And so it's not wasted money on Musk's part, it's spent for a purpose, to seize control of what seems to be the most connected social media phenomenon out there. Facebook had to be weaponized through Cambridge Analytica and it wasn't meant to be public-facing knowledge. At this stage apparently that doesn't matter anymore.
That or it's megalomanaical overreach. Which is possible :)
With a high TC usually comes an expensive lifestyle. It's a really hard process to downscale your lifestyle.
But Zuck's pie in the sky metaverse shit contributed.
Oh and you have a four month severance runway on top of that...
Four months severance is only good if you find another good role within four months. And in the current tech market I wouldn't bet on that.
Something else to consider - if there are a ton of engineers entering the market who are willing to take a pay cut what impact will that have on everyone else in the market? This sort of thing is what drives everyone's wages down.
The rest of the world and even your fellow (US) citizens have to get by on much, much less.
These kind of salaries are not at all normal. I would advice you to not live your life as if you'd be able to make almost half a million per year for the rest of your life.
So save most of it and live a normal lifestyle. If the good income continues, simply retire early :-)
Your lifestyle has to do with your expenses. You can have savings and a sizable emergency fund but if you don't find a job that pays you as much or lower your lifestyle.
Raising lifestyle to match your salary is a hedonistic treadmill.
I suppose these are mostly good, well-working engineers. This should mean that the projects they were working on were mostly useless, bringing too little value for the effort in the short term, or too uncertain benefits at a longer term.
Something did not pan out with the product vision.
And if Meta is indeed stuffed to the gills with highly unproductive yet highly paid people, who is responsible for that? Those people aren’t actually changing.
The profits from work of those devs are already realized. The future profits might not materialize.
Also, it was all over the news that Twitter fired probably based on performance (lines of code, yeah, I know). Wondering if this will make it difficult for the twitter folks to get hired compared to those from FB.
- Wake up at 4am every day.
- Only hire lucky people (they get to work for you that instantly makes them one of the lucky ones right!?)
- Fire the unlucky people or the people having a bad day (its a pretty bad and/or unlucky day when you get fired, if they had any luck at all you wouldnt have thought of their name when you decided to fire someone)
The perfect way to select for luck! Fire people randomly, therefore you will on average only have lucky people working for you! Genius!
No that doesn’t follow.
Why is that? Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient? What is the logic behind this thinking?
Personally if I see Facebook on a resume, I will assume that they will be expensive
> Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient?
I think for many there is a good chance of learning valuable skills at these companies. In my time at Meta I became a more proficient engineer by being around those who were a lot better than me, and I also got a lot better at non-technical stuff like giving people feedback, leadership, communication and so on. It's obviously not impossible that I could have learned these skills elsewhere but they are weighted heavily at Meta etc and it's more likely one will have absorbed them.
None of this is universal, of course. Any particular person might be great or terrible as a result of their tenure at Meta.
At least for the next decade or so, the representation of SV and startup culture will be quite cutting.
But I’m also glad they didn’t jump any sharks and gave it a good wrap.
The culture of shame on failure is pretty strong in Japan and sometimes goes too far. After the crash of Japan Airlines 123 where over 500 people died, two high level people related to the accident committed suicide. Not something I'd like to see normalized. Loosing more lives is not the solution.
I seem to read this comment every other day, hopefully it’s not adding up…
While it's probably easy to land on your feet and find something with a good pay in SV or London, it's probably not the case everywhere.
4 months of pay for this kind of trouble doesn't look like a good deal to me.
True, those labor laws are under attack, but they still stand, and such layoff would be so costly there that they could hardly happen.
4 months is not generous, it is under the legal minimum in many countries, provided you've been with the employer long enough.
You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?
> would be so costly there that they could hardly happen
This is NOT a good thing
I think this depends on ideology a lot. In europe the sentiment is to improve the life and livelihood of the average person on average, and not that of a few CEOs, and labour laws reflect that.
The cynic inside me tells me this results in universal health care, better infrastructure, less divide between poor and rich and thus less crime on average, ... in europe. In the US you have super rich CEOs fueling policies to make the rich richer. Maybe my reasoning here is not true, but I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time.
The sign of a first world country isn't having a bunch of billionaires - you have those in Brazil and Russia. It's when the poorest people in your country still can have healthy, meaningful lives.
Honestly, from my point of view, the US is a 3rd world country, but I expect that viewpoint to be very controversial.
As someone who lives in a real third-world country...I'm of the opinion that this is a silly thing to say. Yeah, the world's biggest economy ($23T GDP) that constantly sends payloads to outer space and back is third-world...maybe you could come live in a place with 80% of people below the poverty line and see what third-world is.
When a country’s poor can still manage to be overweight, have cell phones, have gaming consoles, have automobiles…your perception of poor might be a tad subjective.
And before folks go off on the “what abouts”, yes I realize there are some folks in the US without those things, but let’s face it, you sample just about any “poor” person in the US, you will find at least 50%+ of the things I listed.
I doubt that you could do that with a random sample of the poor in say Burundi
Maybe "not as good for everyone else", but "hell" is such a big exaggeration. I know plenty of working-class people -- think barbers, construction workers, baristas -- who live happy lives.
The US isn't some dystopia where if you're not a millionaire you're living in a slum.
Please, I live in an area with high taxes and I've yet to see the return on the investment. Healthcare? If you have a minor condition and you can wait or if you have a dangerous condition and you cannot wait then it's great. For all the other illness that are life-damaging but not life-ending? I hope you are rich enough to pay for a private practice. That's what my family has been doing for years on top of the above-mentioned taxes.
