It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” The people I know who joined FAANG in the last five years are some of the hardest working people you’ll meet. There are some who get lucky and manage to coast but overall - the quality and tenacity of the IC folks is generally quite high.
I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.
> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.”
I’ve participated in some mentorship programs for college grads. There are a lot of students who think that the FAANG career path is basically “Study LeetCode for a few months, get FAANG job, then rest and vest”.
Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense.
I suspect a lot of it stems from sour grapes: People inherently get jealous of high earners in prestigious jobs, and tend to reach for excuses to bring them down a notch.
"Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years, which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board....Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice..." - https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-stack-exchange-podcast/epi...
I find 1.1 years as average incredibly low. Is this really the case?
> Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense.
My impression is that most people who start at a FAANG company are pretty hard-working but over time become less so, as they realize that it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work and as they get too comfortable with the various benefits that working at a large company provides. Personally that's what I find kind of depressing, seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff.
I can't speak for all FAANG but it hasn't been my experience.
> pretty hard-working but over time become less so
If people start to cruise, they may get pressured by hard-working peers and management. Of course, those who are very good may get away with it as FAANG reward impact and not work, but there are many strong engineers there, so it's very hard to stand out. And those who do are incentized to climb the ladder rather than cruise.
> it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work
It's the opposite. Those who manage to have good evaluations are rewarded.
> seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff
There are tons of cool and useful projects in these big companies. Basically any field of CS you may be interested in is there.
My experience is that people work hard when they get the job. After one year, they realize it's hard to sustain that pace and that they barely meet the expectation with all the hard work. Some leave, some get managed out, and those who stay many years are productive individuals.
Making cool and useful stuff is not easy and requires the right ecosystem. For example, take all the immigrants working at FAANG. They could have been working in their countries and building something cool/useful/or something more meaningful to people in their origin countries. But that's not possible, that's one of the main reasons they come to US. Within US, it is similar problem but at a smaller scale.
> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.”
People who think this look at a product made by 83,000 people and to them, it looks pretty similar to a product made by 83 people.
Some of those workers are working on a large-scale product that scales imperfectly. Sysadmins to rack new servers, human moderators to respond to users' reports, whatever. 1 per 20,000 users and a few billion users is a lot of workers. On the other hand, none of these companies are famous for their high-touch, responsive customer support.
Some of those workers are working very intensely on things that are completely invisible to end users. Applying security patches to backend servers. Training their workers to recognise the signs of modern slavery. Building their own in-house Linux distribution. Products that get cancelled before launch. Getting that newly acquired company onto your corporate platform.
And some of those workers are working on things that are marginally invisible to end users. Ad sales, feed ranking algorithms, spam detection.
Some of those workers are working on new, customer-facing but peripheral things, that have escaped notice because they're at a small scale, or unpopular. Shorts on youtube, for example.
To a critic, these manual scaling support, invisible and almost-invisible efforts don't count - and if you only count customer-facing features, that seems like a lot of developers and not much development.
The big disconnect is that the overwhelming majority of value is never presented to users. It would be trivial to make a viable alternative to the Facebook that users experience; just too difficult to get enough users to move to whatever new platform you make, and you won't be making money to support it.
When you have six figure employee numbers, the internal tools have more users than many startups do. You start to find that off the shelf tools don't work any more and you need to have people customizing them. Then you start seeing things that are specific to the company - people walking too far to get to conference rooms, and someone staffs up a tool to optimize meeting room allocations. You end up with tons of people working on things that are invisible to end users just to keep the machine running.
In my experience talking to FB devs of varying report at conferences, they are often highly motivated and may thus quickly gain a deep understanding of the technology they get to work on, but their overall knowledge tends to be fairly shallow. Most skills are likely transferrable but a kid joining Facebook fresh from college to move on to another job three years later is still a rookie due to their lack of experience.
IMO Google and Facebook are very different in this sense. At least from a user point of view, Google's sites seem to typically be well implemented (the annoying thing about the company is more that they are wasting lots of good brains on a mismanaged projects that only get half-released and ad tech).
The best thing I'll say about Facebook is that their site doesn't give the impression that a ton of talent has been wasted on it.
