I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.
The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.
I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects that has came out of Meta is unparalleled for number of employees. MetaAI had been well protected and is one of the strongest engine for progress in AI. I always viewed it as a company run by a hacker for hackers.
I worked at Ticketmaster when covid first hit. Since the beginning, management has always been positive and re-iterating that the cash reserves are substantial and the company can endure the loss of revenue. Then the first layoff hit. Same re-iteration. We are good. Then came the second layoff.
Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.
Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.
But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:
1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);
2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.
This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.
But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.
But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
My Facebook interview process was not only more professional, objective, and relevant than any other, it was also actually enjoyable, as I said elsewhere.
> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?
So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO.
Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?
Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.
Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well.
Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need.
edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers
> Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.
I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.
Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.
FB is making $30+bn a year profit, and is laying off people to reduce costs by $2b. They could continue to pay these people.
Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.
Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!
Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.
I'm old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
I survived two rounds of layoffs in 2008/2009 and they went as you describe. The first round had significantly better benefits. Which, ironically, ended up going to the worst performers.
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB/Instagram.
I mean, the "world-changing" stuff they're investing in is what directly led to this layoff. The metaverse was the most heavily impacted by these layoffs.
Do you think that great, world-changing, folks go to Facebook to sit on a big salary? if they were going to do something awesome they probably wouldn't have been working there.
now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different
The one thing I want is the ability to work on my own startup in my spare time, without fearing legal repercussions. It wouldn't require me to risk my house on an idea.
FB still making 4Billion in profit, all the comments here dont seem to talk about that Twitter wasnt profitable, FB is and laid off 4x the amount of employees, Zuck just saw Musk do it and thought itd be a perfect time while the attention is on Musk and Twitter, that letter Zuck wrote is sick and sounds like its written by a sad emotionless robot he brags about how profitable Meta is in that letter its pathetic, reminds me of the 70s and Reagan and neoliberalism making changes to laws to allow capital flight from New York to the south and firing all the well paid factory workers in the Bronx 10,000 families now without a breadwinner over night Zuck blew through billions on his VR research that no ones buying and just saw the perfect opening to sharpen his technocrat knives and surgically remove 11,000 employees even though they all contributed to making Meta be 4B in profit and it was Zuck who blew billions he needs his stock to bounce back so he can continue buying the rest of Hawaii
> At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.
I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave…
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
Facebook has become the local town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere.
Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?
16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance and everything else, looks like a decent severance package at least. This seems better handled than Twitter's layoffs.
I wonder why the two biggest recent layoffs were by the two largest (US-based) social networks, is this the end of an era? And where is all that advertisement money going now?
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
Meta is burning $10B/yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E stack development will cost about half. Developing entire smartphone hardware and OS from scratch would cost about a third of that money. Moon worthy space rocket development will cost a tenth of this budget. One can do so much with $10B that it is absolutely mind blowing.
[+] [-] alasdair_|3 years ago|reply
The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.
If it were just about the money, I doubt he'd have done this.
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donretag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] princevegeta89|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
Sadly, today's layoffs were probably related to it not being just about the money then... no matter how good your intentions are, when the money runs out, it's gone.
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
> There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.
Yet now he is firing people based on those same performance reviews. Plenty of people I know at Facebook feel betrayed because of exactly this.
[+] [-] racl101|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatnoah|3 years ago|reply
Same here. I've been doing this since before the year 2000, and can't imagine any other company I've worked for treating employees this well. In this current cycle, I was laid off from my job and my severance was zero days. The only thing I got was the mandatory WARN act time and verting of option that were worth about 2 weeks of my base pay.
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
Zuck's response to Covid definitely had upsides, particularly (as you mention) the continued payment of contractors even though offices were closed. There were downsides too. The "Don't worry about perf" also meant you couldn't get promoted that half and there was no recognition for better performance, which sort of sucked for people whose projects had come to fruition (where they reap the rewards of impact). Hypothetically you could get recognized in H2 2020 but in reality it didn't really work like that most of the time.
