[121789]

this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all

[Forgeties79]

Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.

They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)

[121789]

I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line

but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already

[mswphd]

have any of their risky bets paid off though? most of their main products have been acquisitions.

[121789]

who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me

[Forgeties79]

I think we should care about poor stewardship at the top of a major company.

[Forgeties79]

You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.

The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.

I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.

[lanthissa]

meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.

they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.

There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.