They’re laying off because Zuck is a horrible leader. He went all-in on metaverse that didn’t work out. They could’ve done so much more in AI/ML space with all the resources they had. Now they’re experiencing brain drain and no one wants to work for a guy with bad vision for the future.
Trust in mgmt was the highest metric at fb when I used to work there two years ago. Whatever you see outside is BS. Read his latest post to get some idea of how he communicates internally: https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/i-just-shared-this-update-o...
Also I’ll eat my hat if his bet on VR/AR is not going to pay put eventually.
VR/AR is gonna pay off eventually. It’s highly unlikely Meta will be the one leading that revolution. For one thing, people would simply not trust a Meta based VR platform, thanks primarily to the Zuck. A similar competing offering from Apple, Google, or Microsoft would crush a Meta VR/AR platform very quickly IMO, due to people’s lack of trust in Meta.
Additionally, it’s not clear if any gains Meta would see would be worth the cost. There’s the headline number of tens of billions of dollars spent, but more than the absolute amount of money, the opportunity cost of those dollars not being spent on other more promising technologies, like ML/AI, which Facebook actually was THE leader in 5-10 years ago, is the big problem, and is directly a result of poor leadership.
I guarantee FB will never succeed in VR/AR. It’s DOA considering that he completely destroyed public trust in the past decade plus. Based on prototypes he showed last year, it’s really Oculus in name only.
Disagree. Also, are staffers losing trust or are you just seeing anecdotal evidence? It’s pretty easy to know, there’s a pulse survey every 6 months that asks people how much they trust mgmt at fb. It’s the highest metric when I was there and I would bet it still is pretty high. Don’t get fooled by the vocal minority.
I don’t care much for Facebook, but I miss the days when my Facebook feed is all my friends & family. I don’t mind ads here or there or if they have a paid model, I would pay that as well. It’s funny that our family’s main sharing is shared album on iphoto now.
It still can be. Most of my friends are still in FB (I'm also of a certain generation where none of the people I care about are on IG or TikTok, so those networks mean nothing to me).
I ruthlessly unfollow people who post garbage links on FB and only follow who post their own content so I find my FB feed to be surprisingly sane and helps me keep in touch with people I've met throughout the years in all the cities I've ever lived in, which is not a few.
Despite younger people and curmudgeons retreating from FB -- no concern of mine since my own social network of people my age is what I care about (and one day soon the IG and TikTok crowd will learn that they are old school grandpas too and that they're the MySpace of their generation) -- I find I can still tell stories with pictures and words on FB better than any other platform except blogs, but no one follows blogs these days. IG stories are too short, posts are too limited (you can't caption individual pictures), and TikTok requires you to sit through a 15s video.
Because I ruthlessly unfollow garbage, I don't think I've seen a political post or any divisive content in years. Instead I've gotten to "travel" with friends to different countries, gotten updates on their kids and their struggles with growing older, volunteer efforts that they're part of, etc.
FB is still useful for those of us who use it correctly, and for those of us for whom the written word is still more important the pictures or videos.
Also Cassandra, RocksDB, zstd, Open Compute and probably a bunch I'm forgetting. Meta has one of the most stellar open source contributions of any company.
I don’t understand what this has to do with the article: are you saying that employees (and commenters) shouldn’t be mad about Meta’s actions because they’ve done other, important things?
React and PyTorch are just libraries, with plenty of competition. The industry wouldn't be that different if everyone was instead using Vue or Angular or whatever other frontend JS library would've come along had React not. You're giving Facebook too much credit here. Most developers have never used any of these (me included).
I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.
React had 2 major contributions which were industry changing on the front end, IMO, and may not have happened or would have happened a lot later without it.
1. Virtual Dom
2. One way data binding
I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore.
One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding.
I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
And they are an engineer lead instead of wall street lead company, supposedly with an eye on long term value creation over short term stock movements (though possibly Zuckerberg has just capitulated) with its metaverse bet, i.e. the thing that engineers claim all software companies should be. And yet, I think no other software company gets the scorn Meta gets from engineers on the interwebs, it's hilarious.
React is THE web framework. The difference between react and previous frameworks is like night and day. Maybe nowadays people are seeing the rough spots with things like useEffect but pre-react web was literal hell for web development.
"Meritocracy" was first used in a dystopian, satirical book.
That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE.
But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck.
Whenever something seems off like that I usually try to follow the money to see who profits from it. In this case, I’m partial to the explanation that it stems back to business opposition to the New Deal pushing a lot of money into promoting libertarian Christianity, with one of the bedrock principles being that the world is just and therefore someone rich must have deserved it in some way.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:
React is important because they pushed a ton of money into devrel and a lot of people used it because Facebook was using it, not because it was breathtakingly advanced over the alternatives. If it hadn’t happened, something else would have and we might have been enjoying better-performing web pages for the last decade, too, without the mythology around virtual DOMs.