Google's sites are always half baked and unfinished. It gives the impression no one thought about the frontend. Facebook one could say is too polished. Too many people are involved adding too much, tracking each movement. Tons of talent has been wasted on Facebooks site.
> they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in
While I definitely agree with your assessment regarding laziness (I don't think I know or have worked with anyone at or from a FAANG that I would describe as "lazy") my experience is that grinding leetcode and systems design is entirely independent from "can actually write complex code and design real world systems".
In the dotcom shadow actually knowing how to get your hands dirty and solve real world problems that might not be sexy or at "Google scale" was the essential differentiator for candidates.
That change won't happen over night though, and I do also suspect you are correct that many of these people will have no trouble finding new jobs. They will have trouble finding the same TC.
>I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.
Not sure you meant it, but this is an inadvertent attestation for "leetcode". As in, it's not about the leetcode, it's about the type of person that masters the leetcode.
I think everyone agrees on that. It’s an arbitrary hoop at this point. We’re just trying to find those who are willing to go the distance on the hoops.
Well, then you have a hiring advantage against many companies since you won't apply this judgment. I'd say LinkedIn is probably the least productive engineers, but most Googlers are right up there with the least productive. Facebook is bimodal.
I have worked with a few people who later joined Google. They were OK but not the best people I have ever worked with. So don’t believe that “the best people work for FAANG’s”. It’s BS hype.
It's a scheme that (1) provides a busywork/proof-of-work barrier to entry to FAANG companies, and (2) fools engineers into believing that they are Robert Tarjan when in fact they can't wipe their own asses.
Canned programming interview questions that teach aspiring young people to memorize and recite a function line-for-line rather than actually be able to discuss implementations with the interviewer like a human being. (I blame lazy, clueless hiring managers and hiring practices for enabling this)
Not all of those 12.000 people are going to be in technology, my guess is that most of them won't be.
The article is also poorly written. The author clearly know that Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook? Given that Meta, not Facebook, have 83.000 employees (which seems like a lot to be honest), the 12.000 is across all Meta owned companies. That could mean that Meta is dropping a bunch of projects that doesn't make money, firing the people working on them, while those working in profit centers a safe, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if moderations is going to take a big hit.
As others pointed out "quiet layoff" is a weird term to use, that could mean that initially they won't rehire, at least not externally, when people quit.
> Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook
This is the cost of idiotic name changes. Nobody I know refers to Google the mothership as Alphabet. Meta took more hold, but it’s still fairly common to call the whole thing Facebook.
Google never changed its name, it's still Google and calling it that is appropriate. Google introduced a holding company Alphabet to own several companies (Google, Waymo, DeepMind, Verily, etc).
Facebook changed its name to Meta.
Comparing the two in the way you did is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.
content reviewers are not employees, they are contractors through third party companies like Accenture, so likely not included in the 83K employee number
Previous news was that managers at Meta were told to put some percentage of their reports on PIP's, the thought at that time was they were preping for layoffs, and the PIP's are a prelude to get people to quit on their own accord
That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?
There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.
When I did a deepdive on Facebook ~5 months ago ("Inside the Facebook Engineering Culture"), I confirmed with people inside the company the company having ~75,000 global employees, ~32,000 working in tech.
While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users.
Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users).
The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee.
There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house).
Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently.
I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean:
1. Increasing their profitability even further
2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives
I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has.
All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate.
As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread.
I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.
> They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.
A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
Whatsapp is pretty much the cornerstone of personal and business relationships here in India. I’ve closed more deals over Whatsapp than over phone calls and emails and Zoom calls combined.
Whatsapp had 55 employees and 1.5b monthly users when they got acquired by FB. I very much doubt that the product is fundamentally better now that they are part of a company that has tens of thousands of employees. Same could be said about Instagram I guess?
"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."
The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.
So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
Sure, until they are sick and they suddenly realize the quality of the medical equipment is actually more important. Or there is a disaster and they realize getting electricity or having satellite comms is more important. God forbid you end up in a war and the quality and innovation in your weapons determines if you live or die. Don't even get me started on food.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
I'm sure that those things are important to those people. But they are less important to the world than the engineering that goes to make sure that there is power to run the servers, routers, laptops, and mobiles. Less important than the engineering that makes the motors that move the trains to get people to work and production lines for the food we all eat.
> That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?
At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products.
