That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather.
That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects.
That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three.
And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them?
No! No one does this!
> Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta?
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.
The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition.
https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.
And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers.
And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls.
I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants.
We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls.
Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable.
I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done.
I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job.
It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense.
I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems, which is a bit of a dick move when people are getting laid off.
I'm not dunking on anyone, I'm explaining my day-to-day job with a very small number of senior engineers.
We run a highly complex system. There's no way we could handle millions of calls with five-nines otherwise.
I won't get further into the details because I don't want to reveal too much PII.
I fully understand how much "behind the scenes" work goes on at a place like Facebook. I'm not sitting here imagining rooms of graphic designers thinking what the CSS button radius should be (although I'm sure with 85,000 employees, those happen also).
But note that Musk walked into Twitter, fired en-masse, and it still seems the same to me.
Yes, there are senior engineers who keep the core functionality working.
That is still far less than 85,000 employees.
In our case, it's 3 of us handling all software development. And we write a lot of mission critical code.
That last one is I suspect what makes it so small scale operators can achieve “5 9s” with a fraction of the engineering of larger operators. You can get a lot of 9s most years because you dodge infrequent risks.
We have that in place. We run phone systems that businesses depend on, and we have SLAs that guarantee this uptime in order to secure customers. We have network engineers dedicated to everything from guaranteeing it on the cloud side to checking Wireshark traces for any hint of abnormalities, every day. When I say 3 people, I mean those of us writing the front-end, back-end, database procs, and code that the open-source libraries require, including forking and custom patches. We have other team members ensuring our HA pairs, load balancing, redundancy, fail-overs, and all the other associated technology is working as expected.
I won't get into the details, but we have not violated our SLAs, ever.
And you'd be surprised at what open-source software we are using to drive parts of this system. Kudos to them, they are helping us maintain this with some rock-solid software.
It can't. It depends on "software services" hosted and coded by "other software companies" so his infra's SLA is basically outsourced to either Amazon, Microsoft or Oracle.
It also depends on an incredible amount of in-house custom code.
If I deploy a change that breaks our Angular front-end, or a C# API change that has a typo that routes calls to the wrong places, or a configuration file for our open-source software that handles the phone systems, how exactly do we tell our thousands of customers they can't run their call centers? Or our restaurant customers can't take orders because their phone systems are dead?
Let's not be ridiculous. I'm not humble-bragging. I'm telling you what I do at my job.
> We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into it
In 20 years zero issues? I don’t believe you.
I'm not sure what you mean. A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company. Take Amazon for instance, the oncall is brutal and getting several pagers per day is normal. Other companies may be better, but not one pager per few months better.
> A page every few months will be considered world-class achievement in a FAANG-like company.
Except maybe it's a different beast entirely. At amazon, they're constantly pushing new features at most teams. A stable phone company may just be handling pages for when hardware fails. Presumably there's bugs in fast-moving new code more frequently than hardware failure of a tiny org.
Also, fwiw I've been at amazon and had on-call rotations where we didn't get paged monthly. Your manager/team isn't allowing you to allocate resources to fixing your alarms or bugs if you're getting paged that often and not a crazy critical service.
That's why we have so much churn in frameworks, etc.
If you're not "innovating" somewhere, you're not good enough to work there.
Traditional companies are more long term and stable with their tooling and decision making.
People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?
Rumor.
I hate all those real time chat apps anyways.
Are you saying there aren't engineers working outside of MPK/FRE (which is wrong) or that they're lazy (which is also wrong)?
I would love to hear details on a handful of instances of how this manifests. Toxic positivity, I don't know if I am to read that as like burying ones head in the sand, ears plugged singing la la la, ignorance is bliss or what not. What exact behavior would aggregate into a phrase like that? Very fascinating characterization of something interesting I'm sure.
Life is so short, so why not be legit?
I’m not sure it’s a bad thing, though. I’ve never seen an engineering-first enterprise software group. The business is just so sales-and-relationship driven.
Look at Amazon: you can plot the enshittification of their retail business with the rise of AWS. That’s not coincidence, it’s culture.
0. Lack of an enterprise sales org (think how VMware started or EDS or Perot Systems). I know an ex-Oracle sales guy who's itching to be an enterprise sales manager at Meta.
1. Lack of thoroughness in solving bugs and polish. Workplace video conferencing is damn good. Workplace the web and mobile apps have inconsistent and troublesome comment formatting bugs. I've sent task after task but they never get fixed. Basic things that should work don't.
2. Impact creates a cult that rewards new features while punishing better engineering and fixing things.
(My neighbor works for AWS high up. They treat most of their employees with borderline abuse.)
The only thing that goes in from personal -> work is music or random home office photos.
