diffusionx
Gold Member
Heh, yea, “privatized”, pretty sure that place glows.
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Meta just fired 11,000 people [13% of its workforce]
- Thread starter SJRB
- Start date
ChorizoPicozo
Member
You don't understand zucko vision.
gaming_again
Member
Fukken lmao. Imagine being a shareholder and seeing this shit.
DanteFox
Member
True. Tik Tok is eating their lunch, and the whole Meta play is a gamble that will only pay off in the long term, if it does at all.
TheUsual
Gold Member
Angry, no. Jealous....a bit. Who wouldn't be envious of little work and a nice salary? Enjoy the ride while it lasts and hope the resume is ready!
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Dural
Member
The problem is that these big tech companies have been paying outrageous salaries causing other repercussions like the outrageous housing market in the bay area (and pretty much anywhere big tech is). These people that do nothing are buying up real estate for way over asking price, pricing the middle class out completely. I honestly don't understand how anyone survives in these areas that don't work at one of the big tech companies; teachers, police and fire, restaurant workers, manufacturing jobs, warehouse jobs, etc...
StormCell
Member
No, he had months to determine Twitter was in a poor financial state. Twitter has notoriously not been profitable. In fact, there were lots of discussions about Twitter bringing to fruition subscription-based services long before Elon made a bid to buy the platform, and the idea of charging a subscription to maintain verification status didn't originate with Elon... yes, it was already an idea being mulled over by Twitter.
But Twitter just wasn't profitable...
Is Twitter Profitable? - FourWeekMBA
As of 2022, Twitter is not profitable. In fact, in 2021, on $5 billion in revenues, Twitter generated over $220 million in net losses. In Q2 2022, on $1.17 billion in revenues, Twitter posted a net loss of $270 million. However, in the first six months of 2022, on almost $2.4 billion in...
fourweekmba.com
64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
wow. that explains a lot. honestly i think i'd rather not work there if it's going to fuck up the local economy that drastically. I always wondered why California was an expensive homeless ridden hellhole with home prices that have more 0s than they do square feet, guess i know why when silicon valley is right around the corner...
Slicker than your average
Banned
So what does a market or product marketer actually doYou Should have went into marketing, life really is like this for most of us. Not exaggerating, us marketing people get treated like royalties and get all the privileges. I love it. A friend of mine in logistics worked with me for a day and said the same things as you “I’m living a fricken peasant work life compared to this”
SentientStone
Member
Should use the money saved to hire Jesse Eisenburg as the frontman of the company. Zuckerberg’s physical form is ruining the company.
Lord Panda
The Sea is Always Right
Yoda
Member
(I work at Meta) So the company over-hired, ppl thought the amount of revenue coming in during COVID was a paradigm shift (it wasn't) and we were caught flat-footed WRT short-form video (tiktok) and signal loss (Apple turning off cross app tracking via anon ID) -> lost $10 billion in annual rev (which for us was basically pure profit). Today was extremely rough, I've never seen such a demoralized company in my entire career (i've worked at 4 now one other being a FANNG). On top of this, institutional investors aren't buying the next compute platform WRT VR/AR, Mark may be right, but the consensus is he's too early -> stock is now massively discounted as ppl don't wanna buy the profits from the AR/VR that (might) show up within 5-10 years.
Dual class stock setup
Facebook dual-class shares are weighted in favour of Class B. Founder and owner of the company, Mark Zuckerberg, owns Class B shares. These represent approximately 14% of Facebook, but have 10:1 voting rights. That means Zuckerberg’s Class B shares give him 60% of the voting power.
That’s a list of companies with dual-class shares and, from the names you see, you might expect that this is standard practice. The reality is that this type of share structure is not standard and is not well-liked by certain investors.
Cyberpunkd
Member
Every tech startup overhired in the last 5-10 years, it just intensified during Covid. The early startups - Facebook, Salesforce, etc. - took much less time to become profitable. In the past few years the song was always the same - "don't worry about profits, go fast". In the end it led to incredible redundancy. I know startups that have 5 people for the same position where 2 max. would suffice.