I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.
> I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees
The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
To understand if that’s effective scaling, you have to know how much the average employee is costing Facebook and how much revenue the average MAU is generating.
No idea, it’d be nice if a few of those 80,000 could get the “hide” button to work properly when I hit it on my iPhone Facebook app. I hate when people post gross closeup pictures of spiders (my friends are weird) then the “hide” button grays it out for a second then instantly re-serves the post in the same spot in my feed.
It has been like this for years now.
It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).
Oh god yes. Facebook and Messenger have so many such bugs, coupled with general slowness and clunkiness. Having 80k employees would sound so much more reasonable if all of Meta's services worked really well; right now it seems more like they do the bare minimum.
I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.
Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.
Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.
Update: I think Zuckerberg or someone with some swat at Facebook is watching over us here because this morning my friend posted a picture of a scary spider and I hit “hide” and wouldn’t you know, it actually hid. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I doubt it!
Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.
When money was "free or cheap" (low interests) and plentiful I believe many of these large tech firms added head count as a competitive strategy: "If they're behind our desk then they're not behind a competitor's!" Now that interest rates are going up and talk of tighter times are in the mix, "waste" reduction is the new and upcoming wind that these and all firms are adjusting their sails to. Additionally, keeping rumors of mass layoffs can slow and paralyze smaller firms that are looking to hire because many may be holding off longer to actually hire current candidates in hopes of, and counting on, many many more potential applicants in the near future. Plus with the influx of developers they may be hoping for a buyers (employers) market with regards to compensation in the next few months.
Facebook is an ad company, and if that market is declining, those cuts may come from non-technical groups meant to serve those accounts and markets. There are likely other programs necessary with high marketing needs that I could imagine need culling and thus fewer people.
Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams)
Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
I live really close to their largest data center and only about 500 people work there. It’s 4x larger now than when they initially broke ground and even then it was insanely huge.
Edit.
I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.
I'm actually surprised there would be that many. This report [1] from the US chamber of commerce says 157 after initial construction and I've seen numbers lower than that. (Some may be a function of presumably outsourced workers like security guards and janitorial services.)
Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational. (Obviously engineers do work connected to datacenters from other locations.)
I'm in the same area, and agree the scale is dramatic. One land surveyor a friend ran into has been working there for 7 consecutive years. I think if I were in that role, I would want to see different environments from time to time.
> 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks
> some 12,000 employees could be out of jobs soon.
> "It might look like they are moving on, but the reality is they are being forced out,"
If Meta is going to fire 15% of their staff within the next few weeks, it's not going to be quiet. The way they usually fire under performers isn't abrupt. People get consistent bad evaluations over a couple of halves, then go to a performance improvement programs. I'd assume that this type of things is a legal requirement in Europe.
I think they aren't firing people, they are laying off people. The difference is one has cause (not doing work up to standard, performance, behavior probs) the other is just giant corporation randomness of cancelling products, teams and managers being approached with "give me 15% of your team" types of requests.
They need to file legal paperwork for layoffs of this size so "quiet" isn't really a good description.
This many people is like $1.2B annually in savings if every person averages to $100k (which is conservative). They have stated they are leaning into AR/VR and their quarterly reports show other businesses are flat or shrinking. Its okay to have a business division that has a known profit margin and market share and not invest in furthering to expand it.
I assume whole teams will be let go. That would be a lot more expedient and less prone to discriminatory accusations than the more extended method you describe.
Reading through the comments I see a couple of recurring themes.
For what a quiet layoff means, that's easy. All these companies have a performance review system. Employees are effectively stack ranked. Facebook in particular has a target of 10-15% in subpar ratings. These are ratings below MA (Meets All Expectations) including MM (Meets Most), MN (Meets None) and NRL (Non-Regrettable Loss ie an employee who quits that they don't want back). This is the tech equivalent of IBM or GE firing the bottom 10% of staff every year.
So all you do is you get aggressive about PIPs and forcing those subpar ratings out. That's how a quiet layoff will work here.
The second theme is who will this affect. It's naive to think the answer is "low performers". I don't think the young will bear the brunt of this either. Young workers are as a general rule cheaper. Diversity will inevitably enter the picture. jAs a whole, people who good for whatever diversity metrics the company cares about will be forced out less often than those who aren't.
