b) and c)

It is exactly Mark’s plan. He called 2023 “the year of efficiency”, meaning that he wants to flatten the whole organization and get closer to startup velocity (and cost). He communicated this theme during performance reviews, as suggested by the article.

it seems striking that Carmack left pretty much with that criticism and Mark is now probably executing exactly what Carmack would have prescribed. It'd be interesting to correlate how closely the thinking around this second wave started to when Carmack made his announcement.

This is Carmack’s resignation post for those curious

https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/i-resigned-fr...

It takes a certain kind of cold detatchment to hire 5,000-10,000 people to r&d and build the foundation of your next big thing - drain every ounce of life out of them then discard them on the heap a couple of years later.

Like many tech companies during zero interest rates, they over hired and did not anticipate interest rates going up so fast. At least these employees probably made a ton of money.

This has nothing to do with interest rates, none of these companies are borrowing to hire.

And Meta, Amazon, Salesforce etc are only shedding excess pandemic hires. If you look at a graph of hires over a decade, the pandemic shows a huge blip up, and these layoffs correct that.

It does if they use their stock price as a benchmark, which they do if it is a part of their compensation. Higher interest rates push investors to sell their Facebook shares and buy bonds instead. This means that Facebook needs to earn higher profits in order to pull its stock price upwards. Low-IRR projects are eliminated and with them the people who worked on them.

> interest rates push investors to sell their Facebook shares and buy bonds instead.

Wouldnt the stock price drop with people selling the stock. That didn't happen with meta with interest rate hikes.

You’re right, it should, unless Facebook counterbalanced the hikes with positive news during those days/weeks.

> This has nothing to do with interest rates, none of these companies are borrowing to hire.

The interest rate connection is that investors buy the company stock (driving the price up beyond what's reasonable given the underlying business health), because the alternative fix rate instruments offer negative return.

>And Meta, Amazon, Salesforce etc are only shedding excess pandemic hires. If you look at a graph of hires over a decade, the pandemic shows a huge blip up, and these layoffs correct that.

I think you're arguing against yourself.

Why do you think there was a huge blip up during the pandemic? Because their revenue was increasing at a faster rate, so they hired to sustain the increase in revenue and they believed the growth rate will continue. Why was revenue increasing at a faster rate? Two reasons. First, zero interest rates meant that people had more money to spend than before. Second, staying at home meant that people didn't have much else to spend their money on except tech/internet.

The hundreds of thousands of dollars he paid every single one of them must have been just an awful experience for the people he “drained dry”.

Indeed.

These people all have 2+ years of build, tooling, dev experience in this newly emerging field. They did valuable work, it just did not hit market.

Anyone else in this space will be happy to snag them up.

I'm torn, I highly dislike both tech moguls and people who work for big tech, who should I support here ?

Tech feudalists losing billions is a great thing, plus big tech wages going down ? It is a clear win-win.

Due to the imbalanced tech incomes, we have lost so many beautiful minds to tech. We need more doctors, more engineers, more visionaries.. And all we have is tech nerds and "influencers". And this is coming from a tech nerd engineer.

HN is probably not the best audience for this message. But I obviously disagree.

People don’t become doctors because it’s insanely hard, stressful, time-consuming, and expensive. What we need there is not more money, as doctors also have high salaries already, but a reform in the system to make it more appealing to do the work.

I’m not sure what you mean by “more engineers, more visionaries”. Are workers at big tech companies not engineers? And how does reducing somebody’s salary make them a visionary?

More likely is that somebody makes a lot of money in a big tech company then can afford to quit their job and start their own company. Aka, they can become a “visionary”, like you suggest.

> Are workers at big tech companies not engineers?

that's actually a very controversial question and has been debated my whole code-writing career ( 26 years so far ).

> plus big tech wages going down ? It is a clear win-win.

lol wut.

also, what website are you posting on?

While I agree with your sentiment, this is a nasty business, I would like to think we also all know the game now. Do people go to work at Facebook[1], Amazon, etc., expecting to still be working there long enough to see their kids graduate and go off to college?

[1] I'm still not going to call it "Meta" any more than I am going to call "Star Wars" "Star Wars IV: New Hope".

> Do people go to work at Facebook[1], Amazon, etc., expecting to still be working there long enough to see their kids graduate and go off to college?

Sure, why not?

most people at these companies don't last very long. if you doubt that, just take a look at the average person's linkedIn or resume. You'll see the average tenure at a tech company is about 2 to 3 years.