Facebook has more than 100k employees - TF are they doing?
gaming_again
Member
Most of them are probably moderators in places like Indonesia.
You can hire an entire moderation team in Indonesia for less than that product manager's food benefit budget though.
gaming_again
Member
I meant the 100k headcount.
The PTSD payouts may cost them more in the long run… those mods probably see worse stuff in a day than your average policeman in a career.
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Man my bad. I misread the context.
Cyberpunkd
Member
I don't think Facebook would have counted people working for a subcontractor in their employee count (and let's not kid ourselves - all of the moderation goes through subcontractors).
Tams
Member
In that case you'd have known you bought into a company where the founder has golden shares, so you bought inferior shares (and that's all the was offered).
So you're either fine with it, or an utter moron.
Tams
Member
It amazes me people think Twitter was doing well as a company.No, he had months to determine Twitter was in a poor financial state. Twitter has notoriously not been profitable. In fact, there were lots of discussions about Twitter bringing to fruition subscription-based services long before Elon made a bid to buy the platform, and the idea of charging a subscription to maintain verification status didn't originate with Elon... yes, it was already an idea being mulled over by Twitter.
But Twitter just wasn't profitable...
Is Twitter Profitable? - FourWeekMBA
As of 2022, Twitter is not profitable. In fact, in 2021, on $5 billion in revenues, Twitter generated over $220 million in net losses. In Q2 2022, on $1.17 billion in revenues, Twitter posted a net loss of $270 million. However, in the first six months of 2022, on almost $2.4 billion in...
I mean, I do get that to your average person, if a company stays around that long then they tend to think it surely must be profitable. That's definitely not the case though.
FunkMiller
Member
Definitely. That boyfriend doesn’t look like he can do it for her.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
I wouldnt either, she seems like a right vapid prick.
Azurro
Banned
There were too many leeches at Twitter that did pretty much nothing. It was the necessary move to fire most of them, the rehiring isn't massive, some errors will happen with that scale of firing, but removing useless blue haired elements from an organisation can only be a good thing.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
I am kinda curious who they ley go. Did they have a lot of BS job titles like "Climate change denier suppressor", "Interracial dialogue coach", and "Privilege coordinator" or did they just hire 5 market analysts when 1 would suffice.
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StormCell
Member
I imagine it could be as simple as informing directors and managers that they need to reduce their teams by x percentage range while providing solid justification for whomever they choose to keep.
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Aesius
Member
I’ve read that during Covid a shit ton of employees at Twitter and other tech companies had their roles reduced to calling into Zoom meetings a couple of times per day and literally doing nothing else while still pulling in huge salaries. And that continued well after lockdowns ended and the world started opening back up.
gaming_again
Member
Imagine this being the case and you not socking away as much money as possible while against the time limit of inevitable job loss.
Or did they think that was normal?
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Tech companies with too much cash (profits or from IPO money) often go through this crash and burn cycle of hiring and firing. To me, a combo of needing to ramp up tech fast and also they just have no idea what they are doing. They just dont have the experience what they are doing
On the other hand, giant established non-tech companies dont go through such volatile stuff like firing 50% of their company like Twitter. Nor do they copy each other where like the top 10 tech companies are all firing people at the same time. If Procter and Gamble has tough times firing people, it doesn't mean Nestle or Pepsi will. But tech seems to all follow the same boat.
On the other hand, giant established non-tech companies dont go through such volatile stuff like firing 50% of their company like Twitter. Nor do they copy each other where like the top 10 tech companies are all firing people at the same time. If Procter and Gamble has tough times firing people, it doesn't mean Nestle or Pepsi will. But tech seems to all follow the same boat.
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Cyberpunkd
Member
TaylorSwiftFan
Member
At half the salary.
akimbo009
Gold Member
Sorry, but do you have any thing to back this up other than tales from your ass? I actually know folks at these companies, and yeah, that didn't happen.