As for CEOs compensation: even low earning people in the USA are above average earning in Europe (I repeat, on top of high taxes) while in Europe the best way to make money is through inheritance. Yes, in the USA your parents socio-economic status is very important in giving you a head start but you at least you can participate in the race, while here there's not even a race to speak of; even if I do everything right: STEM degree, programming, speaking multiple languages and so on and on and on... you will probably end up in the same economical status of your parents. And let's not speak about the unemployment of Southern Europe: a different can of worm that has eaten the future of an entire generation, especially men: it is a bomb ready to explode.
The state of Mississippi, which many enjoy comparing to third-world countries, has a higher average disposable household income than does Germany. People, especially Americans of a certain class, have a very twisted view of how wealthy the average European is.
Policies based on good sentiment almost always result in hidden costs that run counter to those sentiments. Strong employees' rights in Europe mean that companies are much more reluctant to hire, since poor performers cannot be let go easily. This is especially devastating to young people who cannot find a foothold in an entry-level job to develop their careers; see youth employment rates in Spain (over a third) or France (one-fifth).
Same with rent control and other tenant protections, which is another sentimental policy that results in poor real-world outcomes. Sweden famously has a national average waitlist nearing a decade for rent-controlled housing, but this problem is by no means limited to Europe; if you compare states in the US with strong tenant rights vs. strong landlord rights, you'll find that the latter has much lower rents at comparable population densities.
> I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time
There has been more immigration from Europe to the US than the other way around for decades, so a lot of people do value the factors that enable those tech unicorns to flourish in the US.
We have plenty of almost unicorns here in Europe, then they tend to be smaller. Albeit the European Union market is roughly equivalent to the USA one in term of population or wealth, it is heavily fragmented legally and culturally. If you want to grow out of your country, you get to address the challenge of various different cultural differences be it for your product, running a business or entirely different laws. And sometime there is not even a market cause your solution is already addressed in some of the other countries.
> You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation
Those would involves RSU which I guess do not get vetted, even so 4 months several when having a $300k salaries yields out a $100k severance.
> is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?
I am not sure it would be that large. At least for France it is 25% of a monthly wage per year of tenure. So for a 5 years employment that would be 1,25 months. Then you get unemployment benefits, usually a package to assist in finding a new job and of course you keep your healthcare coverage. The system is entirely different really. We get less lump sum but have a lot of other benefits which definitely help in rough time.
No it doesn't. Life expectancy in the United states is declining. Perhaps labor law has something to do with it.
This seems a way better treatment than what you would get from labor laws anywhere in Europe.
Compensation = (years worked at company/3)*monthly salary.
This comes on top of the minimum notice period, which is given by:
notice period (in months) = floor(years_worked/5) + 1
In many cases, employers and employees agree that the employee will not work after having received notice, but are asked to be available to help answer questions their replacements might have during this period. The employee still receives their salary during this time (even if they find new employment), so effectively this notice period can be added to their compensation.
So for many employees in the Netherlands, the minimum legal compensation is better than what these employees will receive. In practice their compensation is often better than the minimum legal compensation.
> In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees"
Even if reflect badly on founder/CEO to say "I erred by hiring tons of below average engineers who couldn't deliver so I am fixing it now" It would reflect worse on those engineers in real world.
Do you apply negative stereotypes to people you don't know as a normal part of your daily interactions?
And you think they don’t?
Consider that FAANG employees are already the top less than 1% of the industry. Even in a down-market they can wander down the street and end up with a job with comparable pay and probably better conditions in a week - and a signing bonus to boot.
If a FAANG reduced their compensation broadly, all the employees would be at an opportunity cost disadvantage vs just finding a new gig. The company would be at a disadvantage relative to its peers in its ability to retain/replace the talent they need to get through this period. Worst of all for the individual, it resets the market rate for top engineering talent.
So the choices are:
(1) You take 5-10% of engineers, give them a few months beach time while they brush up on the leetcode so they can land the same job for the same pay at a company a few blocks away plus a signing bonus
(2) Everyone at your company takes a 5-10% pay cut and the best talent leaves anyways but now everyone gets paid less too.
Option (1) feels like the game theoretic optimal.
Define reality. This has been my experience for the last 10 years, and frankly, it's been the experience of a number of folks I've seen laid off and fired from similarly situated companies in the last few months.
Could that change? For sure. I'm talking about the situation on the ground - today - from personal experience within the last few months. Why are we attempting to optimize today for a reality that does not exist right now? Let's cross that bridge and adapt when we see what it actually looks like.
> And yes even those that feel secure in their jobs currently...
Speak to some FAANG employees. I'm not sure any of them have ever felt secure in their jobs because these companies operate with very little fat and aggressively prune every 6-12 months.
> ...will eventually see a paycut in some ways.
In a hypothetical future, yes it could happen of course. Has it happened yet? No. It hasn't. Should we find ways to cut our own pay now in advance of a reality that may not materialize? Not in my opinion, no.
I thought part of the point of this place was to share what's happening in our industry right now in addition to doomer projections.
An average Netflix employee is responsible for $2.6M in revenue. $2.375M at Apple. $1.6M at FB and Google. $920K at Microsoft. [1] Now adjust that down to just the engineers. At NFLX, that's $6.5M in revenue per engineer. These companies would be nuts to hire anyone other than the best and to pay for it. They will see attrition and they'll need replacements - and they'll pay for them. If that changes, let's revisit.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
Did you consider that this cohort might be self-selecting, leading to your "informed opinion" being somewhat biased against the average?
To some extend. But it’s true too. It is their fault.
Managers are usually the most competent employees at actually getting shit done, because they have to do their own shit on top of managing what the employees are doing.
Although losing your job is difficult, it seems to me like I would much rather be fired from Facebook than Twitter.
In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees". I remember a couple years ago when Nintendo was having problems then all the top execs lowered their compensations. I wonder if top execs at Facebook are also doing that? (doubt it).