> figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale
This is the thing that boggles my mind. They spent their budget. They have 4 months of data. What do they have to show for it?
I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it.
But are you saying that Uber made this tool available, urged everybody to use it, and is confused about what happens when it worked? It's one thing if they decide AI isn't productive enough to be worth the cost.
Are they out of ideas on what to build next, or something?
The personal max and teams plan actually are an amazing bargain compared to the API PAYG cost you get with Enterprise. I guess they really need their Enterprise features though, otherwise they could just tell users to expense a $200 max sub. Enterprises gonna Enterprise.
- Claude Team plan is limited to 150 now[1]. You can mix between Premium (equivalent of Max 5x) and standard (Pro like)
- ChatGPT business is not user count limited (AFAIK) however business plan only supports the equivalent of Plus there is no Pro equivalent.
For larger organizations it will still come down to usage billing . The ChatGPT plan is quite limiting for most users and the only option is usage/credit billing for more consumption. Claude has the more generous usage in Team but limited to 150 users.
My guess is nothing you can see right now, since it likely takes a lot longer for any substantial external-facing changes to roll out broadly. Internally I'm sure several features have moved faster. I've noticed this at Salesforce where it certainly seems like things that would have taken a few weeks take a few days now. This doesn't translate directly to more money, just more potential to make money.
> Are they out of ideas on what to build next, or something?
Well, what is there for Uber to build next? They have their ride hailing platform. It works. They have adapted it for other kinds of delivery (food, groceries, "anything that fits in a car") What else is there in the "someone driving a car" space for them?
> I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it.
I'm glad to see we've reached the point of AI discourse at which anything that might be construed as criticism must be prefixed by "I'm also part of the cult, I'm not a non-believer, but" to avoid being dismissed as a heretic.
It's an honest surprise that this isn't spun as "internal AI efficiency gains." They want the efficiency, of course there's AI component, but they're not pre-claiming victory. Neat.
It's worth remembering that there's an _actual_ underlying economic problem here. Interest rates are up. AI spending is expensive. A dollar invested in a company needs to do _more_ than it did 5 years ago, relative to sitting in treasury bills. And Meta isn't delivering on that right now.
But IMHO: that's no excuse. This is admitting defeat, deciding to push the share price higher while they give up. Meta has the user data, the AI ambitions, the distribution, and the brand.
They could do anything, and the world is re-inventing itself. They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
What people dislike is the boom-bust cycle inherent to all levels of a market economy. During some years, these companies suck people up like a vacuum -- that can be bad if you're on the inside and all of a sudden the culture goes out the window, or if you're expected to onboard 3-4 people at the same time, or you end up with a reorg every quarter. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, companies shut down (non-backfill) hiring entirely and layoff huge percentages of the company, with no guarantee that you'll be safe just because you're doing a good job.
Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.
Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
yeah, these big layoffs don't add up to me right now.
if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?
making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.
I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.
Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.
I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.
There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone.
Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China.
Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip.
Oh, and Europe can only do this stuff because of the USA military, by the way.
That obtained the cutting edge technology by buying an American company that had been founded to productize technology developed at an American defense laboratory based on a Japanese researcher’s work
You are forgetting 20 years and billions of dollars developing, in collaboration with research institutes like IMEC and funding from chipmakers like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.
But it doesn’t fit your ideological narrative of how innovation functions so…
I am not the person you originally replied to. I have no ideological motivation here. I am merely pointing out ASML did not invent EUV, nor did they fund its initial development or the first decade or so of its productization. ASML employs plenty of scientists and engineers who did important work getting EUV to market, but your characterization implied that ASML single-handedly introduced a step-function increase in semiconductor fabrication technology from their labs in the Netherlands, and that is a misleading impression to give. It’s belied by the fact that ASML can’t even choose their own customers without approval from the U.S. government.
I believe that it's a bit more complicated than that especially if we look at the contributions of IMEC.
But irregardless I can hand you the point that you are making and then say that yours is a very tight standard that would not pass most of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley.
The point I'm trying to make for the initial poster is that they are confusing "technological innovation" for money making. And yes you don't have a money printing machine in the EU, but you have A LOT of technological innovation that eventually goes to market through SV.
