Meta lays off 11,000 people

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket &quot;don&#x27;t worry about performance, take care of your families&quot; guarantee that honestly was an enormous help.<p>The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don&#x27;t work for Facebook and he had zero obligation to them, yet he paid all of their wages for the full length of the pandemic just so they could stay afloat.<p>If it were just about the money, I doubt he&#x27;d have done this.

&gt; I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.<p>As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice.<p>Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I&#x27;m sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta&#x27;s share price, but he was a multi-billionaire before and he still is now. Is that it?

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO. Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

Some data from the inside:<p>Reality Labs (AR&#x2F;VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go.<p>Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well.<p>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.<p>edit: updated to clear up some confusion about the meaning of RL and bootcampers

&gt; Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.<p>I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn&#x27;t working any more (as you&#x27;re doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn&#x27;t sustainable.<p>Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020&#x2F;2021, you&#x27;d have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.

I&#x27;m old and this is the third time around for these sorts of layoffs in tech. (Was around for dot-com bust of 2000-ish and financial meltdown post-2008.) One thing you want to keep in mind is that decent severance packages are usually only a thing for the FIRST round of layoffs. There will be more, and the payouts will be a LOT worse. Just, FYI.

Sorry for all the people who’ve lost their jobs, but I’m excited to see the awesome world-changing stuff they’ll make now that they’re not spending their time building FB&#x2F;Instagram.

&gt; At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.<p>This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-it&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-it&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons...</a><p>The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe&#x27;s memo and adapted it to suit their needs?

As much as I dislike Meta&#x27;s practices, this was well handled. Decent severance and support.

I agree. Two very different business responses between Musk and Zuck. I almost feel sorry for Zuck as we are witnessing meltdowns of two large companies in real-time. Musk just continues to dig his own grave…<p>I feel bad for the ppl losing their jobs but that is a very generous severance package.

As a non-tech guy who follows the tech scene:<p>87000 people to run Facebook sounds a little ridiculous.<p>These tech companies sounds like colleges these days where the number of administrators has grown 10X and the amount of teachers has stayed the same.<p>Use your money to hire people that directly contribute to your product. Use profits to &quot;do good&quot; after.

Facebook has become the <i>local</i> town square on the Internet. Thousands of active local groups is something that other social networks will have a hard time replicating. Marketplace is another feature that takes advantage of Facebook having a strong local presence, everywhere.<p>Why did they pivot towards VR and metaverse when Facebook&#x27;s strength is being the &quot;Localverse&quot;?

16 weeks of base pay + 6 months of health insurance and everything else, looks like a decent severance package at least. This seems better handled than Twitter&#x27;s layoffs.

&gt; I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go<p>_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That&#x27;s an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

I wonder why the two biggest recent layoffs were by the two largest (US-based) social networks, is this the end of an era? And where is all that advertisement money going now?<p>As a side note, it&#x27;s crazy to think that Meta stocks are currently -75% from its peak last year.

IMO the Zuck just gave Elon a lesson on how to be a grownup CEO.

Got cannned today. At least the severance is good

Honest question - what does &#x27;take accountability&#x27; and &#x27;take responsibility&#x27; actually look like for Zuckerberg here?

I&#x27;d like to highlight this quote from the statement:<p>&gt; and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected<p>Apple decisions + EU regulations?

Meta is burning $10B&#x2F;yr to build Metaverse. They are also loading up on massive debt. This is the part I don’t understand. Development is expensive but NOT this expensive! A back of the envelope calculation suggests that one can build an entire search engine infrastructure and product for the same price. Something like HoloLens from scratch would cost LESS than half of that price. A full competitive self driving E2E stack development will cost about half. Developing entire smartphone hardware and OS from scratch would cost about a third of that money. Moon worthy space rocket development will cost a tenth of this budget. One can do so much with $10B that it is absolutely mind blowing.

Google did the same sort of crazy hiring and i wonder if they will be next to layoff thousands

Genuinely curious why Meta (other big companies) hired so much during the pandemic? Did one companies make a strategic business decision to hire more based on project needs, and other companies followed on in a copy cat way? I guess maybe meta was thinking “VR will take off during pandemic and folks won’t be able to put the goggles back down ever”. I could see some companies copying it just to hedge against other companies over-recruiting and snatching some of their employees. Seems almost like a similar copy cat effort is happening now, unless they are all just admitting they over-hired.

