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.
I don't know enough about the AI/ML space in terms of competitive business advantage, so I can't really speak to that.
I don't think he lacks vision; I think it's pretty hard to go from $0-500,000,000,000 in value without vision, frankly.
People like to shit on Zuckerberg, but the truth is he built a global company that something like 1 in 3 people use. Nobody has ever done that before, and it's an incredible achievement. His vision might not be your vision, but I don't think you do something like that without a perspective on the future and how to grasp it.
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.
Well, depending on the question I answer with what would be most beneficial to my team. They are asking if having standing desks for everyone would be good? Sure.
But a lot of fluff questions regarding satisfaction are answered with lies. "Sure, it's alright, 7/10".
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.
You're not wrong, but if we've all collectively decided that companies should be patrons then I think we've made a mistake.
These people are only one reorg away from losing their income, Mr. lz4/zstd should be able to focus on his work without such fears, so great is his contribution to our field.
Yeah it's wildly off the wall how hard it is for enoromously valuable critical people doing amazing things to get support for themselves & their work.
That the direct-corporate-patronage/semi-employeeship model is so prevailing is a sign of brokenness. We need more, collectively, to have a health of our technical ecosystem.
Having these corps willing to hire great folk & have them keep hacking is still often a good option, often. "Create more vue than you capture" is easy to back/do when it's so clear who is out there creating mad value.
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?
1. Being angry at an action doesn’t make someone an ingrate. You can both be grateful and angry; I’d say it’s even common to be both.
2. Meta has had no meaningful impact on my software niche, or many others’. Their only real impact on me has been radicalizing my older family members and firing a few of my friends. They aren’t entitled to any particular gratitude for that.
I don't think you get radicalized by social networks alone. Usually things like economic distress, mental health issues, (missing?) social life irl are much bigger factors here. But yes, if you are already leaning towards it, the internet can probably reinforce any kind of extreme beliefs, as they usually provide simple solutions for complex issues.
I understand the distinction you’re making, but I think the “radicalization” characterization is appropriate: my experience is that Facebook-exposed relatives place both more and more extreme value on policies that they might otherwise have.
Were they primed by other sources of media and culture exposure? Absolutely; what distinguishes Facebook is its place in the timeline, and the abundance of evidence that radicalization broadly tracks with social media engagement.
Yeah, Facebook really turned things up in my experience with the constant 24x7 promotion of increasingly extreme content. Fox News has limited hours in the day to produce new content and some editorial restraint, whereas Facebook would cheerfully take someone who was normally at, say, turn of the century WSJ-level conservative content and feed them stuff which Limbaugh wouldn’t have touched. After a while, they start thinking that’s normal.
It is patently evident that you resemble a Zuckerberg shill who frequents technology discussion boards, disseminating tangential remarks extolling gratitude for a corporation that is, in essence, detrimental and morally unsound.
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.
React is a web framework. Like everything else it has some good points (popularity) and bad points (performance, support cost).
When you get more experience, one thing you’ll learn is that when “literal hell” isn’t entirely untrue it’s a social problem. If your organization isn’t good at maintaining a large application, a tool won’t save you. It’s very common for people to look at problems and blame the current tools because that’s where the symptoms are and, critically, it doesn’t require saying anyone needs to be doing a better job managing the project.
JFC, "when you get more experience". If you people are going to be throwing around this bs you better have your linkedin on your profile and you better have 20 years of experience.
edit: Which you do, touche. That being said, I'm experienced, I'm just hyperbolic and emotional about things. Not everyone that's experienced has that "cool, I've done this a million times before" demeanor ok.
Let’s just say my first for pay project was working with a custom Gopher server and I played around with JavaScript when it first came out in beta with Netscape Navigator…
Okay, I’ve been writing JavaScript since before it had that name so you’re only low by 7 years or so.
Again, I’m not saying that React is horrible – only that people are prone to misattribution leading to overstating the benefits of their current favorite tool relative to other factors. That works both ways, too: it’s not uncommon for people to credit a newer tool for productivity improvements due to their skills increasing over the same time period.
Frameworks come and go. I rather give the credit to the creator not the company. It solved there problem and open sourcing it benefits them more not the community. Now they don't need to train new Facebook developers on some internal framework. Now 1000s of engineers move their framework forward vs only the ones they pay.
I remember when Perl cgi-bins blew my mind. A webpage wasn't just static HTML and images anymore, it could be a program that did arbitrary things! Nothing new under the Sun.
