Corporate robots are the same everywhere.

Also known as best practice.

The whole point of HR/PR in these situations is to make the situation as forgettable as possible.

Your say best practice, I see apologies for doublespeak and the attempt to normalize unaccountable dehumanizing statements from corporate lackeys.

Telling the truth is always better.

"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"

I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that.

They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.

Making shit up to obscure the truth is a way bigger asshole move than just telling the truth.

What did they lie about?

Of course. It's not about the best move or what looks better. Nobody cares for that.

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.

zuck did say “I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here.”

Is he laying off himself too? Because simply saying "I take accountability" without any actual consequences isn't taking accountability.

he lost 75% of his personal wealth, so there have been pretty real consequences for him already

What does that even mean? He won't have to work for a few centuries instead of a millennium? Lol.

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.

If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.

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).

It's not a logical inconsistency to point out that dollars matter a lot less once you have enough.

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.

> If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.

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".

That wealth is not “immeasurable”. It’s just hard for someone to understand when their point of comparison is personal finances.

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.

Sounds like a good thing. Last thing we need is billionaires owning more things.

It has nothing to do with ownership being good or bad. It’s having people with vision and acumen for financially sustainable businesses setting up these projects for success.

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?

Capitalism is just as often not the meritocracy you think it is, but just capital buying up production...

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.

Losing 75% of wealth is the consequence of holding meta stocks, but it does not make him immune to accountability.

For better or worse (obviously for worse) his relationship with the company is fundamentally different than that of every other employee. He’s a founder and holds a majority of voting equity. That makes him inherently unaccountable in a way that is nearly without precedent in the modern corporate era.

Losing 70% of his net worth makes him directly accountable to the success of the company (lack thereof).

What does taking accountability mean for a permanent CEO who cannot be fired by anyone?

As much as “thoughts and prayers”. It mainly makes the CEO feel better.

It means writing a really heartfelt form letter.

Even if he did, would anyone believe it? This is Zuckerberg we’re talking about.

And who else is accountable? He's the top dog. And apparently well paid to state the obvious.

Typical Gavin Belson move: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

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?

Would telling the truth be better if the real truth was “We’ve been waiting for a good excuse to drop a bunch of people and boost the bottom line short-term so we can get some loans”?

p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days

> I have no idea what meta is doing these days

What you said, but in a Second Life clone.

The tech industry labor market has been cooling rapidly this year, it's not only ad-tech companies, and certainly not only in companies who might have over-hired due to betting everything on metaverse.

Or the fed increased interest rates and the economy is forced into recession too stop inflation.

Are you trolling? that would be worse for literally everyone involved. Have you held yourself to this standard in your professional life? it seems so absurd

Yeah, in 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. Told my team we'd all be laid off soon. I finished the project I was on first and was the first laid off due to no more work.

> the truth is always better

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?

Many people can't handle the truth. That's why see weird situations that don't make sense(i.e religion, populist leaders, snakeoil etc)

Honestly I think GTP-3 can generate a much better human-touched message than the template

Typo: GPT-3

Yes, perhaps for legal reasons, but what does using a template that feesl like GPT-3 tell the people about management that are still with the company?

> best practice.

Which is actually average practice... and in most distributions that's definitionally not the best.

Exactly! My #TF2 nick is "Sheep with a gun"!

I replied by editing my original comment. I got flagged, so I thought it appropriate to edit my comment to motivate what I posted.

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.

The overlords saw they were losing control with people opting to WFH and great resignation … so they said “What audacity … inflict pain and suffering on the mortals”.

Well, we'll see who wins.

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.

The two companies probably hired the same consulting firm to plan their respective layoffs.

Or, the dynamics behind the two events are very similar and there’s only so many different ways to describe it, so you shouldn’t expect significant variation in how they’re described.

Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.

That would make it very simple for real AI bots to take its place.

it took the collective brain power of an army of Big Three management consultant alumni to draft this soulless document.

Startup idea - layoff mail generator using GPT-3.

I experimented with making a GPT-3 excuse generator for getting out of work/school a while ago^. We can look forward to a future of incredible synergy, as employees dodge work with AI generated notes and are summarily fired by an AI!

^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 am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house

I guess GPT-3 has never played Numberwang

Please create a writeup on this, utterly hilarious.

Why stop at HR, the whole c-suite is a massive cost center and ripe for disruption.

Exactly. GPT3 for conversations, some humain actor giving enough materials so the C suite can appears in all hands and the likes thought realistic model ( not the meta crap )

The rest is implementation details.

Why stop at the c-suite? We may not be close to being ready to disrupt software engineering but the trend is heading in that direction. We already passed a milestone for code generation.

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.

Hey now, that's my job ;)

Recently there was an ask hn that was "What SaaS do you wish existed". My response was "c-suite replacment".

I've been priveledged enough to see the insides of hundreds of companies. The problem is ALWAYS the leadership! (or lack thereof)

I haven't seen inside very many, but when I was at university I participated in bargaining with the execs there; I've also interacted with execs of the small- and medium-sized companies I've worked at. Regardless of the purpose and scale of the organization, they all seemed to be emitting the same blandishments, always loosely correlated to context...

No need to go fancy when copy paste will suffice

I could do it in 50 lines or less of python, including sending the mail to the loosers.

well they saw the postive feedback that the Stripe comments got and plagiarised it

Someone did crib the Stripe layoff notice at Meta. Strange, but yeah, obviously someone at Meta did base it on this Stripe one.

Don’t they share either Kleiner or Anderson horowitz as common investors and board members?

I dare say that once some are out the others look to them and copy what they can if it worked.

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.

Corporate robots are the same, that's why corporate mistakes are also the same :/

Layoffs have become so normalized these days, I'm sure they have templates.

Probably from a "How to make people redundant" template

The wording is quite similar but I don’t think identical is the word you’re looking for.

Seriously. The sweetest words to me would be: "Here is your six months severance and full medical, now get your shit and get out!"

At least the last sentence reminds me of "The hard thing about hard things".

That just can't be a coincidence. American tech giants are again colluding to control the job market for software developers.

We must have massively different world views, or at least different definitions to colluding. This doesn't survive Hanlon's Razor. At worst, this is corporate corner-cutting, not collusion.

- hey, can I copy your homework? - sure, but change it so it doesn't look like a copy

Don't companies usually use consultants to plan layoffs?

This is scary.

Same layoff consultants?