Will the remaining staff use &quot;Mark as safe&quot; feature? &#x2F;s

For those wondering what &quot;accountability&quot; and &quot;responsibility&quot; should look like:<p>They do not need to mean punishment, they can just mean &quot;clear, concrete intent for remediation and improvement&quot;.<p>The remediation part is implemented by the severance package. The intent for improvement, is nowhere to be seen.<p>When somebody makes a mistake, punishing on its own is meaningless. The point is to remedy the mistake (eg pay money if the mistake incurred a financial loss) and prevent further future mistakes. No, the CEO should not resign, they should just identify why things went SO wrong and show a clear plan on how to prevent such mistakes from the future.<p>If someone deletes a database, I don&#x27;t expect them to resign, I expect them to restore it from a backup, and find a way to prevent such mistakes from the future (eg run migrations in a reversible transaction)

Is anyone else thinking this is very similar to Stripe CEO layoff letter(1)? Sure all lay-off letters have some similarity but I’m pretty sure any automated plagiarism detection system would flag this.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons-email...</a>

Considering the severance, Meta might have just realeased the biggest pre-seed funded class ever.

What is the composition of roles that are getting fired? I naturally tend to think about programmers but Meta (and the other big tech companies that have had big firings) have roles all over the place<p>Are they mostly getting rid of programmers?

Considering the greatly inflated tech wages in top companies, aren&#x27;t those layoffs alone likely to impact the US economy?

Im really curious how severance in non-US jurisdictions works in these cases. Both stripe and Facebook are offering WAY more than required by UK law for example. Do they offer similar packages to any UK staff laid off? Or do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?

Wonder if &quot;day in the life as a 23 year old product manager at Meta&quot; still works there...

Sad but completely unsurprising. People should realise by now that when a company starts a massive hiring boom, it will inevitably bust. Why? Because as many have said already, if you have tonnes of cash, it is easier to hire loads of people rather than hire appropriate and effective people.<p>The fact that we are talking about such an enormous number just shows how many people are part of the hive but probably not really contributing much to the company overall.<p>The worst part is that some people who <i>are</i> really effective will get caught up in the layoffs paying for the inefficiency of corporate structures.

Where are tech jobs heading in the United States and globally? Who (or what industry) is absorbing all these folks? I think the current landscape merits one of these prediction style threads on HN.

It&#x27;s amazing how similar this whole thing is to Stripe&#x27;s layoff letter, down to the exact ordering of severance, PTO, RSU, career services, immigration details and the thing about everyone losing access immediately due to sensitive information but also keeping email access for 24 hours and the bit about recruiting being most affected. It&#x27;s almost a verbatim copy.

It&#x27;s wild to me that a CEO can simultaneously take responsibility for the decision to over hire, and also suffer none of the financial consequences. In fact, META stock is up 7% on this news, so Zuck has made money on this decision.<p>I think that&#x27;s a major inefficiency in modern corporations. Executives are the last to face consequences when they make a bad decision.

&gt; Severance: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.<p>̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶.̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶5̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶2̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶a̶y̶.̶<p>I was wrong here. I read it as 16 weeks per each year of service.

&gt; I view layoffs as a last resort, so we decided to rein in other sources of cost before letting teammates go.<p>So spending a few billion less on the metaverse was not an option?

Why is this identical to Stripe’s layoff letter <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-ca&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons...</a>?

All these companies and guys just began feeling very rich and wanted to corner the market by hiring more. This is the reason every company hired more and more people. Mark was probably very bullish on VR given covid and remote work taking off. Musk felt similarly rich and bought Twitter.

Like with all lay offs, the move to cut discretionary spending and perks may also impact employee morale and motivation, and the decision to extend the hiring freeze may also limit potential growth within the company... it&#x27;s going to get worse before getting better

I totally would have been part of this layoff if I’d responded to any of the many, many FB recruiters who have contacted me in the last 18 months.<p>Why didn’t I reply? Several reasons, but importantly because if you can’t say anything nice sometimes it’s best not to say anything at all.

&gt; I’ve decided to...let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go.<p>It&#x27;s phrased as if those 11,000 were itching to go away all this time. Then Mark, in his infinite benevolence, &quot;let&quot; them finally &quot;go.&quot; He hath freed the birds from their golden cages.

Does anyone know how many of these are in engineering?