While many people do job-hopping because they might get more money etc., others value stability, short commute, a project they like, their colleagues and more money is not as enticing. Even others found a cushy job they don't want to lose - many reasons to stay.

Maybe in the boom times. Now with the market attrition rates are more in line with 6-10 yr stints.

The alternative for many would have been something closer to a startup. In the case of Oculus - employees probably did quite nicely out of the company being aquired by facebook (?).

I guess if you are working on greenfields tech - one should avoid the big tech co. You have no real ownership of the innovaton and nobody is going to come along and buy you out if it goes well.

So, if you know you’re doing research on a new product that as far from a sure bet, don’t you have enough self awareness to save a fair amount of your outsized Facebook compensation, sell your RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify and be ready to interview?

Or am I just old and not naive and start doing the same thing they do I got my first check + prorated sign on bonus when I was hired at BigTech almost 3 years ago?

Then why did he hire so many people if he wants to run a flat org at "closer to startup velocity (and cost)"? Wasn't he the one in charge since oh... I dunno... Day 1?

People make mistakes

Exactly! If you look at HN comments you'd think they all live this perfect life, never introduce bugs in their software, never make poor financial decisions (including mistakes of omissions).

The whole comment section becomes a cesspool whenever Meta/Mark or Elon is discussed

He must regret daily going for Metaverse. What a crazy move.

It's easy with the benefit of hindsight to say a bold investment that didn't pan out was a crazy move.

In this case, it was also easy to say it was a dumb idea contemporaneously.

Unless you were the one of the people saying that this was a dumb idea from the beginning. IIRC there were quite a few people who thought that.

I think you missed the joke, the first line says it was a bad idea in hindsight, the second line says it was also a pretty bad idea in foresight.

I love it when megacorps misinvest billions. Opens space for a competition that didn't.

It's actually kind of amazing that there's not any real consequence to making that bad call. It sucked up a lot of energy, lots of people tried to stake and early adopter position in the metaverse and it turns out everyone just didn't want that.

I think they could have made more money if they built games into facebook. At probably a fraction of the cost really.

Reminds me of Marks 'pivot to video' on facebook [0]

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...

I believe they tried to court game developers via Facebook platform at one point. I recall giving Civilization Network a shot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_World

> there's not any real consequence to making that bad call

There is: they've spent a fortune of their money on building it.

Is that a real consequence? Are Facebook shutting their doors? Is Mark Zuckerberg no longer wealthy?

Yes, of course. It's not the sort of consequence that would be meted out by a parent, but it's appropriate. Facebook is much the poorer for it, as is appropriate for them trying a new thing.

That is exactly how Microsoft became so dominant in personal computing starting in the 1990s. While it's true that Microsoft did some unethical things, they succeeded primarily because Novell, WordPerfect, Borland, and IBM all made huge strategic errors and essentially knocked themselves out of the game. They missed inflection points that transformed the entire industry. Microsoft's errors were all smaller, and easier to recover.

> What a crazy move.

Not at all! Done right, we could have ended up in a sci-fi future strapped to our VR headsets all day long. But the real life, physical technology is just not here yet (maybe it's impossible and never will be), the software they invented for their lacking headsets is disgustingly bad (Horizon Worlds) and there is no nameworthy content.

I assume his advisors and tech leads all pulled the wool over his eyes and sold him their lofty dreams as tangible reality.

> Done right, we could have ended up in a sci-fi future strapped to our VR headsets all day long

When I read this phrase, the spaceship from Wall-E comes to mind. But in reality, it would probably look a little bit more dystopian than what Pixar imagined...

Most people would say they HATE this future, but most people would LOVE this future. As passive infotainment consumers, stereotypical scroolers, they are already glued to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, reddit and whatever other digital dopamine dispenser and skinner box there. Significantly improve on that with pleasant, increased or even full immersion and you got the next big thing.

...they say, posting on HN, a slightly watered down dopamine dispenser brought to you by the people that made Reddit happen.

I still think VR might be a hard sell for most people. As dumb as large groups of people may be, it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media. It's tricking out that it's not always a great thing, and there is legit buy-in from huge chunks of the Left and Right to restrict what social media does.

All of this stuff is locked behind AR/VR glasses that are close enough in size, shape, and weight to normal sunglasses. If someone manages to build that, it'll be the biggest thing to hit computing since the smartphone. If not, it's all going nowhere.

> ...they say, posting on HN, a slightly watered down dopamine dispenser brought to you by the people that made Reddit happen.

