Although losing your job is difficult, it seems to me like I would much rather be fired from Facebook than Twitter.
In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees". I remember a couple years ago when Nintendo was having problems then all the top execs lowered their compensations. I wonder if top execs at Facebook are also doing that? (doubt it).
I suppose these are mostly good, well-working engineers. This should mean that the projects they were working on were mostly useless, bringing too little value for the effort in the short term, or too uncertain benefits at a longer term.
Something did not pan out with the product vision.
The profits from work of those devs are already realized. The future profits might not materialize.
And if Meta is indeed stuffed to the gills with highly unproductive yet highly paid people, who is responsible for that? Those people aren’t actually changing.
While it's probably easy to land on your feet and find something with a good pay in SV or London, it's probably not the case everywhere.
4 months of pay for this kind of trouble doesn't look like a good deal to me.
True, those labor laws are under attack, but they still stand, and such layoff would be so costly there that they could hardly happen.
4 months is not generous, it is under the legal minimum in many countries, provided you've been with the employer long enough.
Compensation = (years worked at company/3)*monthly salary.
This comes on top of the minimum notice period, which is given by:
notice period (in months) = floor(years_worked/5) + 1
In many cases, employers and employees agree that the employee will not work after having received notice, but are asked to be available to help answer questions their replacements might have during this period. The employee still receives their salary during this time (even if they find new employment), so effectively this notice period can be added to their compensation.
So for many employees in the Netherlands, the minimum legal compensation is better than what these employees will receive. In practice their compensation is often better than the minimum legal compensation.
The culture of shame on failure is pretty strong in Japan and sometimes goes too far. After the crash of Japan Airlines 123 where over 500 people died, two high level people related to the accident committed suicide. Not something I'd like to see normalized. Loosing more lives is not the solution.
Also, it was all over the news that Twitter fired probably based on performance (lines of code, yeah, I know). Wondering if this will make it difficult for the twitter folks to get hired compared to those from FB.
Managers are usually the most competent employees at actually getting shit done, because they have to do their own shit on top of managing what the employees are doing.
Why is that? Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient? What is the logic behind this thinking?
> Do you really learn that much at Facebook, do you really become that much more proficient?
I think for many there is a good chance of learning valuable skills at these companies. In my time at Meta I became a more proficient engineer by being around those who were a lot better than me, and I also got a lot better at non-technical stuff like giving people feedback, leadership, communication and so on. It's obviously not impossible that I could have learned these skills elsewhere but they are weighted heavily at Meta etc and it's more likely one will have absorbed them.
None of this is universal, of course. Any particular person might be great or terrible independent of their tenure at Meta.
Personally if I see Facebook on a resume, I will assume that they will be expensive
I seem to read this comment every other day, hopefully it’s not adding up…
To some extend. But it’s true too. It is their fault.
With a high TC usually comes an expensive lifestyle. It's a really hard process to downscale your lifestyle.
Oh and you have a four month severance runway on top of that...
Four months severance is only good if you find another good role within four months. And in the current tech market I wouldn't bet on that.
Something else to consider - if there are a ton of engineers entering the market who are willing to take a pay cut what impact will that have on everyone else in the market? This sort of thing is what drives everyone's wages down.
Your lifestyle has to do with your expenses. You can have savings and a sizable emergency fund but if you don't find a job that pays you as much or lower your lifestyle.
But Zuck's pie in the sky metaverse shit contributed.
> In any case, it's always jarring seeing CEO's saying: "I take responsibility for these troubled times... by firing thousands of employees"
Even if reflect badly on founder/CEO to say "I erred by hiring tons of below average engineers who couldn't deliver so I am fixing it now" It would reflect worse on those engineers in real world.
Do you apply negative stereotypes to people you don't know as a normal part of your daily interactions?
It's not going to work, but there's a good reason for why they are trying.
Edit: not really "new" – first AR/VR display was in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland, but current tech allows us to have standalone device with good ergonomics and plenty of performance
I would rephrase that to "who were willing to go through the big tech interview loop in the past". The big different between the people who go through this and don't is not ability but desire from my experience.
I know 4 developers that work for FAANG companies, I don't know why, but all 4 of them are women.
One is a brilliant programmer, team leader and generally a wonderful person to hang around with. The other 3.... well... I have no idea how on Earth they made it, they're clueless when it comes to programming; of which 2 have serious personality issues also.
Doesn't change that the prestige of having it on your resume will cause many other companies to blindly hire you.
- It's unclear if the layoffs hit software engineering, or if it's mostly business roles.
- Engineers from FANG (or whatever the acronym now is) aren't competing for all the roles out there. They generally aren't looking to join banks/insurance/telco or what they would consider "boring" roles.
If you are looking to join a cool well paying startup in SF, then yes, I imagine the competition is extra tough right now.
> we expect headcount at the end of 2023 will be approximately in-line with third quarter 2022 levels
Was that a lie or are they re-hiring in the future?
> “So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year,” he said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 26. “In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
So it doesn't sound like they are lying in the Q3 report. Their current plan is to shrink some teams and grow others resulting in about the same number of employees a year from now.
I think a lot of people being laid-off are going to struggle to find employment at anything even close to the kind of level of reward they're used to at the big tech companies (because you just know the people that are hiring are going to take full advantage of the sudden glut of developers to pay less!)
That is sweet. Can enjoy the holidays
> Zuckerberg said he was accountable for the company’s downturn
Lol then reduce your stock size? Offer your employees your money. Honestly, all these CEOs coming out with the same line is just nonsense
Many Americans have no job security or savings either. Hard to feel bad for foreigners who come here and earn Facebook salaries while sending money home and displacing local citizens and economies.
I am the child of immigrants who did just that, BTW. Global labor is only good for capitalists and owners, not for everyday workers and residents and communities.
Next would be a great steward to inherit React.
RL hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.
Most bootcampers 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.