Frankly, if React didn’t exist, and assuming none of the other post React frameworks ever came to exist, we would likely have a duopoly of Angular and EmberJS. I personally do not like Angular at all, but EmberJS was awesome. It’s performance was slightly sluggish but nothing having more developers due to higher popularity couldn’t have solved.
If I had to be absolutely honest, the developer experience side of EmberJS was miles ahead of what React is today. NextJS is only just coming closer but I’m not even sure it’s there yet.
If React hadn’t existed, and more people had experienced EmberJS, I think web development would have been a far better experience today than it is right now.
The more I think about it, the more I’m switching to the camp that React wasn’t just not a necessary positive to web development, but was in fact a massive negative.
FB’s devrel dollars completely drowned out EmberJS, which was being pushed by a very small indie team, and web development would have been immeasurably better if we were using EmberJS today, as opposed to React and its bandaged on partners.
"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.
I’d agree with an incremental improvement for developers but it came at the cost of fair performance & accessibility regressions and a culture of tool chain complexity which undercuts the productivity gains. If I had to pick, I’d say TypeScript has had a much more noticeable impact on teams’ ability to ship code rapidly and reliably.
> 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?
I don't enjoy the period between layoff announcements and finding out you were (or were not) laid off, but I've been through them several times and don't have a problem concentrating enough to "do good work." My work output might be mildly reduced, but it's certainly not zero.
I understand this might vary between individuals. It's just overstating your case to claim that it is impossible.
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.
I think there's a big gulf in our industry between people who lived through 2008-2010, and people who didn't.
We might not go back to that dire of a situation, but I imagine it will be closer than we have been for quite some time. A lot of people see Zuckerberg as being an asshole, where really he is going above and beyond by being this communicative.
To be a CEO, you have to be a bastard sometimes. You don't have a choice. The trick is in the execution.
I don't think anyone is faulting Zuckerberg for the November layoffs - things were looking pretty dire at that time and the stock dropped all the way under $90.
However what people are upset about now is that is another huge layoff was announced only a few months later. The first one was supposed to be "deep" enough.
> “I would guess that the way people would evaluate whether you trust me and want to work at this company in whether we are succeeding in making progress toward the overall stated goals,” Zuckerberg said, according to the Post. “I think a lot of this is about the results we are able to deliver.”
Great answer for shareholders.
Not the answer employees are looking for when trying to understand if their job will continue to exist. Especially when front-line engineers don’t have as much control over whether or not their project succeeds in the market as the execs and product people do.
Loss of your top performers trust (and creativity/productivity) is cited why layoffs cost more than they save
> short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation
Not sure what you're trying to get at. He eats meat and wants to respect where it came from rather than grabbing a factory raised, killed, and processed McRib and not thinking about it.
That sounds like the right way to me if you're going to eat meat. Personally I think it's a bigger problem when someone doesn't know or care (especially if they don't want to know/care) how the meat ended up on their plate.
Do you truly believe that someone who would kill and butcher an animal is a threat to _you_?
> "He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,"
Not everyone with a homestead does that though. I know it's the traditional Jewish and Islamic way of doing things but it's cruel to drown an animal in its own blood or letting it die slowly from blood loss when you could just disable the brain in an instant.
By "spar" they mean "ask questions at the first all-hands since the 2nd round of layoffs were announced." Which, sure? But there's not a lot of additional detail in this story.
Really? Man that’s too bad… but I understand. People really didn’t understand how lucky they were to work in a company where leaders came every week to answer questions
This is the right time for tech workers to finally unionize. Too long have we believed tales of exceptionalism and of evil union overlords in the way of meritocracy.
I really think people don’t even know why unionizing was a thing back in the day. Dangerous conditions, back breaking labor, endless hours, checks don’t clear, wage collusion…
I don't know where you've worked, but I've sustained several debilitating repetitive stress injuries as a result of long hours working in tech. I've had multiple higher-ups bitch that we're supposed to be working ten or twelve hour days, then want us to come in on Saturdays, too.
And you weren’t capable of changing jobs? I can’t imagine it being hard to change jobs as even journeyman “enterprise developer” (which I did for 25 years until 2020). I was able to find a job quickly in 2000 and 2008.
And unions wouldn’t have prevented collusion. That was illegal with or without unions.
Yeah, I changed jobs to another job with similar bullshit Bay Area culture.
Are you seriously trying to argue that they're isn't a pretty universal culture of long hours and, often, the expectation of even more hours after work on "passion projects"?