I think it’s to their credit that they don’t have one and instead got cern.
A bunch of shitty crud apps made by mediocre rent seekers that got rich on tax avoidance, gov money + research, and low interest rates vs actual ground breaking research that benefits humanity. Silicon Valley is probably the worst thing that happened to humanity between the 2008 crash and Covid. People have been figuring it out but not after they have already given these scammers permission to inspect their wallets.
Wow. Can't tell if this is a parody or just very, very uninformed. Either way, good day. Hope you understand, one day, how technology has helped millions of people in many different ways.
I'm tired of this American exceptionalism. Success is not only about money. It's about making a positive impact on the world for everyone. This is where the big tech companies deeply fail.
America poisons the world with pollution (eg pulling out of Paris Agreement), misinformation, promoting discord as 'engagement', unnecessary military engagements and screwing up the rest of the world.
And really, abdicating 'leadership' was already done by America by voting for Trump.
Billions and billions of people willingly use these products. Are you saying they use them because they are bad for them and they don't like them and don't value them?
No they use them because they are addictive, intentionally. But they reinforce negative emotional content because it is more engaging. This is what causes all the polarisation in society, what gave us Brexit and Trump. See for example the book Careless People, it describes how Facebook set up a huge consulting operation with the Trump campaign to get him into office.
But they are bad for society, it's not for no reason that a lot of countries are trying to ban them for the younger generations now, similar to smoking.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
It would be better because it would create a more diverse work space where multiple employers complete for employees, instead of one company playing musical chairs with people
A few companies get almost all investments. They start a lot of projects fast and close the ones that don’t work
If companies stuck to fewer projects, money would be invested in other companies focusing on specific products, you get a lot of companies and not the market concentration you got today (which is responsible according to few economists to a lot of the us labor market dysfunctions it is currently experiencing)
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
Well Apple seems to be able to largely avoid these staffing whiplash problems…
I mainly call them problems because hugely scaling your org up and down on a whim is extremely inefficient when your recruiting and onboarding costs are high. Surely it’s more wise to repurpose the people you already have unless you have no time horizon on appropriate new areas of R&D.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
No but purposely forcing economic hardship on people when you're one of the most profitable entities on earth will always be a shitty thing. I'm sorry but treating workers like replaceable cogs is disgusting behavior and I'm not shocked that big tech routinely turns to anti-worker devices to enforce control.
Attacking? Nowhere did I attack anybody. Explaining what a layoff is not "attacking". If you are offended by market economics I suggest you get thicker skin.
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
why do we feel that way? it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
unless you mean that the quality of domestic workers is declining, which i'd agree in most things (tho for some things like software i think still has a chance)
I don't think the quality of US workers has to decline. The quality of workers in lower CoL places like India simply has to increase, and it has. Both of the companies I've worked for have opened India campuses in the past few years.
I hire for such companies and the quality of US workers vs foreign workers who move here on visas is much different. To be fair, foreign workers who move here on visas tend to be the rich and highly educated of their own country and US workers are more distributed across SES. They also have more education on paper bc they usually need a masters or more to be eligible to work here
The compensation of software tech (especially Silicon Valley) has also gotten much higher over the past number of years in the US compared to disciplines requiring the same level of education/experience both is the US and even Western Europe. I expect this will equalize with outsized tech salaries becoming a thing of the past except for a few individuals with proven track records.
I mean, the same can be said for consulting salaries, HFT salaries, hedge fund salaries, etc., which similar to software engineering only require a bachelor's and have a similarly grueling interview process.
Why would this equalize? As long as software companies make huge profits and have growth capability which the top ones clearly do, what change would make this happen?
Some software companies are making huge profits today. Many software jobs are at companies making returns comparable to other engineering job profits. There's also a supply side. If the market is flooded with a lot of people in it mostly for the money, salaries will supposedly shrink.
we've seen that most of the people who are only in it for the money don't actually bring much value to the company. a lot of middling software engineers are actually a liability. unlike operational work, engineering needs to have a higher bar than just a beating heart and hands
Too simplistic of a hot take. People have families and other reasons _not_ to emigrate. I also know people who moved to big tech companies in the states, worked there for a number of years and then went back home to “emerging countries” to be closer to their roots.