The only things that go out from work -> personal are public résumé-level performance reviews, tax, and benefits information.
Exceptions on work devices include Github and streaming services, but otherwise not much else should be co-mingled. Everything else stays in its own domain.
(I don't use personal social media accounts so I'm the wrong target audience. Personal FB and Insta accounts are linked to work, and Github if you have one.)
FTEs generally require an FB account to start the tech device provisioning process.
Are there any specifics to DM me worth running up the flag pole?
Most serious advertisers and agencies use expensive third party tools that manage your ads using the advertising APIs.
I don’t think it’s worth “running up the flagpole”.
But even the b2b parts of Facebook are run like a b2ç business, because that's the culture.
It was the perfect Slack replacement for companies with over ~1000 employees, and I wish my current company was using it.
I think it’s somewhat telling that you didn’t list “engineer” here.
Meta isn’t a quirky startup, and hasn’t been for a decade: it’s one of the largest corporations (by market value) on the planet. By all rights, there ought to be a lot of people performing boring, turn-the-crank work that doesn’t immediately surface to you.
Sometimes I need a wizard with multi-domain knowledge to whip up a POC system, but most of the time I need someone to ensure all of the pieces work, have specs that meet reqs, and won't cause an outage when we deploy them.
I've always found the term "hacker" pretty eye-rolly.
My cat can legally be a software engineer - no degrees required.
* Supposedly not hiring freeze for senior ICs.
I don't think Meta is well-configured to make consumer-facing products that "surprise and delight", and Workplace's slightly janky interface is a clear symptom.
There's jank that can be fixed.
The problem with Slack is it creates an instant, continuous distraction noise barrage worse than email groups. We at least have a cultural norm of not DMing individuals (unless it's a SEV) and seeking info in group posts or maybe group chat.
I never feel like using Slack is stopping me from writing code, but when I'm waiting for a build or what-have-you I can look at channel updates asynchronously.
On the other hand, Slack is a simple communication tool where I can asynchronously coordinate with whatever team I need to get in touch with, it's exactly what I had asked for years at companies I worked for in decades prior to Slack: a well made IRC-like interface. It just works, with all its flaws and performance issues, it's still valuable. Workplace on the other hand is not valuable at all, it could disappear from the company stack of tools and I would never bat an eye. And I work for a global company, much smaller in size than Meta but definitely one that you either heard about or use our products.
Perhaps it’s just because I got used to it, but I do miss Workplace a lot - mostly for allowing me to easily stay on top of what’s interesting to me.
* Workplace made it really easy to be on top of what’s happening in the company, and in what it thinks you’ll be interested in. The algorithmic feed was super helpful.
* I was able to follow along with what’s happening overall in the company and all the interesting to me info just with a few minutes at beginning of each day scrolling my Workplace feed. Now, with Slack / gdocs / emails, I would need to read all updates in hundreds of different Slack channels and figure out myself what’s relevant.
* Google Docs - super hard to find anything, or even know if it exists since everyone applies restrictive sharing options. With Workplace, I would write a post in the relevant group - easily searchable by everyone (and discoverable by being ranked on Workplace).
Slack is good at synchronous communication, it’s a substitute for Workplace Chat.
Where I’m at now there is nothing similar to Workplace, which is great at asynchronous communication. On Slack content scrolls up the page and loses its engagement quickly. Also if someone does make a post that gets super high engagement in a channel I don’t regularly check, nothing will surface that post to me.
That's why I wrote localslackirc. To make having to be on slack bearable.
(My biggest gripe with Slack is how painful it makes replying to specific comments in the original channel. Neither Workplace chat nor Discord have this problem.)
> “This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Goler wrote.
> The company is expected to lay off what will likely be thousands of highly skilled employees — such as engineers and other technical staffers — who help build the company’s products, according to people familiar with the matter.
I wouldn't be so certain
Sometimes the people doing that kind of reasoning are hit next.
I’m not saying there’s no waste, but this is classic rationalizing.
Actually, you do!
It seems like an immensely profitable project that would take a relatively small amount of resources.
iPad users likely have a GDP bigger than France, I don't know a single millionaire who doesn't have one... yet their ability to click ads is very restricted by the mini/stretched screen.
How does the culture allow so many non-core projects to get priority over this?
To me, the problem with Meta is the constant focus on impact. There's little incentive to write robust software. Many tools are half-finished, fragile, poorly documented.
I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Mostly, it seems like most workers in the building chit-chat and have meetings rather than do anything resembling actual work that's building product going in front of users. Country-club, cult-of-toxic-positivity lots of relaxing going on, in my view.
In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Also, the spend on R&D needs to be more focused on productization. Finally, I'm still wondering why there's no consultantish enterprise sales arm monetizing and discovering opportunities for lucrative SaaS products like Workplace.