What people dislike is the boom-bust cycle inherent to all levels of a market economy. During some years, these companies suck people up like a vacuum -- that can be bad if you're on the inside and all of a sudden the culture goes out the window, or if you're expected to onboard 3-4 people at the same time, or you end up with a reorg every quarter. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, companies shut down (non-backfill) hiring entirely and layoff huge percentages of the company, with no guarantee that you'll be safe just because you're doing a good job.

Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.

Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.

Pressure from whom? Mark Zuckerberg personally controls the majority of voting shares. He can do whatever he wants.

It absolutely is. The funding for it, not the product itself.

You heard it here first, Zuck and his peers are brave generals in the battle against the Y...Chinese Peril and we are all...cannon fodder, I guess.

Is Meta innovative?

They make products, sure, but output isn't the same as innovation.

You have brain poisoning from reading too much slop online.

>But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip. >chip

Do you realize that the cutting edge in chip technology is a Dutch company

I'm tired of this American exceptionalism. Success is not only about money. It's about making a positive impact on the world for everyone. This is where the big tech companies deeply fail.

America poisons the world with pollution (eg pulling out of Paris Agreement), misinformation, promoting discord as 'engagement', unnecessary military engagements and screwing up the rest of the world.

And really, abdicating 'leadership' was already done by America by voting for Trump.

It would also be green for everyone else's brokerage account.

Having fewer jobs available would result in more employers? I'm not sure how.

The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.

Sounds like a strategic mistake.

"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.

You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?

The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care

I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.

>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.

I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.

I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.

American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.

The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)

Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.

It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.

>Why is this time different?

The humiliation of all of the disastrous failures has been lost to history and PMC are once again bullish about their cost cutting genius.

Remote coordination tools are no longer utter dogshit.

I think this is broadly correct too.

They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.

He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this

I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.

You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.

Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.

Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).

have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.

You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.

The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.

I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.

> Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market?

If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.

The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.

So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.

This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.