I by no means wanted to exclude myself from the groups I so derogatively named. Hacker News is pure infotainment to me. The quality is above reddit though, but that's not a high bar.

> it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media

Are they? To me it looks like TikTok addiction and stupidity is continuously peaking.

I'd say HN quality is way way better than Reddit, entirely due to the audience. Reddit is very much anti-knowledge, anti-solution, anti-reason whereas HN features intelligent discussions, often supported by facts.

It's really not clear that people are ditching FB. They showed 20% more ads last quarter than in the quarter the year before.

You forgot to add miserable and depressed to your list

I mean, the Wall-E one already looked _extremely_ dystopian.

The video for "Do the Evolution" by Pearl Jam.

From what I understand, he would like to be remembered similarly to Steve Jobs, as an inventor of the future. I think this was his way of doing that.

People loved Steve Jobs though whereas people hate Mark.

He failed to produce his own brand. The only thing that comes to mind when anyone thinks about Mark is "Facebook scandals", "looks, moves and talks like a reptiloid/robot" and "the mataverse that no one wanted failure (no legs!)". I bet he wishes he would have been what Elon Musk was, someone with pretty much his own cult. Elon Musk still has his cult followers and online knights despite his increasingly erratic behavior and general unpleasantness.

Not everyone loves Steve Jobs. Lots of people don't. I don't.

I do hate that Zuck ruined the word meta for everyone.

Steve Jobs was a misanthropic douche who routinely abused his own staff and screwed over many of those around him, including, famously, Woz.

He just had really, really good marketing, and products that landed at just the right time.

Your characterization of him is correct, but he didn't accomplish what he did through sheer luck and marketing; he also had a really good sense of what (average) consumers wanted in a technology product, which his competitors seemed to mostly lack.

Steve Jobs "landing products at just the right time" is a synonym for "was a wildly successful businessman".

The only thing that is vastly better in VR than in reality are horror games. While one can laugh on how silly/unfrightening the movie nightmare on the Elm street is, a proper VR jump scare can easily lead to a heart attack when following some quiet period of gameplay. Not sure if this was the intended effect as it would likely reduce the number of consumers once for all.

I think what would be awesome is if he just opened it all right up, the specs, the hardware, the whole thing. It would spur a bunch of hackers and cool innovation.

Without doing something like this, I don't think it will go far.

You're right that multiple rounds of layoffs is terrible from a employee morale PoV. From a business PoV its however not quiet as clear cut as you make it seem.

Doing a single round is incredibly hard if management decides to downsize the company significantly as they're not expecting any growth anymore. Its just more manageable to do it in multiple rounds until you're left at the desired employee count.

And all the naysayers around here, memeing about the Meta-Pivot: I hope you're aware that 2022 was an extremely profitable year for facebook/meta. The markets massively overreacted from that announcement and Metas Stock mostly recovered its original drop. Its future doesn't look rosy for sure, but ya'll massively overstating the significance of the Meta rebrand.

d) different set of roles are going to be cleaned up? According to rumors meta is flattening and requires many managers to switch to ic roles with mandatory coding/delivering. Could be a chance to clear the house there too. Also perf review results, won’t be surprised if not only individual perf was reviewed but whole teams/orgs.

In general, I think, that Facebook (and rest of faang/ms/etc in similar proportions) now are building plans what/whom they need to cut off if they want to operate with 50k/35k/25k/15k total headcount.

> Mark wants to go all in AI instead of Metaverse

I see no evidence of that. The recent announcements are at best a re-org, or worse a cleanup of three+ reorgs where FAIR and others were subsumed into RL-R.

It is clear that The Meta leadership doesn't really understand what they are doing. The first cut I suggest was designed to send a message to investors that meta is "serious" about something. I assume that this second cut is because not enough people left of their own accord.

However none of this is actually a change in strategy. Where are the product changes? where is the announcement of key priorities for the different Apps? are they going to start putting users first? or just add more shit into each app until something sticks?

The key problem Meta has is that they only have one effective leader: zuck. Everyone else appears to be underwhelming.

Boz: arrogance personified. None of the misteps in the last 4 years are ever his fault. It was market forces that meant that raybans failed, rather than releasing them before they were finished. the quest pro didn't sell, not boz's fault. The market wasnt ready for a capable device with absolutely no software support for the new features. Want to join your friend in a VR game? sure! just perform 15 clicks and wait 7 minutes. No not those clicks, no you need to press the hidden sub menu silly! Oh, no, remember you need to have an OS update first. 10 minute update tax!