It's actually older workers who will bear the brunt of this as age (ie in the US being over 40 is a protected classs by law) is not a diversity metric I've seen any tech company cares about. Don't bleieve me? Go look at your company's diversity policy. It'll mention specific protected classes. See if age is one of them.
As always, leaf nodes in the org chart and some low level managers will pay the price for poor leadership right up to the executive level. Nobody cares about the metaverse. It's a strategy from a company that has no idea what it should be doing.
I cover what's happening inside Facebook for software engineers, and I have confirmed that the 15% needs improvement target was not set as guideline for engineering teams, based on talking with several engineering managers within the company. However, this article is making its round amongst software engineers as well, creating lots of fear and uncertainty.
Right now, for engineering, what is happening is the revamped performance review process running its course. As with every year, the target for "needs improvement" is 10%, which is not new. Those going on "needs improvement", in the past, did not all go on PIPs. Also, PIPs at Facebook have not been nearly as draconian as at Amazon. With all these details, I find it a very strong stretch to say that "15% of Facebook's workforce may lose jobs."
Originally I wrote in a lot more detail about all of this - and why the Business Insider article likely doesn't apply to engineering - behind a paywall. Seeing this trending on Hacker News, which article I find misleading - an article referencing a public Blind post! - I un-paywalled my reflection, and my own analysis on the situation at Facebook. I personally doubt there is a need for layoffs at Meta, and I'm surprised no other publication points this out. Analyzing the financials gives a very different picture on whether or not any form of layoffs would be needed.
The original Business Insider article - referenced by the article linked on this post - writes [1]
"Executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as 'needs support' in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said."
So, as per Insider - and the article this post is about -, this information should be below the VP-level now, at director levels, and widespread in the organization as per Insider's reporting. I talked with people who supposedly should have been told about this 15% target. In engineering, I could not find any sources (including at director-level people).
We'll see soon enough if the Business Insider article is right, as the article claims:
"Several employees told Insider that as much as 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks."
Let's check back mid-November to see if this did happen by then. If it would, there will be plenty of news on it.
I would not see the business sense. It does not mean that I am right. I offer my analysis, and I cannot predict what will happen, beyond assigning likelihoods to events. I assign a low likelihood of engineering layoffs happening at Meta the coming months. I see an even lower likelihood when considering that right now Business Insider reported about the performance review touchpoint happening - as previously planned - which tends to not be a trigger for letting people go, at least not in bulk.
Huh, WFH cull? Zuck himself works from home (or his Hawaiian island compound) half the year now and the company expanded the WFH option to the majority of employees and may even consider shrinking offices (or certainly stopping real estate expansion) and adopting hot desk policies
Until Meta gives up on the Metaverse, I don't think we will see a cull that's WFH oriented. Surely if Meta can't find a way to work in the Metaverse, no one ever will.
Now other big companies that continue to invest in HQs: I wonder.
I have been downvoted several times for telling this. Remote work will be a net negative for tech people. Apart from the obvious productivity losses(lack of collaboration, and supervision), work is likely to move to places where salaries are lower, and they are likely to be big job cuts, as people realise get invisible and managements feels they don't need them.
Readit News
I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.
I’ve participated in some mentorship programs for college grads. There are a lot of students who think that the FAANG career path is basically “Study LeetCode for a few months, get FAANG job, then rest and vest”.
Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense.
I suspect a lot of it stems from sour grapes: People inherently get jealous of high earners in prestigious jobs, and tend to reach for excuses to bring them down a notch.
I find 1.1 years as average incredibly low. Is this really the case?
This is where,
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33209621
and
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33205375
Prestigious: no
It’s just a job.
> pretty hard-working but over time become less so
If people start to cruise, they may get pressured by hard-working peers and management. Of course, those who are very good may get away with it as FAANG reward impact and not work, but there are many strong engineers there, so it's very hard to stand out. And those who do are incentized to climb the ladder rather than cruise.
> it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work
It's the opposite. Those who manage to have good evaluations are rewarded.
> seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff
There are tons of cool and useful projects in these big companies. Basically any field of CS you may be interested in is there.
My experience is that people work hard when they get the job. After one year, they realize it's hard to sustain that pace and that they barely meet the expectation with all the hard work. Some leave, some get managed out, and those who stay many years are productive individuals.