>it's becoming more and more likely that developments in AI lead to a K graph in experience / value - senior / self sufficient workers will be significantly more valuable than ever.
I don't buy this at all, this narrative feels like pure cope to me. The skill ceiling for working with AI tooling is not that high (far lower than when everyone had to write all their code by hand, unquestionably). To me it seems far more likely that software engineering will become commoditized.
I'm sure everyone posting about the supposed K graph believes that they're on the valuable side of it, naturally.
American workers got uppity. Forgot their place. Started protesting company decisions and wouldn't return to office. Hiring may eventually come back but not any time soon. Workers need to be chastised first.
Offshoring has been a common practice for decades, it works great for some functions and not great for others. Why would it suddenly have a massive uptick in 2027?
Meta has done several rounds of such layoffs since the post COVID interest rate hikes and they do not have a larger employee presence abroad since then.
They also, unlike a lot of their cohorts in FAANG, don't have a significant engineering presence in India and it hasn't rapidly grown since COVID either.
I’m curious why this meme is so sticky. In the early 2000s people were also panicking that all the software jobs were going to India and never coming back. It was so pervasive it made the cover of Wired magazine, but it never happened. Why is this time different?
The reason it never happened wasn't that MANY jobs went off-shore (they did) but that the pace of this paled in comparison to number of new jobs that were opening up on-shore. Now that we are seeing demand stall on-shore this is going to hit the front more-so than before. Many layoff news later come with "oh by the way, we also hired x,xxx people off-shore. I think has generally been overblown but I think it is a thing if someone actually wanted to run "America First" campaign and actually mean it, to outlaw or make off-shore development cost-prohibitive. I work on a project in a company that employs now about 1k people and over 40% of that workforce is off-shore. Just about every colleague I have (DC metro area) that works at another joint is in the same spot (or much worse, like CGI etc which doesn't even have developers on-shore anymore...)
Maybe it did happen, but the expansion of broadband internet, and then mobile broadband internet, caused an enormous demand for additional and different types of programmers that was unable to be satiated by people outside of the US.
It "never happened" only in aggregate, which is sometimes irrelevant and always hard to see for an individual employee who's worried about their individual career. IBM had 150,000 US employees in 2000 and 50,000 today.
Sure, but there's no getting around how terrible it is to communicate and coordinate between PST and IST. One of the divisions I currently work with operates in a model where the "drivers" are all in the US and there's a large IST-based team that "executes". It's ... not great, and nobody on either side of the equation likes it. And all the people involved are very smart! But it really does matter, and we're seeing a lot of things move far slower than initially thought.
Why are people so focused on India when it comes to outsourcing?
US dev salaries are so much higher than the rest of the world that basically you could hire anywhere in Europe and still save most of the cost per person.
You could go to LATAM if you want the same timezone.
On the corollary, salaries of capable Indian developers have certainly caught up to most Western countries, so that you wont be saving much per person.
Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.
AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.
Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.
Not going to argue about what will or will not happen (predictions are hard, especially about the future), but you absolutely don't need AI to explain layoffs at Meta. On one hand they have a failed investment in Metaverse and an underwhelming attempt to participate in AI race. On the other hand they have a stable advertising business that doesn't need much innovation, but can always benefit from some cost cutting
They obviously biffed it by hiring for a bad moonshot when the pandemic money printers were turned on, and now they have plenty of belt tightening to do.
Also doesn't help that nobody can say how many people it needed to develop and maintain software even before AI. Elon declared the emperor had no clothes.
He really didn’t tho. X was constantly breaking and falling apart in his hands, so he repackaged it in xAI where he got a bunch of money to hire a bunch of engineers to develop features and keep it running. It’s still not profitable. But people have no critical thinking skills so they haven’t noticed this
I'd argue Twitter not breaking down after layoffs is good for the industry. It means you can roughly see investment in software as capex - once it's built, it's built.
You still need engineers to innovate though, but industry has no idea what innovation still makes sense except, maybe, AI. That's why everyone is investing in it, there are just not many other places to invest.
