I would say an 80% margin is objectively good, and that moving it really doesn't make much difference even if you can make the number feel bigger.

Again, their system is designed to be ruthlessly efficient. They probably over-hired like 10-15%. I'd strongly suggest listening to the Odd Lots episode with Patrick McKenzie titled roughly 'what happens to tech workers in the age of layoffs.'

I get it's fun to speculate from the outside but there's no reason to look at it and go 'yep should be 5X higher' simply because they have a lot of staff. They have a lot of staff because they have billions of monthly active users and optimizing every aspect of their business is something they can do, and something that yields more profit than cost.

A lot of this armchair quarterbacking comes from folks who never worked there. Find someone who works at Meta and ask them about PSC.

I work at Meta :) The growth I watched in headcount over the last 4 years has been pretty amazing. Before Meta I worked at Reddit. More people were in my bootcamp class at Meta than the entirety of Reddit at the time. And they did bootcamps like that every week for years.

I don’t totally disagree with you. People at Meta work hard and they optimize everything and psc for better or worse definitely encourages performance. But I don’t know where numbers like “overhired by 10-15%” come from. I don’t think things were falling through the cracks and not being optimized before the company doubled in size.

I worked at Meta for five years, and fighting for work was never, ever my experience. When I started there was far too much to do and you were basically forced to ruthlessly prioritize in order to be successful.

Towards the end this started to change for me, but it happened a bunch earlier in engineering/product. Fundamentally, the standard way to grow headcount was revenue per head, and while that works for sales and ops it's a terrible, terrible idea for engineering because you end up fighting for work.

In fact, I'm part of an ex Facebook group, and all of the old timers are incredibly shocked that this was allowed to happen, and a bunch of newer people are confirming it did.

Just like companies can grow forever and stocks only go up. This is what MBA's are taught to do and makes work toxic by chasing numbers and metrics.