It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
Isn't a lot of retail apple stuff essentially outsourced? Apple sells a lot of stuff in Poland, but there are zero Apple jobs here. It's all "authorized reseller" and "authorized service".
Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people.
Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.
Facebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.
It's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.
If you look from the outside yes, however there is low we don't know about FB and hidden works not producing a product etc just yet.They are very long term focused and very different from Tim Apple's idea of a company as an operational engine.
Many businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business.
Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
WhatsApp and Instagram, both acquired by Facebook, were actually a gold standard in lean development. 1o to 30 people for a massively popular product.
If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.
So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
amazon manager here: it's the same with us. our director gave told us to manage out more people this year to hit our revised headcount targets for next year. there are no layoffs, just larger-than-normal targets for managing out people. I talked with friends across various orgs and the targets seem to range between 10% to 25% for different teams (as opposed to 5% for normal years).
“Manage out” sounds suspiciously like “constructive dismissal” to me. Not only unethical but illegal to varying degrees across many jurisdictions. Could get pricey!
There's a massive difference between constructive dismissal and managing out. Managing out can often be as simple as a manager saying "Hey, your performance isn't great your not on course to get any bonus or raise this year" and the employee deciding "Fuck this, I'm off". Instead of in normal times, where you're trying to retain people and the conversation is often "Hey, you're making really good progress but there's just a few areas we need to work on which is why your compensation isn't quite where you would like it".
There's a thousand reasons people stay or leave companies and just slightly adjusting how much you're working to keep people can often be the difference in the attrition rate.
I work at AWS on EC2. It's really not bad. Very competent coworkers, technical leadership, plenty of principal engineers willing to help... Oncall's tough, and we definitely need more engineers but otherwise, you learn a lot
This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Doesn't always mean the same thing, "managing out" could mean firing, but it could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. To manage them out of the company "by their own choice", which is unfortunately just as bad if not worse.
I've long felt it was a pity that (in most places) employees and employers could not just have honest discussions about career path, suitability, and deliberate planned exits which are a smooth transition for everyone involved.
Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they need out of a job and folks are forced to just look for something better and then announce they're leaving with a 2 week notice.
Ironically, companies spare no expense when it comes to turgid, grinding performance eval exercises but ALWAYS kick honest discussions to the side.
At least facebook, it seems (?), is just cutting a bunch of folks rapidly rather than doing stuff like "managing out". That's better than the typical corporate 2-face behaviors.
Amazon is a big company. Need to preface that with what department.
E.g. Alexa might be getting headcount trimmed. But other areas might see influx of investment. some Amazon teams had reduced PIP over the last year as well.
In most large companies hiring and firing people are totally different, and rarely ever talk to each other. This is why in most companies if the top management wants to make a big layoff, they first let go the 'recruiting staff', and then work from there.
In smaller layoffs, I'd imagine they'd continue to fill in open positions, while eliminating positions they think they don't need.
There's also another thing where they want to fill in people where they think need for their newer/hot/important project which they think will give them better profits. And cut people/shut down projects which they think are not important/profitable.
I’m not an expert at how facebook diversifies its income, but their R&D has produced a lot of insanely good outcome in engineering area. Meta ML, React, React Native, etc, howbare they not building income over these tools? Vercel or laravel seems to be making huge amount of money by building dev tools around their frameworks.
Regardless of what they have done, I hope everyone affected is okay
Yeah that make sense, but still a developer tooling aspect is huge and they can surely branch to cloud and other stuff as well across the stuff that they had found?
The more precise title from the referenced article from two days ago:
> Facebook is conducting 'quiet layoffs' by urging managers to label a certain number of workers as underperforming. The moves may lead to thousands of job cuts.
It's actually a very tricky question. If the bonuses, perks, etc. for everyone are lowered, such that those at the low end cross the threshold of wanting to leave, then it's probably legal. If people at that low end are singled out for poor treatment, then it might be "constructive dismissal" and thus illegal in most jurisdictions. Facebook is probably treading as close to that line as they can, or (even more likely) stepping just a bit over and relying on lawyers to keep it from becoming too expensive. This is the barrier that class-action suits are meant to overcome, BTW.
A contact of mine who works for Meta says that this has been coming for a long time and no-one is surprised. They're also rescinding internship offers (now THAT'S shitty) and freezing hiring.
Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time.
People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.
It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
They literally went on a hiring binge from 2020-2021, so... in my opinion, yes. Sure there's bleak outlook, but you have no idea how many people I know from different companies who jumped ship from some 2nd-3rd tier co to work for the big five or Zoom-like start up during COVID.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
On that issue I've never seen a LinkedIn message from a Tiktok recruiter, or heard messages about mass hiring. Anyone know if they operating on a much lower staff count?
Not to disagree at all with the broader point you're making but their last quarterly release says their headcount is like 83k. That roughly agrees with the original article which says 15% is 12k.
This exactly. Rather than falling for the headlines which many have done, the pandemic has shifted roles from the office to remote at $100K+ salaries and cheap money allowing this to be possible; but very unsustainably.
Now you have thousands of VC inflated startups and tech companies (including FAANMG) starting to do layoffs due to the market going the other direction. The majority of FAANMG companies including Meta will still be around regardless of the headlines where as the tens of thousands unprofitable VC-funded startups will realize that they need to be profitable 'now' to be able to survive for another decade or get another round of funding.
The tech 'hiring binge' of 2020 was going to go the other way soon enough. Even unsuprisingly.
In effect this is the end of covid season layoff. Peloton wasn't the only company who made investment mistakes during covid, just very visible. Many big companies greatly over hired during the same period. Now they need to correct course.
I’d be hesitant to call this an investment mistake. It was a gamble that covid would permanently change tech consumption habits and that would create new opportunities for big tech. So they hired people for those new unforeseen opportunities. maybe some of them didn’t pan out. Maybe others did but no longer need as many employees. Either way, hiring a bunch of people just to lay them off was clearly at least an option if not the main plan.
Laying off 15% of your staff is huge. If it's driven by a hire-and-fire approach, then that's even worse, because that shows Meta can't manage their way out of a paper bag.
Seeing giants fall like this, where they achieve the highest peaks imaginable, but then struggle to find the next thing that is suitably big enough to satisfy expectations makes me never want to reach mega success status if I ever start a startup.
It's a lottery ticket. You can be good, even very good, your whole life and do just fine.
But these kinds of once-in-a-generation moonshots, they're a product of wild ass luck, so if you find yourself with one, you grab it with both hands and ride it as far as it goes. Because it's not about you-- you need to be strong enough to hold on, keep the thing from exploding or crashing into the side of a mountain, but it's bigger than you and your level of control is partial at best. Honestly, it's usually the product of something big happening in the world that you've randomly managed to tap into.
It’s like music. Most bands are capable of a great album, but the truly incredible artists can move from genre to genre constantly reinventing themselves.
To create an org that can do the latter (hello, Apple) seems incredible difficult, but it always seems to involve exceptionally creative leaders.
So the secret I think is to sell you mega status Facebook Borg and start afresh in a different area without the baggage of the previous app.
Do you want to build America's next top advertising company? Because that is what FB and Google did. Nothing else they have tried in ~20 years has come close to making any money.
The fall is relative. Zuckerburg himself is still filthy rich. Only some of his employees suffer. So it is still worth to have a startup and make it mega, if you can pull it off.
I think it's not the bottom of the fall, but I do think it's a pretty clear fall.
Facebook is the new MySpace, and Instagram is not attracting the newer generations. The metaverse is a wild moonshot to invent a completely new market and platform that Meta alone would control and of sufficient size to replace the inevitable decline of Facebook/Instagram ad revenue.
Personally, I don't believe people want the metaverse, and if it succeeds, it'll come at the cost of coercion via marketing overload.
Readit News
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
- a film & tv production business
- a massive physical retail store footprint
- a global e-commerce store
- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else
I agree that it's really bizarre how wasteful FB's operations seem to be compared to Apple's.
What an unimaginative company...
And the app doesn't look like it changed that much since it started being supported by 10,000 employees (guessing).
You didn't intend it, but that is a complement of the highest order. Thanks!
Those who've worked on large systems over many years will understand what I mean.
No matter how much people hate their price gouging :-)
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Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.
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Siri,
iCloud,
ApplePay, Apple Card, Apple Pay Later, Apple Cash.
AppleNews.
Apple Fitness
Apple Arcade.
Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
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If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.