Did he really? X is constantly more buggy than Twitter ever was.
Right now they have a bug where post appears duplicated as a reply to itself (you can tell it's a bug because liking one automatically likes the other).
The obvious problem is that you can't run a consumer economy without consumers. No one cares about warehouse robots if no one has the income to buy what's in the warehouses.
For "no one" substitute "more and more of the working population."
I suspect oligarchs believe they can automate their way out of this. The little people will be surplus to requirements, and measures will be taken to eliminate most of us in due course.
But the manufacture of everything is both global and industrial. You need to run things at a certain scale.
Even if we had AGI tomorrow there's still a huge gap between where we are today and a hypothetical low-population global post-AGI robot economy.
And if burn through that straight into ASI no one knows - or likely can even imagine - what that would look like.
but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?
I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.
It depends what your company does. In my case we are double our output and probably will be triple by summer. We are building new adjacent products and more complex features. Smoking our competition. So they better keep up or we will eat them. We let go of one person in the fall who just couldn't work this new way. Our head count is going to stay the same or go up by one more hire in the next few months. We are a dev/qa team of five people now, do billing systems...
Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
> But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.
Definitely makes it harder to make long term plans/commitments. It was tolerable at least when the market was decent, ie, if you were reasonably good at what you did you could be confident about landing a new role before your severance ran out (typically within a couple months-ish). If this current state of the tech market is the new normal, where it takes many months of searching to land something, that alone will likely cause many to reconsider this field, I think.
> They're ... laying off people, maximizing profits, and giving up.
Cowards.
To play devil’s advocate, what they’re doing is not remotely cowardly, it is the entire point of their existence
They have a lever they can pull that will increase profits and the stock price. Why the hell else does a company like Meta even exist? It sure as hell isn’t to provide jobs to meat bags, and anyone that thinks it is needs a very quick lesson about the real world.
They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.
That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.
This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people.
They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.
I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.
The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...
It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".
That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.
this seems a little hyperbolic without knowing details. they probably already cut around 5% every year for performance anyway (their performance reviews probably just came out). i could pretty easily see the rest of the reduction being unprofitable businesses like VR that they don't want to invest in anymore, it might not be due to AI at all
Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.
They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)
I can pretty much agree with everything you said in the first line
but for the second, I guess I don't consider that terrible? they make risky bets, pay people tons and tons of money to try them, then if it doesn't work out they shut down the projects and let the people go? that feels like every startup except the employees actually get compensated. if that's driving the extra layoffs, it's hard to feel too bad for people who have probably been paid millions already
who cares? I'm saying the people that take the jobs for the incredibly risky bets (and everyone knows what is risky) understand the tradeoff--if the bet doesn't work their job is at risk. In the meantime they get paid millions of dollars. That seems like a fair situation to me
You make fair points there. I think what bothers me is that they can be so irresponsible with money/their projects, but still somehow manage to make very high margins, and yet they continue to just lay off thousands at a time like this repeatedly. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to it other than typical “number go up” nonsense.
The fact is Facebook had serious red flags going up that the AI boom has papered over (for now?) as well. They don’t make a lot of sense to me.
I don’t know how to tie this all together to be honest. It’s a lot of feelings/emotional response. But frankly it just feels cruel how they treat their employees and our society, so it colors my perception of everything they do.
meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.
they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.
There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.
I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.
Facebook is of course a company that had ONE idea, which wasn't even original - trick people to use the service and then use their data in inappropriate ways. I believe their original business plan was "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
They scaled that idea, made a lot of money doing it because of course, bought up a bunch of companies who themselves had original and ethical ideas. But they were never allowed to shine brighter or step out of the shadow that is Facebook, who still believes their customers are "dumb fucks". That never changed and Facebook's current customers, employees, shareholders, and targets of acquisitions need to remember that and never kid themselves about who Facebook is.
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.
Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.
Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market? Doesn't this presuppose that people are entitled to keep their job as long as they want to, and if the company no longer needs them, it's a violation of that right?
And even if it's because the leaders of the company misjudged something, I'm unclear how that means that employees who were laid off have had some great injustice visited upon them.