This is the slow demise of Facebook, if their pivot to AR&#x2F;VR&#x2F;Metaverse fails to catch on things will go sideways fast.

I&#x27;m surprised they announced this on a prime news day, as oppose to Friday afternoon where less attention might have been given to it.<p>(My heart goes out to all who lost their job. I&#x27;m wishing everyone well during these tough times.)

Amazing what an iOS update did.

&gt; At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.<p>There was similar wording to this in the recent Shopify announcement. I must admit, I was frustrated by it then, and I&#x27;m frustrated by it now.<p>&quot;Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration?&quot; Yeah, sure, many people <i>who don&#x27;t understand the concept of regression to the mean</i> predicted a permanent acceleration. But here&#x27;s the thing: if you thought that after months of being cooped up most people were just going to carry on sitting round their houses playing Runescape and jacking off, or never visit the shops again, you are an idiot. Now, I will grant you, there were some silver linings to the pandemic, and some people did kind of enjoy it, but there were also a <i>lot</i> of people crawling the walls who couldn&#x27;t wait to be let off the leash again. Just look at what&#x27;s happened with the travel industry and holiday chaos this past summer, at least here in the UK.<p>I saw Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan recently. I&#x27;ve got quite a lot of hostility for Meta, due to the societal damage, and personal cost to individuals, for which it&#x27;s responsible, but Mark Zuckerberg is an intelligent and interesting guy. Definitely worth listening to, not least of which because he actually comes across as a human being in this podcast episode rather than some sort of odd robot.<p>I&#x27;m incredibly disappointed that he got taken in by this idea of a permanent off trend shift to online and beyond him - and beyond Shopify - this kind of, &quot;hurr durr, we got it wrong, wut you gunna do &lt;&lt;shrugs&gt;&gt;,&quot; justification for layoffs is going to get really old really quickly.<p>There&#x27;s something really wrong with corporate governance that can look at an unprecedented situation like COVID and then jump to the conclusion that it&#x27;s going to permanently change human behaviour in the round, disregarding all previous trends: humans are, after all, still human.

Meanwhile all you hear on the mainstream news is &quot;Labor shortage&quot; &quot;No one wants to work&quot; &quot;Companies are having trouble finding talent&quot;. This smells like 2008 all over again. Housing market is tanking, MSM is lying about employment numbers. Companies are lying about how many people they are actually hiring. I went through all this back in 08. you&#x27;d put in applications and never hear anything back, then the next day you&#x27;d see the exact position you applied for listed on the job board again.

87000 people is working at meta just now. What are all those people doing? Why is so many needed? How many are developer, manager, marketers, seller, anti spam&#x2F;desinformation stuff etc etc?

&gt; Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.<p>That&#x27;s... Wrong ? Who predicted that the growth would continue ? To me and from a lot of reading I did, it was obvious by the end of 2020 that a lot of those tech companies took several years of growth in advance, not that it would continue...

Facebook employees are so much luckier than the poor twitter employees that no one cared about.

Perhaps a strong, independent board of directors could have mitigated this fiasco. The meta-verse never looked like a good idea especially after previous failures like &quot;Second Life.&quot; YMMV<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebook-metaverse-was-always-terrible&#x2F;620546&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;10&#x2F;faceb...</a>

One thing that struck me is the similarity in the wording of the Stripe and Meta layoff memos. They appear to have been written by the same AI.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timesofindia.indiatimes.com&#x2F;gadgets-news&#x2F;stripe-lays-off-14-of-workforce-read-founders-email-to-employees&#x2F;articleshow&#x2F;95298642.cms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;timesofindia.indiatimes.com&#x2F;gadgets-news&#x2F;stripe-lays...</a>

In 2000, some Hi Tech companies laid off 50%, e.g. Motorola, Meta now has 1 out of 8 laid off, seems a lot, might not be enough in the end though.

A lot of people are spouting doom and gloom for the entire industry, but I feel like Facebook had this coming. Especially since they lost billions in Meta.<p>It seems to me that there are a lot of software jobs out there, and companies can’t seem to find enough people. But that said, I’m sure the story is probably different in Silicon Valley

Fantastic. I just got laid off from my (non-Meta) job, and now I have to compete with thousands of other software engineers.<p>I suppose I knew that the cushy absurd-salary-days of software engineering had to come to a close at some point, but I guess I was just hoping it would happening after I retired.