Even ignoring small companies and "startup culture", the entire Google campus approach was to encourage people to stay longer and work more, and that seems to be the common model among the big tech companies.
And unions wouldn’t have prevented collusion
I didn't say anything about unions, I merely addressed the implication by the parent comment that it isn't an issue in the tech industry. That said, I don't know why you think unions can't help fight wage collusion. Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it has to be brought to light to be caught.
> Yeah, I changed jobs to another job with similar bullshit Bay Area culture.
You realize there are jobs outside of the “Bay Area” don’t you? Do you know how many job “opportunities” I’ve “noped” out of in my career just based on asking the right questions about the “culture”?
> Are you seriously trying to argue that they're isn't a pretty universal culture of long hours and, often, the expectation of even more hours after work on "passion projects"?
I am very much arguing that - based on 25 years of experience and 8 jobs. I have not written a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since graduating from college - in 1996.
> Even ignoring small companies and "startup culture", the entire Google campus approach was to encourage people to stay longer and work more, and that seems to be the common model among the big tech companies
If that’s not your preferred environment then don’t work for BigTech, there are literally millions of jobs at banks, government, insurance companies and other corporate America jobs where people work 40 hours a week.
> That said, I don't know why you think unions can't help fight wage collusion. Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it has to be brought to light to be caught.
The lawsuit was brought in 2011, covering a period beginning in 2005. I guess you think that's optimal. Regardless, your assertion that a union couldn't help with this is entirely unsupported.
As for the rest, you can dismiss others all you want, but you know for a fact that what I've written about Bay Area and SV tech is true, and you also know that this site revolves around it.
Good for you for whatever you've done, but it's irrelevant to the discussion.
Then don’t work in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley if you don’t like the culture.
It’s not rocket science. There are 2.7 million developers in the US. Most don’t work on the west coast.
It’s not ”irrelevant” to the discussion. You chose to work in toxic environments. You had agency to choose another type of culture. There are literally millions of developers in the US who made different choices.
I in fact don’t know because I never worked on the west coast and I’ve done okay. I actively ignored software development jobs that would require me to deal with that Bullshit.
Those Meta RSUs have done dwadle for total compensation in the past couple years. So the layoffs are piling stress in stress - much lower income and now job uncertainty. As others have noted, transferable skills due to Metas open source contributions are the bright spot.
So the median income in the US is $70K a year and yet most people aren’t homeless or hungry.
Yes I work for BigTech now. I haven’t been “stressed” about losing my job after the first year when I started working - over 25 years ago. My first mission was to save aggressively.
Have you seen how much Meta made before Zuck drove it off a cliff? Just because you're well-compensated compared to others doesn't mean most of the value created by your labor isn't stolen by Capital.
I’m not against unionizing necessarily, but these are layoffs. They happen, they suck. The benefits of working at these places are INSANE and unless you are working on content moderation the work isn’t physically taxing/destroying your body etc.
All of these CEOs are nuts. They are all greedy. The capitalism-to-the-max model is less than great… but those of us in software are treated amazingly well.
I agree these people should pay for their bad decisions but some of those decisions gave us equity grants, sky high salaries, and free meals. We can’t act like we haven’t benefited.
Meta staffers were sparring all the time when I was at then called Facebook company. It was during the last elections and it was excruciating. People would be very agressive during Q&A and internally in posts and groups. We should do this, we should do that, this is wrong, no THIS is wrong. Everybody had their righteous opinions on how the company and specific teams were supposed to work. I remember Mark becoming red with anger during some of these weekly Q&As, and the CTO looking like he was about to cry. Yet they still kept on going and continued to give these weekly Q&A (I think a lot of people respected them for that, even with the divisions I believe trust in mgmt was the highest metric at fb)
I remember fighting against Chinese groups criticizing western medias and talking about how tiananmen massacre is a hoax while Mark was publicly reprimanding the people who would scratch the “black” of “black lives matter” from some of the walls of the office to overwrite it with “all”.
During all that time the American people hated fb. HN couldn’t comprehend how engineers could accept to join and work at facebook. The social dilemma came out on Netflix.
As someone who really liked the facebook app and thought it would continue to change the world in a good way, it was really hard to read about the company externally and to see employees destroying it from the inside.
I think my opinion now is that 1) any type of organization becomes problematic once it gets too large/accumulates too much power (religion and the government are much more of a problem than Meta though) and 2) politics shouldn’t be allowed internally. People shouldn’t “come to work as themselves”. People really suck and they should keep a lot of things to themselves.
