Mass layoffs expected today at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook

[failquail]

Is this a billionaire race to see who can bankrupt thier own companies the fastest?

[failquail]

@Mister44

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.

Have you seen the recent videos?

It’s like if you took a 10years old second life experience, used half of a nintendo-Wii avatar, then tied it to the most expensive VR headset on the market…

The chances of this working is like >1%

I Played Facebook's VR Metaverse so you don't have to

[anon81034786]

@Akimbo_NOT

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

@gracchus

It says a lot about the short-sighted greed that underlies the American investor culture.

Having played in the Silicon Valley tech space for most of my career, I’ve never seen such a boom/bust 180 degree turn happen so quickly based on nothing but pure speculation and fear of a looming recession that may not even happen. Six months ago EVERY tech company had plans to double staff and couldn’t hire fast enough because of rosy projections based on the last 2 years of pandemic business spending. Every company bragged about record revenues coming in and everyone thought the party was just getting started. Fast forward to not just the instant hangover but the frantic window jumping of all these tech CEOs taking orders from their true bosses…the VCs on Sand Hill Rd.

The myopia displayed over the past few years from these so-called “visionaries” is absolutely stunning and the massive layoffs happening now in some of the largest tech companies in the world…those with literally TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars just sitting in their bank accounts… money they could use to weather years of economic downturns without firing a single employee - really illustrates just how fucked up our end stage capitalist economy is right now. Employees are not viewed as “our most valuable asset” (oh how many times have I heard this phrase during interviews…) but tissues that can be discarded at whim in order to boost the share price a couple of bucks.

At least prior tech crashes were warranted because of real structural failures - over investment in the dot com days, housing market crash in 2008. This one is simply pure fear and greed. Makes ZERO logical sense.

[gracchus]

Related might be the cratering of FTX in the cryptocurrency space. Here again, we see another weird supposed tech genius sh*tting the bed and betraying those around him.

If I never see another photo of Studiously Schlubby Sam in my news feed it won’t be soon enough.

[Akimbo_NOT]

Grocery stores of all a sudden have money to buy other grocery stores, airlines have enough cash on hand to buy other airlines even after begging for billions of dollars in COVID relief funds, oil and gas companies making obscene profits yet the 1%, ala Wallstreet, all have raging hardons for a recession to lay off even more people so they can increase shareholder value.

Assholes.

[anon52120741]

@Brainspore

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.

Capitalism requires that companies eventually move into new business lines that they are not very good at…the way that this ends up eventually killing many corporations is maybe the one good thing about capitalism (though, of course, capitalism manages to do all of this in the worst way with the most possible damage to the employees and customers of these corporations)

I have questioned this impulse many times always to be met with “Must constantly increase shareholder value! Anything else is basically committing fraud against your shareholders!”. If I was doing that right now I would follow up with “How is that working out for Meta shareholders?”

[anon52120741]

MANY businesses thought this for some reason - Netflix, for example, is not actually in trouble, but they thought the pandemic rise in viewers would last forever, there are a lot of other examples. It’s because these companies are run by people that are bad at their jobs, I assume.

[teknocholer]

@gracchus

There are few things that are guaranteed to juice the price of a stock more than massive cuts to employee headcount.

[Loudmouth]

The employees subject to layoffs could make a claim that they have no legs to leave their virtual workspaces.

[ZombieRasputin]

@anon52120741

I have questioned this impulse many times always to be met with “Must constantly increase shareholder value! Anything else is basically committing fraud against your shareholders!”. If I was doing that right now I would follow up with “How is that working out for Meta shareholders?”

My wife is a graduate of an MBA program, and this is the unquestioned gospel that all these programs are spewing out, all over the country. Endless growth is required. Sustainability only comes once you have destroyed everybody else in the market segment. She was met with blank stares when she started going up the ladder of “everything” to prove that Capitalism believes that we live in an open system, and yet we are very much confined to a closed system (Earth).

These MBA professors and students simply cannot understand anything else.