People who think this look at a product made by 83,000 people and to them, it looks pretty similar to a product made by 83 people.
Some of those workers are working on a large-scale product that scales imperfectly. Sysadmins to rack new servers, human moderators to respond to users' reports, whatever. 1 per 20,000 users and a few billion users is a lot of workers. On the other hand, none of these companies are famous for their high-touch, responsive customer support.
Some of those workers are working very intensely on things that are completely invisible to end users. Applying security patches to backend servers. Training their workers to recognise the signs of modern slavery. Building their own in-house Linux distribution. Products that get cancelled before launch. Getting that newly acquired company onto your corporate platform.
And some of those workers are working on things that are marginally invisible to end users. Ad sales, feed ranking algorithms, spam detection.
Some of those workers are working on new, customer-facing but peripheral things, that have escaped notice because they're at a small scale, or unpopular. Shorts on youtube, for example.
To a critic, these manual scaling support, invisible and almost-invisible efforts don't count - and if you only count customer-facing features, that seems like a lot of developers and not much development.
The best thing I'll say about Facebook is that their site doesn't give the impression that a ton of talent has been wasted on it.
While I definitely agree with your assessment regarding laziness (I don't think I know or have worked with anyone at or from a FAANG that I would describe as "lazy") my experience is that grinding leetcode and systems design is entirely independent from "can actually write complex code and design real world systems".
In the dotcom shadow actually knowing how to get your hands dirty and solve real world problems that might not be sexy or at "Google scale" was the essential differentiator for candidates.
That change won't happen over night though, and I do also suspect you are correct that many of these people will have no trouble finding new jobs. They will have trouble finding the same TC.
Not sure you meant it, but this is an inadvertent attestation for "leetcode". As in, it's not about the leetcode, it's about the type of person that masters the leetcode.
But that's how I've found it in hiring.
What is leetcode?
The difficulty levels vary and FAANG is well-known to ask such questions (in the harder difficulty spectrum) intech interviews
Dead Comment
The article is also poorly written. The author clearly know that Meta is the parent company, so are the 12.000 people across all Meta properties, or just Facebook? Given that Meta, not Facebook, have 83.000 employees (which seems like a lot to be honest), the 12.000 is across all Meta owned companies. That could mean that Meta is dropping a bunch of projects that doesn't make money, firing the people working on them, while those working in profit centers a safe, for now. I wouldn't be surprised if moderations is going to take a big hit.
As others pointed out "quiet layoff" is a weird term to use, that could mean that initially they won't rehire, at least not externally, when people quit.
This is the cost of idiotic name changes. Nobody I know refers to Google the mothership as Alphabet. Meta took more hold, but it’s still fairly common to call the whole thing Facebook.
It’s not like Alphabet is doing anything… alphabetical. And if they did they’d call it Google Spelling anyway.
Facebook changed its name to Meta.
Comparing the two in the way you did is either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous.
Dead Comment
There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.
While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users.
Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users).
The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee.
There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house).
Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently.
I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean:
1. Increasing their profitability even further
2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives
I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has.
All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate.
As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495
Spend more time talking to average people.
They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.
A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.
Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.
No wonder that we get stories of students now revolting against challenging courses: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough...
"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."
The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.
So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
Deleted Comment
At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products.
I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.
But then, Valve was one of the most profitable company per employee count.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a...
The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
It has been like this for years now.
It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).
I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.
Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.
Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.
Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
Edit.
I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.
I'm actually surprised there would be that many. This report [1] from the US chamber of commerce says 157 after initial construction and I've seen numbers lower than that. (Some may be a function of presumably outsourced workers like security guards and janitorial services.)
Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational. (Obviously engineers do work connected to datacenters from other locations.)
[1] https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/ctec_datacente...
> some 12,000 employees could be out of jobs soon.
> "It might look like they are moving on, but the reality is they are being forced out,"
If Meta is going to fire 15% of their staff within the next few weeks, it's not going to be quiet. The way they usually fire under performers isn't abrupt. People get consistent bad evaluations over a couple of halves, then go to a performance improvement programs. I'd assume that this type of things is a legal requirement in Europe.
Not sure how this is going to work.