But look, the big problem with Facebook is twofold:
1. Apple's "do not track" feature really cut the ad business off at its knees. You can support that on privacy grounds but that shouldn't obscure the issue that a platform being able to do that while maintaining that benefit themselves is actually a huge problem (and it makes a big case for Apple acting anticompetitively);
2. (This is the big one) Zuck has no vision for the company. That's the core problem. Assuming pandemic growth would continue (as he claims) isn't the problem.
This first took form in response to the spread of misinformation in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Facebook decided to try and determine objective truth in posts. That's never going to work and never going to make anyone happy. Controversial topics get amplified. But labelling misinformation treats this as a content problem when it's a user behaviour problem. It's your weird uncle posting articles about chips in vaccines. The content doesn't matter. The behaviour does.
But here's the big one: Facebook has long viewed products on two axes: audience and medium. Twitter, for example, goes to a large audience. WhatsApp, small audiences. Medium is essentiaally this progression: text -> image -> video -> VR -> AR. It explains the purchase of Oculus and fits with the metaverse.
But there's literally no business case for the metaverse. Nobody wants it. Phones are convenient. Wearing headsets isn't. If we can ever build AR glasses (and that's far from a certainty) then maybe that might work but there are significant technical problems (eg matching focus, true blacks).
So 11,000 people got let go today because of bad decisions made at the very top that they had nothing to do with and no control over. Sure Zuck has lots a bunch of paper value but whether you have $100 billion or $30 billion, you're fine.
[+] [-] adam_arthur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antipaul|3 years ago|reply
I wish there was a biotech with FB’s culture.
[+] [-] musicale|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j0ba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomerbd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jiscariot|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dbg31415|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|3 years ago|reply
As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.
Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?
[+] [-] nokeya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicolashahn|3 years ago|reply
Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.
Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well.
Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need.
edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers
[+] [-] hbn|3 years ago|reply
I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.
Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.
[+] [-] sabellito|3 years ago|reply
Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.
[+] [-] martius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dolmen|3 years ago|reply
But in fact stores reopened and people went back to massively buy at stores instead of offline. Parenthesis is closed.
[+] [-] roflyear|3 years ago|reply
Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.
Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!
Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.
[+] [-] fullshark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschneider|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IronWolve|3 years ago|reply
Almost every 10+ years a mega company buys the company I'm working for and lays off everyone. The first time I stayed on and didnt take the layoff with my group, was going to merge into the new company. Then after a year, was let go and didnt get the big layoff package, then my manager left.
Totally screwed out of a major layoff package as it was a year later, way past the laws for mass layoffs, was a mistake to stay on, they kept me long enough they only had to let me go under new terms, then promptly closed the group (me and my manager). I was the most senior and long term employee, they saved a bucket load to screw me over.
[+] [-] anthomtb|3 years ago|reply
That said, the company where I experienced the layoffs was losing money and the first layoff was 2-3% of the workforce. Meta is still quite profitable and they are axing well over 10% of their employees. I would think another big round of layoffs is unlikely unless Meta has a bunch of debt coming due or the macro conditions REALLY go in the crapper (and there sure are a lot of doomsayers out there).
[+] [-] ericd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kadomony|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|3 years ago|reply
now, if google lay off a lot of people... that would be different
[+] [-] optymizer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madengr|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DarkGroku|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|3 years ago|reply
This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...
The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?
[+] [-] sidcool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CarbonCycles|3 years ago|reply
I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.
[+] [-] buggythebug|3 years ago|reply
87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous.
These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same.
Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to "do good" after.
[+] [-] keewee7|3 years ago|reply
Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook's strength is being the "Localverse"?
[+] [-] yashg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maccard|3 years ago|reply
_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.
[+] [-] pera|3 years ago|reply
As a side note, it's crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.
[+] [-] andreiursan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meta_gone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lljk_kennedy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwater|3 years ago|reply
> and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected
Apple decisions + EU regulations?
[+] [-] sytelus|3 years ago|reply