We always used to joke that layoffs always come in threes.<p>The first one never cuts deep enough. People do the bare minimum.<p>The second one comes when everyone realises that the business actually is in trouble and does need saving.<p>The third one is needed as the business has been so badly damaged by the layoffs and is now bleeding cash.
I wonder if all of these layoffs have to do with this tax change:
<a href="https://beenegarter.com/rd-expense-capitalization-remains-applicable-for-2022-are-you-prepared/" rel="nofollow">https://beenegarter.com/rd-expense-capitalization-remains-ap...</a><p>Software engineering as an R&D expense can no longer be used in the same year, or has to be deprecated. If companies are trying to look profitable compared to bonanza years, they can’t be paying a bunch more to the government for extra engineers hired when the rule was still in place.
Not too surprising more lay offs are coming.<p>I joined Facebook in 2017 and they had around 40k people (left in 2020). By 2022 they had 80k.<p>I met with my first manager (he’s a director now) at FB a few weeks after the lay offs were announced and even he was totally puzzled as to why Meta hired so many people. In his own words, he couldn’t see what all those extra people were doing.<p>I do wonder if that number of employees is just inflated due to Meta acquiring a bunch of companies (VR)
> "<i>Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside of normal business hours</i>."<p>Just to air a side gripe, I don't know why journalists and/or editors think statements like this are helpful in the least. Did you ask them 1 hour before your deadline? Was it a week ago?<p>Are we to gain some better understanding or infer something by your inclusion of this caveat, other than to get a superficial cover-your-ass "we asked them at some vague time we can't be bothered to state, and haven't heard back yet"?<p>Back to the substantive content, this article can be summarized by the first sentence of it, minus the regurgitated 2/3 of the rest of the story. "We heard someone in some division say their budgets aren't final yet, so we're guessing that more cuts are possible."
There's a lot of buzz from folks who work there about Zuckerberg emphasizing flattening the hierarchy and making job cuts a routine part of operations i.e. much like say IBM or Cisco routinely trim in a way that most of their cuts don't make the news
>The WhatsApp owner had cut more than 11,000 jobs or 13% of its workforce in November, following such tech companies as Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) which have announced thousands of layoffs due to the economic downturn.<p>What economic downturn? Certainly none in the US by most metrics.
On a side note, I was curious to know the design story behind the Meta logo.<p>Found the page below explaining the branding, and how the logo can be used in motion. But why would they choose to display the animated logo as a 97 megabyte animated GIF? I know times are tough and people need to be laid off, but I suggest retaining at least one person who understands why it's not cool to post a 97 MB GIF of your main logo.<p><a href="https://design.facebook.com/stories/designing-our-new-company-brand-meta/" rel="nofollow">https://design.facebook.com/stories/designing-our-new-compan...</a>
Pretty funny to me that in the article it speaks about “the WhatsApp owner” almost as if there are now enough people who might not really know Facebook anymore…