Shockingly, COVID cause a massive surge of demand on online and tech companies cause, ya know, everyone was online and using their services... So they scaled up because of a shit ton of work.
Anyway, not defending meta here cause I hate their products but this isn't much different than game devs getting dropped - cheering on and discounting people who just lost their jobs isn't a good look.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
What tech companies should do when it comes to hiring is hire more contract workers. Pay them well so they stick around, but at least you dont have to go through giant severance packages and contract workers arent part of head count as they technically arent employees. So if Meta or Twitter had tons of contract workers, there's tough times and the company needs to save costs you can gas them easier or simply not renew their contract. Of course, you might get loud pissy tech workers complaining about the company not extending their contract duration but this will prevent roller coaster hiring and firing cycles.
If things are going great, then slowly offer FT tenure.
My company does the same. There's a certain core of FT employees, but when work heats up we hire contract. When the company proves it can keep it up we offer FT work so the head count officially goes up over time. But in a controlled way.
If things are going great, then slowly offer FT tenure.
My company does the same. There's a certain core of FT employees, but when work heats up we hire contract. When the company proves it can keep it up we offer FT work so the head count officially goes up over time. But in a controlled way.
akimbo009
Gold Member
Contractors are generally poor substitutes to full time, and the work they do can come under some IP limitations - so they are fine for support engineering or similar IT roles but even then it has limits. And companies exploit contractors with minimal pay and no health benefits - if that became the norm it'd just hollow out the talent and innovation.
These are also very complex systems and they months or years to deeply understand - temp contractors aren't going to help there especially since COVD wasn't some seasonal event - it was ambiguous and once in a life time.
But really, it's the same as game developers to some extent - just cause you're behind on your deadline you don't catch up by throwing more people at it (see: mythical man month).
The Pleasure
Member
Then how will I FUCK people's a** in the metaverse?Only the top half
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Fair point.
Maybe tech stuff is better suited for FT employees.
In my office, I've seen contract workers in every department, except now that I think of it Sales is always a FT role. But marketing, supply chain, finance, demand planning etc.... all have contract workers who float in and out pending workload. I dont really see a difference in quality of work. Some FT workers are idiots, while some contractors work their ass off hoping for FT offers later. But no doubt one negative of contract is they dont work longer hours. Once 5 pm hits, they bolt and they'll never answer emails or do weekend work. But FT employees can work at any time if needed.
And some are on contract for years. Some people actually like contract work as they like moving around and getting money frontloaded where they do their taxes at income tax time, whereas the rest of us get grilled taxes off our pay every two weeks.
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Mikado
Member
It's only a matter of time until someone builds an alternate metaverse that contains only the bottom halves.
akimbo009
Gold Member
Oh yeah, there are a lot of roles where surge is well handled by contractors. There's just some core roles that struggle in the model - but for smaller companies dev contractors can make sense as the product they make isn't software but for companies like meta their product is actually software so contracting out your core competencies and value is not a great story for your long term strategy.
And yeah, I was a contractor in a former life - there is something nice about the flexibility. Not for me anymore, but definitely fun for a while.
Yoda
Member
I don't think the last 5-10 years is comparable to the covid hiring surge. The company essentially doubled in size during 2 years, most companies doing layoffs are only getting back to their HC level from a year or two ago at best. There's still plenty of demand, just not everyone locked up at home demand with forced unemployed -> so they hop on the internet all day.
Also companies at the scale of FB have quite a lot going on:
- We run our own data centers & edge network
- All tooling is built in-house. I know it's popular to rip on FB, but it still gets billions of distinct users of month, so it's a set of technical problems you won't encounter anywhere else (off the shelf solutions simply will not work)
- Apps have heavy amounts of ML powering their discovery/ad serving functionality. This means lots of high performance infra, research scientists, etc...
- AR/VR (regardless of what you think of its business prospects) is a nascent technical area, lots of unsolved problems which can't be tackled by a handful of individuals. I'll note this is the one area I think we're overspending, tech itself needs more time to mature for it to be productionized at scale.
GymWolf
Member
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dr_octagon
Banned
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