&gt; <i>We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.</i><p>Conviction for Metaverse is unwavering. Hope some good comes out of it in future.

If 11k employees are 13% of the workforce, then Meta employed roughly 85k people.<p>Holy moly, what do all these people actually do all day long?<p>Also, assuming an average annual wage of 80k USD, that would mean 6.8 billion USD of wage costs every year. That&#x27;s quite something.

The fact that the company is still investing in the development of the metaverse, while letting go of thousands of employees, may not sit well with some... this could be just &quot;I was wrong, part 1&quot;

We’re probably going to see a decline in market comp &#x2F; offer competitiveness as the flood of big tech layoffs hits the job market and startups feed on the offerings from big companies.

When somebody in Zuckerberg&#x27;s type of role says, &quot;I take responsibility for that,&quot; how exactly do they see that responsibility play out?<p>Unrelated but that&#x27;s some nice severance.

&gt; &gt; I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.<p>He&#x27;s not taking responsibility.<p>Taking responsibility would look like him saying &quot;And I&#x27;m going to personally give 1% of my shares to those who are leaving spread equally&quot;. Responsibility means being willing to sacrifice something personal to make it right (or less wrong).<p>Zuck owns 13.6% of 2.687B shares, at a $104 a piece that 1% share would be about $30k per exiting employee. And basically no skin off his back.<p>That&#x27;s true responsibility and ownership.

I have a question...<p>If we assume that during the last 20 to 30 years that there has been no gain in actual real production efficiency increases(real reason for inequality is non-investments in actual production efficiencies by VCs and hedge funds); where is the call to re-align in VCs and hedge funds to investing in production efficiencies directly (I say directly as investing in climate green energy is an indirect production efficiency play)?

Seriously, what exactly does “I take responsibility for this” mean? Is Mark Zuckerberg going to resign as CEO or step down from the board or go with no pay for a year or two (including bonuses)? He says he’s accountable, but how exactly does this move hit him hard (except for a punch to his ego)?<p>If there are no consequences of significance for him, what’s the meaning of those words? What do the people who aren’t laid off to trust anymore?

Yeesh. Was planning on returning to tech work after a couple year hiatus in a couple months. Between this and twitter there may be some competition (:

I know a couple of my European friends were bitterly disappointed to be kept on, over there you get a nice little exit package mandated in law.

It sad to see the direction of the company go complete VR and AR. If it is the next product it would seem to catch on early with the demo.

Did they hire 11k people during the pandemic? If not then the given reason for the layoffs are clearly not the full story.

&gt; We made the decision to remove access to most Meta systems for people leaving today given the amount of access to sensitive information. But we’re keeping email addresses active throughout the day so everyone can say farewell.<p>E-mail address still working for the day? Is this the standard way to layoff employees in the US?

Even though laid-off employees will lose access to Meta internal systems today, they are welcome to utilize Facebook services to stay connected to former colleagues, friends, and family members around the world. After all, it is Facebook’s mission to create a more connected world - and that will never change.

I’m feeling sorry for everyone affected.<p>Let’s hope that this isn’t going to impact Buck [0] too much. It’s one of the best things Facebook has ever made.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;buck&#x2F;tree&#x2F;dev" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;facebook&#x2F;buck&#x2F;tree&#x2F;dev</a>

Is it better for Google and Amazon to try recruiting this available talent straightaway or keep waiting?

&gt; I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.<p>I wonder what this means in practice? Nothing? Ok, great.

&gt; But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth<p>Interesting, so the cust cuttings aren&#x27;t about being sustainable or avoiding loss, but to meet future growth expectations?<p>Couldn&#x27;t they just have like sustained a break even point until economy recovers?

I recently left my well paying job in a startup to pursue my hobbies for a few months. Now I am looking for a job again. I wonder how will I find a job with so many Meta and Twitter engineers flooding the market :&#x2F;<p>PS: I have only worked with startups including a YC startup.

&gt; the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected<p>What&#x27;s &quot;ads signal loss&quot;? Is that iPhone asking for permission to track activity across apps, causing less accurate ad placement?

Mark&#x27;s statement has a fineprint at the end about future uncertainty and &quot;forward-looking&quot; statements. I guess that&#x27;s the new way to state your point and at the same time change the meaning of it in the fineprint.