Mosseri: Pivoting Instagram to video, because tiktok. just push push push. Oh wait our cash cow users are pissed off, ok, roll back. "there was no way to forsee this problem" despite everyone telling them it was a horrid user experience.

Blue app: Lets just push random shit into your stream, don't worry we'll roll out the user controls next half. Don't like the content? tough my metric is to get more shit in your feed, if you don't like it, its not my job to fix it, thats someone elses.

On Instagram: they'll discontinue ig live shopping, which is at least some good news.

Fb: I've been out of it and the reality is millennials and gen z won't be joining it. They know that.

Their only bet is to lobby congress to ban tiktok.

Instagram has gotten to the point where I just have absolutely no interest to continue using it.

Mostly it feeds me soft porn, and my friends have kind of posted the same things over and over, which has become kind of boring. Food pics, workout pics, whatever.

It's gotten to the point where I'm just actually bored with the platform in general, not necessarily the content.

Facebook, I just have zero interest in going anywhere near it, it's so, so, so boring.

I follow aviation related accounts so I see pictures of planes on my feed. I did have to stop following hashtags because people tend to spam bikini pics there

I don't even bother with it anymore.

At least TikTok is giving me things I search for.

I have +5 years without fb so that's that.

Twitter serves its purpose for (news, articles, etc...).

Instagram will feed you more of whatever you are following or tapping.

I have noticed that if I don't use Instagram for a few days I end up with generic, lowest-common-denominator videos. Scantily clad females, bar fights, car accidents, etc.

But if I start seeking out and watching the stuff I actually like, the feed updates itself within a day or two and I get content that I actually want to watch.

I just can't be bothered seeking out "stuff I like" on Instagram anymore, mostly I've seen it before etc, just feeling like I have better things to do lately.

If I actually want to "watch" something, I open Youtube, seems to me like the content on there is 10x better.

Each to their own.

I feel exactly the same. Maybe it's just a stage in one's life?

I think I’m just bored with the platform, same format, crappy engagement from other uses etc.

It was fun for a while but yeah, not really sure it’s worth my time, or that it ever really was.

>Their only bet is to lobby congress to ban tiktok.

Good point, the only way for 'Meta' shares to go up and for investors to have some confidence in 'Meta' is by Tiktok being banned in US (and other western countries like EU, Canada etc).

Automatically, the advertising money which was to go to Tiktok will go to Instagram (via Reels).

It should also be said, however, that banning TikTok would set a dangerous precedent for Meta's business outside the US.

Isn't Instagram already blocked in China?

on top of plenty of other apps blocked, banned, or forced to restrict results or behavior?

I was thinking more about the EU actually. After banning TikTok, it won't be long before someone says, "hey, Instagram steals people's personal data too."

Meta has to follow all the EU regulations around data privacy. Does TikTok?

I can't make my mind if the GP intended to be sarcastic, but if you read it in a serious tone, you are making a disservice for yourself.

Banning TikTok is such a pointless exercise. So what, it just means that another service will pop up and take its place under a different name. The government can ban it all it wants, but it's not going away. Too simple of an app.

How many times in our lifetime seeing comments like this?

"Too simple of an app"

Okay but that’s what the government hopes will happen… They don’t object to TikTok the concept. They object to the PRC having influence or control either real or potential.

It doesnt need to stop TikTok. It just needs to slow it down long enough for one of the US competitors to eat up their marketshare.

The end goal isnt protecting US citizens. It's weaponizing information to use against perceived threats, both foreign and domestic.

>It just needs to slow it down long enough for one of the US competitors to eat up their marketshare.

If I were Snapchat I would be making moves to jump at this opportunity. I feel they're positioned the best to take that market share out of all of the current competitors, for the simple fact they've kept their core UI & model virtually unchanged.

Considering Meta is banned in China, I don't understand why there's even a question about this.

Because copying China isn't a great way to devise policy. China bans many things that are good and should remain protected in the US.

I don't use Tiktok or have a strong opinion on it specifically, but I really disagree with the notion that we should reflexively ban things because China banned something similar first.

China isn't playing by the rules here so there should be some form of sanction. If it's not banning Tiktok, then it should be something else.

> Because copying China isn't a great way to devise policy

Sure but never copying China because "China bad" is also a bad policy. Sometimes, bullies only understand "tit for tat" language.