So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
There's a thousand reasons people stay or leave companies and just slightly adjusting how much you're working to keep people can often be the difference in the attrition rate.
Amazon's hire-to-fire strategy is now widely known
This is about the worst kind of doublespeak I have ever heard. It is actively malicious, the very thought of it brings images of purposeful abuse of employees. Seriously, just fire people.
Instead it's just thick layers of bullshit during performance review time or people getting blindsided by a layoff or a fake PIP. From the employee side, one can't simply express what they need out of a job and folks are forced to just look for something better and then announce they're leaving with a 2 week notice.
Ironically, companies spare no expense when it comes to turgid, grinding performance eval exercises but ALWAYS kick honest discussions to the side.
At least facebook, it seems (?), is just cutting a bunch of folks rapidly rather than doing stuff like "managing out". That's better than the typical corporate 2-face behaviors.
Makes me wonder how they avoid being sued ?
E.g. Alexa might be getting headcount trimmed. But other areas might see influx of investment. some Amazon teams had reduced PIP over the last year as well.
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/tech-roles
In most large companies hiring and firing people are totally different, and rarely ever talk to each other. This is why in most companies if the top management wants to make a big layoff, they first let go the 'recruiting staff', and then work from there.
In smaller layoffs, I'd imagine they'd continue to fill in open positions, while eliminating positions they think they don't need.
There's also another thing where they want to fill in people where they think need for their newer/hot/important project which they think will give them better profits. And cut people/shut down projects which they think are not important/profitable.
Very dystopian.
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Regardless of what they have done, I hope everyone affected is okay
It’s very hard for a company of this size to find something to move the needle enough to make a difference.
Look at Google. YouTube is worth $120 billion with a B and it is dwarfed by their ads business.
It's virtually all ads revenue, something like 97% of their revenues is from advertising
> Facebook is conducting 'quiet layoffs' by urging managers to label a certain number of workers as underperforming. The moves may lead to thousands of job cuts.
Like redundancies are treated differently from firing due to failing job duties normally.
It's actually a very tricky question. If the bonuses, perks, etc. for everyone are lowered, such that those at the low end cross the threshold of wanting to leave, then it's probably legal. If people at that low end are singled out for poor treatment, then it might be "constructive dismissal" and thus illegal in most jurisdictions. Facebook is probably treading as close to that line as they can, or (even more likely) stepping just a bit over and relying on lawyers to keep it from becoming too expensive. This is the barrier that class-action suits are meant to overcome, BTW.
Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time.
Good luck with your interview!
[0] Facebook had a recruiting crisis in 2021: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...
[1] Facebook aimed to hire 10K Europeans for metaverse in 2021: https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000...
People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.
It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
Now you have thousands of VC inflated startups and tech companies (including FAANMG) starting to do layoffs due to the market going the other direction. The majority of FAANMG companies including Meta will still be around regardless of the headlines where as the tens of thousands unprofitable VC-funded startups will realize that they need to be profitable 'now' to be able to survive for another decade or get another round of funding.
The tech 'hiring binge' of 2020 was going to go the other way soon enough. Even unsuprisingly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms
But these kinds of once-in-a-generation moonshots, they're a product of wild ass luck, so if you find yourself with one, you grab it with both hands and ride it as far as it goes. Because it's not about you-- you need to be strong enough to hold on, keep the thing from exploding or crashing into the side of a mountain, but it's bigger than you and your level of control is partial at best. Honestly, it's usually the product of something big happening in the world that you've randomly managed to tap into.
To create an org that can do the latter (hello, Apple) seems incredible difficult, but it always seems to involve exceptionally creative leaders.
So the secret I think is to sell you mega status Facebook Borg and start afresh in a different area without the baggage of the previous app.
Sounds a little bit like Nokia, more than Apple. Paper mill, cable products, rubber boots, tires, TV, mobile phones... ;)
Do you want to build America's next top advertising company? Because that is what FB and Google did. Nothing else they have tried in ~20 years has come close to making any money.
- Robert Greene.
Facebook is the new MySpace, and Instagram is not attracting the newer generations. The metaverse is a wild moonshot to invent a completely new market and platform that Meta alone would control and of sufficient size to replace the inevitable decline of Facebook/Instagram ad revenue.
Personally, I don't believe people want the metaverse, and if it succeeds, it'll come at the cost of coercion via marketing overload.