&quot;I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here.&quot;<p>...but I&#x27;m going to stay and keep all the cards on the Metaverse as my personal fortune sinks with it. For 11% of you, good luck.

Correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but if 11,000 employees is 13% of Meta&#x27;s workforce, that implies they employ close to 100,000 people? Excuse me while I involuntarily spit my coffee over my keyboard.

Over 1000 points and 900 comments in 4 hours and not #1 on the front page?

Alright people the talent pool just got more fish. Go get &#x27;em!

&quot;Desk sharing&quot;... I wonder with the cost-cutting appeal of smaller real estate footprints and remote work if the huge campus era is actually drawing to a close.

So from the looks of it, the investors see this as a good move. In 5 days Meta stock went up nearly 20% from $82 to $105.<p>Dramatic news but company holds stronger than last week.

When these big tech layoffs happen, I always wonder what proportion of those laid off are software engineers. I would not be surprised if that figure is small.

How many of them are severely disgruntled? Is my data safe?

I am wondering when will Amazon start the layoff process or that their practices are more economical and that they wont go this direction.

It would be very interesting to see a breakdown of what % of Meta employees are remote, what % are not, and what % of each are laid off.

But can they hire at least 1 person who can fix all the glaring user interface bugs on their core web app? The trade would be worth it.

It felt as if I was reading the Stripe memo.

Anyone have a quick estimate as to the number of layoffs across the tech sector in the last 3 months? Absolutely wild.

Ohh that’s a lot.<p>How can I view timeline of my companies headcount growth? Does LinkedIn have this info?<p>Edit: LinkedIn premium is required for this info

“Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended.”<p>It’s not over yet.

Meta&#x2F;FB is an immoral company, so I have almost zero sympathy if you agreed to work there in the first place.

Have all departments been equally impacted? I am curious if machine learning engineers have also been laid off

Meanwhile, the stock is up 8% today. Because maybe this shows Mark isn&#x27;t as crazy as investors thought.

I think 11000 people are going to find a brighter future at a nicer company.<p>Does anyone under 40 still use Facebook&#x2F;Meta anymore?<p>=)

Best is to know finance&#x2F;unit economy&#x2F;burn etc of your employer in good as well as bad times!

Can the market absorb all these layoffs? Will it significantly drive salaries down from peak Covid?

Quite a difference between this message and the one Twitter (i.e. Elon Musk) sent to its employees.

I&#x27;m still surprised they are using the fb.com domain. Why haven&#x27;t they move to meta.com?

Looks like the terms of the layoff are very generous. 4 months of pay, accelerated vesting, etc.

That’s ok, they hired too much people too fast. Ad revenues go down, they need to save money.

From the immigration H1b PoV looks of it a few months of severance and then there is 60 days when the clock starts ticking to find a job. Not bad.<p>From what I understand the people where the WARN act is active they have to give atleast 60 day notice in case of mass layoffs(this is different from the 60 day grace period for H1bs to transfer status).

TikTok is on a hiring spree in the US. They will get a ton of talent in great discount

Honestly I don’t have any idea where this metaverse thing is or how to get to it.

The timing of the layoff, right before the holiday season, is especially harsh...

FB still making 4Billion in profit, all the comments here dont seem to talk about that Twitter wasnt profitable, FB is and laid off 4x the amount of employees, Zuck just saw Musk do it and thought itd be a perfect time while the attention is on Musk and Twitter, that letter Zuck wrote is sick and sounds like its written by a sad emotionless robot he brags about how profitable Meta is in that letter its pathetic, reminds me of the 70s and Reagan and neoliberalism making changes to laws to allow capital flight from New York to the south and firing all the well paid factory workers in the Bronx 10,000 families now without a breadwinner over night Zuck blew through billions on his VR research that no ones buying and just saw the perfect opening to sharpen his technocrat knives and surgically remove 11,000 employees even though they all contributed to making Meta be 4B in profit and it was Zuck who blew billions he needs his stock to bounce back so he can continue buying the rest of Hawaii

How much of the &quot;metaverse&quot; group is being laid off? Anyone know?

Could the title match the post tile to follow the hackernews guidelines?

Where would you advertise for ex-Meta or ex-Twitter developers?

They should join fresh ex-twitter employees and incorporate.

“I want to take responsibility” vs “I take responsibility”.

laying off 11k employees while still claiming to be &quot;historically important&quot; and &quot;profitable&quot;... Poor attempt to stay positive IMO

This is the best toned layoff announcement I’ve read.