> In a show of support, Zuckerberg said he understood that workers are feeling uncertain as they wait for the possibility that they could be laid off. He added, however, that “it’s not like we can just pause working while we are figuring this out.”
Why should a worker be motivated to do work if by the next day they could be gone?
Yeah that’s a real issue, and that’s the trade off that a leader must be aware of when they communicate things like that. The last paragraph of his note points out that he chose to be more transparent this time.
Note also that most layoffs will be non engineers.
In 2019, Facebook had 44k employees but by 2022 that number had more than doubled to 86k. Even with the current layoffs, they will only be back to 2021 levels.
It could be argued that it's reasonable to aim for pre-pandemic employee levels, given the drop in valuation, post-pandemic revenue decrease, and the significant loss in revenue from Apple's privacy changes.
This is just speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt. To achieve pre-pandemic employee levels, Facebook would need to cut an additional 20K employees.
Given the sensitivity of this topic, I will refrain from sharing my (colorful) opinions and maintain a professional tone to avoid scrutiny or censure.
If the objective is to boost efficiency and reduce expenses while minimizing negative impacts on the product, one can establish metrics to evaluate the outcome.
By examining metrics such as feature velocity, revenue, SRE, and usage, I believe you'll find the answer to your question.
I know they'll survive in some form, but companies doing multiple rounds of layoffs feel like they are in a death spiral, most especially for culture and employee trust. And fear only motivates for a short time.
If this is some attempt to squeeze people back to to office, well they can forget about it. I'd leave tech before I move my family for a company that has a record of cutting people.
If Facebook's overall global influence wanes as part of this adjustment, but they remain the social network that people like to use to stay in touch with each other, I feel like this would be a net positive overall.
Readit News
Also I’ll eat my hat if his bet on VR/AR is not going to pay put eventually.
Additionally, it’s not clear if any gains Meta would see would be worth the cost. There’s the headline number of tens of billions of dollars spent, but more than the absolute amount of money, the opportunity cost of those dollars not being spent on other more promising technologies, like ML/AI, which Facebook actually was THE leader in 5-10 years ago, is the big problem, and is directly a result of poor leadership.
He lacks vision. No, he’s an antithesis to innovation.
I can absolutely see why staffers are losing trust. Mark is treating this as if everyone already agrees with the idea.
Just, unbelievably callous.
Every major tech company (except Apple) is doing the same because they overhired to an incredible extent.
Mind you, these companies were already bloated before the pandameic hiring, partly because of a strategy to drain talent from the startups ecosystem.
I always lie in those internal surveys.
he's never heard of a strike
I ruthlessly unfollow people who post garbage links on FB and only follow who post their own content so I find my FB feed to be surprisingly sane and helps me keep in touch with people I've met throughout the years in all the cities I've ever lived in, which is not a few.
Despite younger people and curmudgeons retreating from FB -- no concern of mine since my own social network of people my age is what I care about (and one day soon the IG and TikTok crowd will learn that they are old school grandpas too and that they're the MySpace of their generation) -- I find I can still tell stories with pictures and words on FB better than any other platform except blogs, but no one follows blogs these days. IG stories are too short, posts are too limited (you can't caption individual pictures), and TikTok requires you to sit through a 15s video.
Because I ruthlessly unfollow garbage, I don't think I've seen a political post or any divisive content in years. Instead I've gotten to "travel" with friends to different countries, gotten updates on their kids and their struggles with growing older, volunteer efforts that they're part of, etc.
FB is still useful for those of us who use it correctly, and for those of us for whom the written word is still more important the pictures or videos.
/s
React and PyTorch.
For everyone hating on the company, they did more for software engineers than any other company. The most meritocratic and highly compensated
I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.
1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding
I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore.
One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding.
I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE.
But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck.
Wild.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:
http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/
Why should a worker be motivated to do work if by the next day they could be gone?
No one could possibly concentrate enough to do good work with the loomimg axe.
I don't care if you're writing code or flipping burgers the distraction is mind-numbing.
Note also that most layoffs will be non engineers.
While I understand that gradual layoffs are less risky and easier for the organization to absorb, it seems short-sighted.
Delaying the inevitable will only cause more pain and damage in the long term.
It could be argued that it's reasonable to aim for pre-pandemic employee levels, given the drop in valuation, post-pandemic revenue decrease, and the significant loss in revenue from Apple's privacy changes.
This is just speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt. To achieve pre-pandemic employee levels, Facebook would need to cut an additional 20K employees.
If the objective is to boost efficiency and reduce expenses while minimizing negative impacts on the product, one can establish metrics to evaluate the outcome.
By examining metrics such as feature velocity, revenue, SRE, and usage, I believe you'll find the answer to your question.
If this is some attempt to squeeze people back to to office, well they can forget about it. I'd leave tech before I move my family for a company that has a record of cutting people.