be a great one.
Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.
Is it expected to be hard? Meta currently employees a lot of people who are willing to be there for any number of reasons. If 2 years down the line Meta announces a hiring push offering the same or better compensation packages with the ones offering now I am sure people will flock to be there.
I think we should put behind us any discourse about companies risking their hiring pool by being hostile to the society or their own employees. People will definitely try to be hired at $company if it means six figure pay, doesn't matter the sector. We have plenty of examples for this.
You could have said this every year for so many years about so many companies. If people will work for Palantir, they'll work for Facebook. Facebook could be a lot worse and I think a lot of their employees would stick around.
I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.
You're confusing _evil_ with _cruel_. Palantir is the former, but from what I have heard they treat their employees well. They are attracting exactly the kind of people they want.
That's true and probably a kinda critical distinction here. Facebook is sort of making the bet that they can not only treat the world like shit but their direct employees too.
Certainly, everyone has "a number" they're willing to suffer for - but telegraphing the suffering ensures that number will be maxed out and morale/motivation will be rock bottom. So: you're paying a huge premium for underperforming talent. Destruction.
1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.
2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.
3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.
4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make
This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?
5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.
None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"
Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.
Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects
The curious thing about that is the transformation of the feed — it’s long since stopped being majority friend/follow posts and clearly is the algorithm picking whatever else it can come up with that will engage. This should mean personal network effects aren’t the moat anymore, for FB anyway.
I feel like making a system capable of delivering the amount of data that WhatsApp/instagram deliver to billions of people worldwide would take more than a weekend.
Not that I’d want to work there given what they do, but every time I’ve been contacted by a recruiter there, it seems like it’s within a month of a mass layoff they’ve had… which is maybe just because they seem to have mass layoffs every quarter now.
They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.
Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well. If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that with the AI tools used to AI-wash the dismissals, it’s easier than ever to bone up on economics and why it’s a bad idea to hire people without a clear view of the economic margins along which the employee will be profitable for the firm.
Someone made a great post about other companies who have shed their 'covid excess' but are still citing that period as a motivation for their decisions.
Boohoo, too bad so sad. Facebook has been a psychopathic company hellbent on making the most money possible in the most unethical ways by influencing its users and bleeding them dry for their personal data.
Whoever chose to work for them in the last 15 years really made a conscious choice. They chose money over ethics and anything else. And don’t tell me about student loans, there are other companies hiring (well, at the time anyway) engineers that would let you make your payments comfortably.
> “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.
The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.
Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.
>Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.
My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.
You may have noticed Zuck is continually trying to make or buy the Next Big Thing. Elon mostly just wants to keep the lights on and shape content to his personal interests.
There's been a substantial increase in political bias.
> Our new X users saw double the amount of right wing content than left wing content
> And right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.
> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.
But who in their right minds trusts the people in Meta?
People out of work don't either.
Even people with jobs don't go to FB or Instagram hoping to read AI-generated slop.
Meta is about to find out all the above the hard way.
If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.
But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.
Instead of insisting that more businesses should share enough profit to enable more people to live the Little American Dream (have a small home, small family, somewhere reasonably nice), we say the opposite, "No. People currently achieving that need to give it up." The bar is so low that this is what counts as "spoiled".
Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.
It was a bet. It didn’t pay off. His billions might be tied to the value of the company but his millions are safe and secure. He can keep taking bets for a long time.
Meta is just an investment vehicle for him at this point.
I think we should put behind us any discourse about companies risking their hiring pool by being hostile to the society or their own employees. People will definitely try to be hired at $company if it means six figure pay, doesn't matter the sector. We have plenty of examples for this.
I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.
1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.
2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.
3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.
4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make
This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?
5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.
None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"
Such a nice euphemism for data grabbing / social graph building / spying / AI training machine!
> You’ve been at Meta for more than a decade.
It seems to be about someone who probably makes >$200K/year and should be set for life with stock options.
They also seem to have adopted a no-remote hire policy and are in an extreme high CoL location. It’s a truly awful mix for trying to attract outside talent. I don’t know why they even bother.
This is a convenient strawman for companies but I think it's no longer true that the people being layed off stem from that time: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
Someone made a great post about other companies who have shed their 'covid excess' but are still citing that period as a motivation for their decisions.
Whoever chose to work for them in the last 15 years really made a conscious choice. They chose money over ethics and anything else. And don’t tell me about student loans, there are other companies hiring (well, at the time anyway) engineers that would let you make your payments comfortably.
The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.
Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.
Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.
So like 2000 and 2008 if you worked in heavy industry.
Ouch. Great point.
> Our new X users saw double the amount of right wing content than left wing content
> And right-wing content was shown most prominently, regardless of users' political leaning.
> Left-wing users saw almost the same amount of left-wing and right-wing content, even though they only followed left-wing accounts. But only 14% of the political content sent to our right-leaning users was left-wing.
> The neutral users saw twice as much right-wing content as left-wing content. And barely any of the political content shown to our X users was non-partisan.
https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boo...
Maybe the bias just aligns with your personal one now?
He threw several.