> Boz: arrogance personified. None of the misteps in the last 4 years are ever his fault. It was market forces that meant that raybans failed, rather than releasing them before they were finished. the quest pro didn't sell, not boz's fault. The market wasnt ready for a capable device with absolutely no software support for the new features. Want to join your friend in a VR game? sure! just perform 15 clicks and wait 7 minutes. No not those clicks, no you need to press the hidden sub menu silly! Oh, no, remember you need to have an OS update first. 10 minute update tax!

I wonder if companies like Meta will finally start caring deeply about performance of their products, and will switch to software paradigms which preserve performance (see for example latest Casey Muratori talk on slowness of Clean Code, and also his "40 million lines of code" talk). I mean, the forced updates of software, and how long they take, is a major complain of users of many modern entertainment devices (the VR googles, game consoles etc.). They long updates are of course caused by "the stack" being a pile of uber-overcomplicated shit, which was quick and convenient to develop, but now is harming the product.

Abstraction costs performance in many cases. But you sometimes want/need that abstraction. But on the other side of that is drop a comment in there how to abstract it if needed but do not abstract it until you need it.

And 'updating' that is my favorite playstation game! It seems to be what I do every time I turn it on every few months.

I thought this was Hackernews and people fixed tech inconveniences with random scripts! I’m sure someone on here could hack together something to check for updates and run the update or automate that process with a click from your phone.

I agree, but sadly it's getting harder and harder to do that sort of thing. It seems that almost inevitably, along with those fancy framework abstractions come tighter restrictions on how much the user is allowed to do things which are not explicitly supported by the UI. All in the name of "security", of course.

With the PS if I leave it alone and powered on it will take care of itself. But I turn it off so it does not use as much power. I have enough other items in my house turned on to heat it up :)

> uber-overcomplicated shit, which was quick and convenient to develop, but now is harming the product.

Its not even as contrived as that. In meta, you don't get points for incremental improvements that make life easier for users. You get points for making a new widget that improves a single metric. That metric will most likely be something sub-team related, with little to no impact on the over all team or even product.

HR reasons are more common than you'd think. There's only so much HR and legal power to go around and it sometimes is easier to plan layoffs in multiple stages, rather than go for one big one.

Never attribute to [whatever] that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hoping one round, RTO, etc. would lead to more folks naturally leaving and not needing to do a second round (to save on severance and PR).

Could it be that since Twitter hasn't collapsed yet people are trying to pull a Musk headcount-wise (albeit in a better executed manner) ?

> Could it be that since Twitter hasn't collapsed yet

As in it isn't done collapsing yet?

Rome was collapsing for centuries, give it a few years.

Hope not. They’ve had several outages and high profile bugs. Also on the verge of bankruptcy.

Their revenue leaked badly and can't be patch.

D) with an organisation this size, it’s impossible to do the cuts once and for all the people you need to cut, because the communication and reporting lines will get completely disrupted. If they know they need to cut 20%, they can’t do that at once as the business would collapse. Doing 5% every quarter means there’s time to absorb the changes.

Back in 2009-2010, when Facebook was going gangbusters, I used to joke that "Facebook is the new AOL."

Now Facebook is the old AOL.

I think it’s hilarious that they went and changed their name to their worst idea.

The term “metaverse” comes from Snow Crash, which is a dystopia. They would know this if they actually read.

I like it when companies just come out and wear "evil" on their sleeve. Like Palantir. Better than when they try to hide it, anyway.

Snow Crash is a a dystopia because of hyper capitalism not because of the metaverse. It's like worrying about space travel because 2001 had a runaway AI.

The metaverse did empower malicious advertisements to selectively target people (and put them in a coma) in Snow Crash iirc, so maybe it's really just a pivot deeper into that side of adtech.

True, but the reason there was so much demand to live in the metaverse is that the real world was so odious.

Mark loved Snow Crash. He does actually read. That's the really sad part.

The physical world of snow crash was a dystopian hellhole. The metaverse of snow crash was still step up from that physical world, at least for the protagonist. They were a corporate pizza boy slave in the real world, but in the metaverse they were cool and had power and agency.

There's some unwritten rule that management can't layoff more than ~10% of the people at a single time.

Honestly, it's such an strange mix of the Chersteton's fence and scream testing that I can't begin to understand the rationale.

Curious to see if the 2nd phase applies more to countries they operate in that don't have "at will employment" style legislation, it might go some way to explaining the two phases. That would fit into your point b).

IIRC, the first set of layoffs largely affected the US a lot more than Europe - its a much more involved legal process generally to perform layoffs in cities like London vs their US offices and often can't be done as quickly.

The first round is low hanging fruit and the second round is done after restructuring where more targeted cuts need to be made.