They need to file legal paperwork for layoffs of this size so "quiet" isn't really a good description.
This many people is like $1.2B annually in savings if every person averages to $100k (which is conservative). They have stated they are leaning into AR/VR and their quarterly reports show other businesses are flat or shrinking. Its okay to have a business division that has a known profit margin and market share and not invest in furthering to expand it.
For what a quiet layoff means, that's easy. All these companies have a performance review system. Employees are effectively stack ranked. Facebook in particular has a target of 10-15% in subpar ratings. These are ratings below MA (Meets All Expectations) including MM (Meets Most), MN (Meets None) and NRL (Non-Regrettable Loss ie an employee who quits that they don't want back). This is the tech equivalent of IBM or GE firing the bottom 10% of staff every year.
So all you do is you get aggressive about PIPs and forcing those subpar ratings out. That's how a quiet layoff will work here.
The second theme is who will this affect. It's naive to think the answer is "low performers". I don't think the young will bear the brunt of this either. Young workers are as a general rule cheaper. Diversity will inevitably enter the picture. jAs a whole, people who good for whatever diversity metrics the company cares about will be forced out less often than those who aren't.
It's actually older workers who will bear the brunt of this as age (ie in the US being over 40 is a protected classs by law) is not a diversity metric I've seen any tech company cares about. Don't bleieve me? Go look at your company's diversity policy. It'll mention specific protected classes. See if age is one of them.
As always, leaf nodes in the org chart and some low level managers will pay the price for poor leadership right up to the executive level. Nobody cares about the metaverse. It's a strategy from a company that has no idea what it should be doing.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33122417
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33104679
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33087097
Right now, for engineering, what is happening is the revamped performance review process running its course. As with every year, the target for "needs improvement" is 10%, which is not new. Those going on "needs improvement", in the past, did not all go on PIPs. Also, PIPs at Facebook have not been nearly as draconian as at Amazon. With all these details, I find it a very strong stretch to say that "15% of Facebook's workforce may lose jobs."
Originally I wrote in a lot more detail about all of this - and why the Business Insider article likely doesn't apply to engineering - behind a paywall. Seeing this trending on Hacker News, which article I find misleading - an article referencing a public Blind post! - I un-paywalled my reflection, and my own analysis on the situation at Facebook. I personally doubt there is a need for layoffs at Meta, and I'm surprised no other publication points this out. Analyzing the financials gives a very different picture on whether or not any form of layoffs would be needed.
My response / reflection: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/meta-layoffs/
These sort of information is strictly VP+/SVP+. Unless you have talked to a few VPs, your prediction is as good as reading tea leaves.
"Executives told directors across the company that they should select at least 15% of their teams to be labeled as 'needs support' in an internal review process, one of the people who spoke with Insider said."
So, as per Insider - and the article this post is about -, this information should be below the VP-level now, at director levels, and widespread in the organization as per Insider's reporting. I talked with people who supposedly should have been told about this 15% target. In engineering, I could not find any sources (including at director-level people).
We'll see soon enough if the Business Insider article is right, as the article claims:
"Several employees told Insider that as much as 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks."
Let's check back mid-November to see if this did happen by then. If it would, there will be plenty of news on it.
I would not see the business sense. It does not mean that I am right. I offer my analysis, and I cannot predict what will happen, beyond assigning likelihoods to events. I assign a low likelihood of engineering layoffs happening at Meta the coming months. I see an even lower likelihood when considering that right now Business Insider reported about the performance review touchpoint happening - as previously planned - which tends to not be a trigger for letting people go, at least not in bulk.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-quiet-layoffs-will-...
Deleted Comment
They didn’t build all those huge HQs for them to sit empty.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-rem...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57425636.amp
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3888616-meta-platforms-working...
yes because it is unheard of that execs would do one thing for themselves and require something else for people that work for them.....
Now other big companies that continue to invest in HQs: I wonder.
I don't think that creating fear and uncertainty will bring the ranks back to the offices.
The excuses for not are running out.
I have been downvoted several times for telling this. Remote work will be a net negative for tech people. Apart from the obvious productivity losses(lack of collaboration, and supervision), work is likely to move to places where salaries are lower, and they are likely to be big job cuts, as people realise get invisible and managements feels they don't need them.