Originally published at: Mass layoffs expected today at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook | Boing Boing
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It will be interesting to see who goes - honestly, I have no idea what Meta is doing other than setting fire to piles of money.
Hopefully the good people that work there find new jobs that do not involve subverting democracy
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Last time it was finance bros who told us that we were too stupid to understand what it was they were doing that was adding value to the world. This time it’s the tech bros.
Same same. It is we who will have our lives, and our children’s lives, indelibly altered for the worse by the throwing of billions into a black hole. Mass joblessness again awaits. Recession is a meaningless concept (“the recession is over” after 6/9 months but your life is much worse and you are poorer for three years and your expectations reset downwards. Again.) poverty isn’t.
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I suspect it will be firing the entire VR team, the ones least likely to get the axe are the infrastructure engineers and the advertising teams. Feature development in Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram may also see a downsizing. And of the three, I suspect WhatsApp may see the most layoffs because it isn’t the cash cow the other two are.
But in all honesty, layoffs are not going to solve Meta’s problems. It simply has reached saturation in almost all areas and has no more room to grow, and rather pivot to maintaining sustainable revenue it is still fixated on growth, which only results in pain and core rot.
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If it’s an indicator that this toxic company is in decline and a signal that Web3 is not all it was hyped to be I’m all for it.
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Can’t blame that on the pandemic, but they’ll try.
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So, apparently laying off 11k workers amounts to a 4% rise in META stock price this AM.
Hope that the shareholders don’t spend it all in one place.
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There are few things that are guaranteed to juice the price of a stock more than massive cuts to employee headcount. It says a lot about the short-sighted greed that underlies the American investor culture.
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Everything I have heard indicates a double down on the metaverse. We will see what happens, but I am certain whatever the outcome they are probably firing the wrong people
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That’s the truly perverse part; there hasn’t been a mass exodus from Facebook but because of the way our modern capitalist system works any company that isn’t constantly growing counts as a failure.
If you manufactured widgets and your product was so popular that almost everyone in the world was buying your widgets on a daily basis then you ought to be able to count that as a successful business model instead of panicking that you’ve run out of new people to sell widgets to.
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My partner is on the privacy regulatory compliance team.
We are ok for now. The role is unaffected and not under any review.
Had quite a moment after he got out of bed to go check his email after already getting messages from some friends.
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Layoff = stock gains is a sad consistency in the investment world. It’s an instant expense reduction. Sick, sad, gross, always really really horrible when its before holiday season; but true. 
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Before the pand, Google bought up a big slice of San Jose around one of the major mass transits sites in the city, intending to transform it into Googleville for its employees.
How’s that working out in the age of work from home/get laid off from home?
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Oh man, this guy is something else:
So the guy believed that the move to do everything online as a direct result of pandemic shutdowns would be permanent, and that it’s “unfortunate” that things didn’t go that way? Screw him.
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What’s the betting that the virtual reality people are the only ones being spared as Zuckerberg doubles down on his pet project (which is costing $10 billion a year)?
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I am as well. Those kicked to the curb first are not the ones that a company needs to shed, but the ones that the company thinks won’t fight back. My gut fear is that the team that will suffer most is the moderation and compliance teams, and the ML devs will be told how it is more vital than ever that they solve the issues around auto moderating.
Yeah, the first to go will most likely be things like QA, customer support, the Rule 34 catchers, and so on.
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From what I understand, Zuckerberg is all in on on the VR stuff, so if anything he is laying off others so he can keep throwing money into this hole that most people don’t want.
I see his big future idea on this - but I don’t think most people want to live/work that way. It will be used in limited applications. If you think I am going to strap goggles on my head all day so i can work in a virtual office and “see” my coworkers, he has no idea how people actually work.
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At least the severance packages being offered look decent–I wonder if that is in part a reaction to the shitshow over at twitter. I guess still they want to be able to attract workers in the future, which might be difficult for twitter (if it has a future).
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