[asien]

> I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products.

You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.

To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.

Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.

[jiggawatts]

There was a post here recently where a Netflix employee was proudly showing off their log processing system. Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.

[mistrial9]

> Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

to clarify could you say the same thing, in a different way?

[exdsq]

Warning: NPM packages are out of date x 1000000

[asien]

> 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

2MB/minute is 33KB/second.

How is that impressive?

[lbriner]

There is a lot of tokenism in hiring. A Fortune 500 might be marketing a new "push to AI" or whatever and want to seem legit by hiring loads of people, quickly realising that it doesn't work like that but at least it looks good on paper.

FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.

[matwood]

Just a note, that ABNB did a huge layoff at the start of the pandemic which allowed them to come out the other side a much stronger company. Actually highlights your point.

[meowtimemania]

Was it the layoff that made them a stronger company or was it the market improving?

[Apocryphon]

Seems the problem is that these massive companies hit a threshold in size and then everything is about self-perpetuation by creating large moats, even ones that don't make sense, hence you have teams and entire departments engaged in boondoggles that are wastes of time and resources.

Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.

I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.

[captaincaveman]

Yeah but which thousand ...