I got laid off from Block a little over a year ago, and I wasn't salty about it at all. They paid me millions of dollars over the years I was there, they gave me great severance, and I don't view myself as entitled to be able to sell my labor to them, just as I don't view them as being entitled to buy my labor. I wouldn't have felt bad ending my employment if it was best for me, why should they feel bad for doing the same?
> Why must a mistake have been made, as opposed to just changes in the market?
If you're high up at a company like Meta, you likely have a compensation package worth millions a year.
The question is what are they being paid for if not to be "better" at steering the ship than others? They always tell us they are brilliant leaders who bring more value to the company than others could or would.
So if they're just following the market like everyone else, and having to react with large reversals, then to me, it starts to poke some pretty large holes in this idea that they are somehow the best of the best. It starts to look like their only real skills are self-promotion and career advancement. Not because they're better at operating the company, but because they're better at office politics.
This is nothing new of course, this is the way most organizational structures have worked since the dawn of time. The people with power are given deference and privilege commensurate with being elite, but really they're just average at doing their actual job and kind of guessing their way through it. I'm not saying Meta is special or uniquely culpable for this mistake here. I'm saying it's a sad fact of life and maybe, just maybe, if we all start saying out loud this truth, that this is something we could change as a society.
It's more that the psychologically broken people who are also somewhat lucky and intelligent and hard-working end up being those "richest people" - they almost all have some kind of impostor/self-esteem issue. Pretty sure there are a lot of anonymous people with $25M net worth who are happily out rock climbing, traveling, etc.
As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it.
"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
The strength of a focus group is (or should be, anyway) that it's representative. It makes sense that their overall reception of a work is a more accurate estimate of its eventual popularity than the maker's.
However, the maker has tried many things, and among them will be things which are obviously bad (to anyone) if you actually try it.
Story time: in 2008, I went to the big board game fair in Essen and got to try the then-new game Dominion. I think most people who did, knew that this game was going to be hugely popular and influential, which it was. Donald X. Vaccarino is a really, really good game designer. And sure enough, it spawned the genre of deck building games, games where you build a deck as you play (as opposed to collectible card games, which are an important ancestor). But the first few attempts to adopt improve on the formula were pretty lousy.
What's interesting is that Donald X. posted dev diaries, writing at length about what he had tried and rejected. And although I'm pretty sure he did not follow the Dominion-likes closely (the dev diaries may even have been written before many of them), the things he'd tried and rejected were exactly what the Dominion-likes tried to add as their twist. Multiple currencies, like Thunderstone had, he'd tried rejected because it was too high variance. "Pick one of the cards on offer" like Ascension had, he'd also tried first, and found that the game was deeper and more fun if everyone had access to buy the same cards. (The "Pick one of three" mechanic would turn out to work much better in solo/computer games, however, as Slay the Spire's success is proof of!)
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Yes. People who live and breathe your product should absolutely be listened to. Especially when they don't have the super-user tools you do for support (or unconsciously rounding off sharp edges).
It's true. There's probably not a clean rule for when to listen and when not to.
I would propose as a heuristic that for the early stage, when your product relies on true-fans, you at least consider the content of a complaint more and don't just treat it as a signal that something somewhere is wrong. Bringing it back to the OP, I'm sure this is what Card did himself.
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
LLM writing is not adding value to the discussion.
The slightly inflated rhetoric whose tells are false contrast and unnecessary parallelism let me know that a human did not spend time writing that comment. Why should humans spend time reading it?
> Wait for a beloved brand to hit financial trouble. Buy the intellectual property out of bankruptcy: the name, the logo, the trademarks.
The alternative is to shut down. That's how this whole system works: the brand can be sold, because the alternative is to cease existing.
I hate that the brand is worthwhile on its own. But: that's the point! The company invested in making the brand worth something by having it represent a promise. That promise isn't worth anything when the brand can be sold separately from the process of making the thing. The brand continues to be worth something, though.
This mechanism is a core feature of capitalism. Companies can be sold for parts, and those parts can lie to consumers. There's almost certainly a regulatory answer, but the behavior of the roll-up firms isn't unique to any particular firm. It's exactly the kind of value extraction the system is designed to support.