HR is annoying in most of cases. Their job should be (and could be) automated via bots.<p>My thought is, the reason is most of them lack of logical thinking skills, that&#x27;s why they&#x27;re HR in first place ?

I&#x27;m surprised by this direct and candid tone.

While I truly feel the best outcome for humanity is Facebook&#x2F;Meta shutting down, I will give due credit to the PR and HR teams for managing to make Zuck look human in this moment.

Z̶u̶c̶k̶ Zorg fires 1 million: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r0mO6UY6uTg</a>

Sweet baby rays

meta hiring bar was ridiculous compared to the quality of their code. i passed the bullshit interview, standards was higher than Google, and then joined and saw some of the worst code&#x2F;designs i&#x27;ve ever seen. at least Google code quality was fantastic.<p>fuck mark and his 1000 acres he stole on Kauai. karma is a bitch.

Getting tired of “I take responsibility” without taking responsibility.

Bad Musk &#x2F;s

I&#x27;m sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

Imagine complying with the covid vaccine mandates against what you otherwise would have done, and then you get laid off anyway. What a gut punch.

&quot;We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas [like] our long-term vision for the metaverse&quot;<p>Imagine laying off eleven thousand people so you can keep clinging to the disintegrating corpse of the metaverse.

Severance summary:<p><pre><code> Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap. PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time. RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 15, 2022 vesting. Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for people and their families for six months. Career services. We’ll provide three months of career support with an external vendor, including early access to unpublished job leads. Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before termination and some visa grace periods, which means everyone will have time to make plans and work through their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration specialists to help guide you based on what you and your family need.</code></pre>

The world runs on certain types of software. I doesn&#x27;t run on social media, or video streaming, or &quot;AI&#x2F;ML&quot;, or search. So it doesn&#x27;t actually run on FAANG companies. It is no surprise they are shedding workers when the free money runs out. But if you are willing to work on &quot;boring software&quot; that provides actual economic value - logistics, HR&#x2F;Payroll, or really anything people actually pay to use because it boosts their productivity - I wouldn&#x27;t worry too much.<p>This was true during the .com bust, 2008 dip, and it will be true now.

Facebook (&quot;Meta&quot;) made $46.7 Billion in Profit in 2021. They have $42 Billion in cash. If the average engineer is paid $150k then these 11k people would cost the company 150,000 x 11,000 = 1,650,000,000 ($1.6 Billion&#x2F;year) Mark Zuckerberg could _easily_ afford to keep these people employed and focus their efforts towards improving the safety of the platform e.g: stopping Human Trafficking, Drug Dealing and Child Abuse all documented extensively in the Facebook Papers. They are failing to protect the most vulnerable people in society while sitting on a _mountain_ of cash. Shame on you Mark.

Many many moons ago when i pointed out that FAANG are modern day fords and chryslers everyone thought i was exaggerating. Actually if you think about it they are in an even more precarious position as no one really _needs_ them and their popularity are a thing of fashion, and are far from too big to fail.<p>Edit: Linkedin shows 300k jobs available in the us for the term &quot;software engineer&quot;. I like to think and hope that things will be fine for those laid off.

All the people who failed META&#x27;s shitty interview&#x27;s are quietly laughing now. The world is round folks.

All social media companies hire too many folks and now cutting expenses to meet their target for shareholders. Yet, only Twitter seems to get lots of backslashes compared to other FANGS. Why? I wonder if this relates to Elon Musks&#x27; ongoing outbursts on Twitter regarding his political and other conservative views. I believe I answered my own questions. Ha!

Good. About time. $180K per employee for years is not sustainable.<p>This is the general &#x27;Tech Crash&#x27; I was talking about before all of this happened in advance. [0] [1]<p>We&#x27;ll see what happens after the news. No company is safe. Not even FAAMNG companies that HN has been screaming about for years was ever untouchable.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22663119" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22663119</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29508238" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29508238</a>

While many are commenting that these layoffs are sensible given the situation, I am fearful that laying off approximately 13% of Meta employees will lead to a less connected world. I don’t think people fully understand the magnitude of step-backwards it will be in terms of people connecting in this world. Does Zuckerberg take responsibility for what this will mean to people who simply need to connect more through great products developed by Facebook and future technologies being developed by Meta?