"Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history."
"Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date."
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
"At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce."
"There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this."
"There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help."
etc.
The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
Of course it has been done for millennia.
How does a CEO with enough class B shares to control shareholder voting take accountability?
Self flagellation perhaps?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
What you said, but in a Second Life clone.
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it. It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners" (tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute impunity for a day?
Which is actually average practice... and in most distributions that's definitionally not the best.
My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment.
I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I guess GPT-3 has never played Numberwang
The rest is implementation details.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I've been priveledged enough to see the insides of hundreds of companies. The problem is ALWAYS the leadership! (or lack thereof)
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data"
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
Who predicted this?
The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.
Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.
The laptop class genuinely believed we'd never do anything in-person again.
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
But my memory may be playing tricks on me.
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
Also, most forms of non-screen entertainment (bars, restaurants, sports, theaters, etc.)
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
That's throwaway change, compared to the amount spent on Covid.
>Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter.
The US is the world's biggest producer of natural gas, at least while fracking is still largely permitted.
Then, I checked Google. Yep, you are right: https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-production-by-country/
In my mind, I was mixed up with world's largest exporters. Last I knew, it was a race between Qatar and Australia. But wrong again! It is Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_g...
Heck, it’s only four powerballs from last weekend.
¹2011 figure
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?) think doing nothing would have been much worse.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
Anyways you're changing the topic now. Glad I could help you understand how the ukraine war affected the US economy. Good day.
No, I'm not from the US, so the colloquial usage of "gas" as "fuel for cars" slipped my mind.
The US is also a net exporter of crude oil, so all I've said so far still applies.
How has the Ukraine war affected gasoline prices? Are you just talking about the state you live in, or US-wide?
I mean, they probably believed what they wanted to believe, but that’s a very human failing.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
They are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
Stripe and Twitter took a lot of heat off of Meta; if they had done this in March it’d be a whole different story.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
For them that risk was much greater.
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
Input:
"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth."
Results in:
"When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue."
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...
The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?