I'd offer a different approach: think about how you're going to validate. An only-slightly-paraphrased Claude conversation I had yesterday:
> me: I want our agent to know how to invoke skills.
> Claude: [...]
> Claude: Done. That's the whole change. No MCP config, no new env vars, no caller changes needed.
> me: ok, test it.
> Claude: This is a big undertaking.
That's the hard part, right? Maybe Claude will come back with questions, or you'll have to kick it a few times. But eventually, it'll declare "I fixed the bug!" or summarize that the feature is implemented. Then what?
I get a ton of leverage figuring this out what I need to see to trust the code. I work on that. Figure out if there's a script you can write that'll exercise everything and give you feedback (2nd claude session!). Set up your dev env so playwright will Just Work and you can ask Claude to click around and give you screenshots of it all working. Grep a bunch and make yourself a list of stuff to review, to make sure it didn't miss anything.
Amen. Making the checking painless and easy to do is a major boon. There's a spectrum of "checking is easy": the compiler telling you the code doesn't compile is the easiest, but doesn't capture "is this the program I want". Some checks like that are inherently not mechanically checkable and some sort of written "testing protocol" is necessary.
It's fun to combine with qmk [0], which gives you a bunch more options for hotkeys on your keyboard via layers. I've ended up with a layer where half the keyboard is Hammerspoon shortcuts directly to apps (e.g. go to Slack, to Chrome, etc.) and half of it is in-app shortcuts (like putting cmd-number on the home row, for directly addressing chrome tabs).
Between this and one of the tiling window manager-adjacent tools (I use Sizeup), I can do all my OS-level navigation directly. "Oh I want to go to Slack and go to this DM" is a few keystrokes away, and not dependent on what else I was doing.
Also true! The most important thing is that the NewSlacks commit to interoperability. I think Anthropic has a special opportunity to lead the way here, because they have a track record of standing by their principles to an extraordinary degree.
Why on earth would Anthropic commit to interoperability?
That is the company that doesn't interoperate with the standard LLM APIs that OpenAI developed, which everyone else in the industry has adopted and uses. Whether OpenAI's APIs are great or perfect or not, they are the standard that the industry has settled on.
You must be the only one that remembers this because the rest of the comments are dumping on the idea. I don't think it's such a bad one. Presumably its easier for their agents to knock out than a web browser or a compiler.
The push for simplicity can't be at the time of recognition. It has to be during the building, so that by the time the thing gets built, it's the simplest thing that met the need.
Can you actually imagine a promo committee evaluating the technical choices? "Ok, this looks pretty complex. I feel like you could have just used a DB table, though? Denied."
Absolutely not! That discussion happens in RFCs, in architecture reviews, in hallway meetings, and a dozen other places.
If you want simplicity, you need to encourage mentorship, peer review, and meaningful participation in consensus-building. You need to reward team-first behavior and discourage lone-wolf brilliance. This is primarily a leadership job, but everybody contributes.
But that's harder than complaining that everything seems complicated.
>Can you actually imagine a promo committee evaluating the technical choices? "Ok, this looks pretty complex. I feel like you could have just used a DB table, though? Denied."
A committee with no skin in the game, who knows? But a manager who actually needs stuff done, absolutely.
"Red lines" does not mean some philosophical line they will not cross.
"Redlines" are edits to a contract, sent by lawyers to the other party they're negotiating with. They show up in Word's Track Changes mode as red strikethrough for deleted content.
They are negotiating the specifics of a contract, and Anthropic's contract was overly limiting to the DoD, whereas OpenAI's was not.
Having recently set up sentry, at least one of the ways they use this is to auto-configure uptime monitoring.
Once they know what hosts you run, it'll ping that hostname periodically. If it stays up and stable for a couple days, you'll get an alert in product: "Set up uptime monitoring on <hostname>?"
Whether you think this is valid, useful, acceptable, etc. is left as an exercise to the reader.
This is the thing that boggles my mind. They spent their budget. They have 4 months of data. What do they have to show for it?
I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it.
But are you saying that Uber made this tool available, urged everybody to use it, and is confused about what happens when it worked? It's one thing if they decide AI isn't productive enough to be worth the cost.
Are they out of ideas on what to build next, or something?
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