The AI drive was so successful they were able to slash staff, cut stock awards for remaining staff, and find money left over for executive bonuses. AI is truly amazing.
At this point we need to accept that zuck has no talent. He simply stole someone’s amazing idea and got lucky. Every single idea he has come up with since has been a tragic failure.
Meta recruiters keep reaching to wanting me to run the gauntlet - that is their interview process.
Every time they email me, I'm tempted to ask why would I join Meta where I'll have to pour all of my energy and emotions 50-60hrs per week only to be laid off... for absolutely no reason. And Meta/Zuck have recently been going around saying the "layoffs are based on performance". So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
> The company had raised its quarterly dividend by 5 per cent last week to just over 52 cents, in another boost for investors.
Meta doesn't HAVE TO make this 10% employee pay cut for its infra buildout. Zuck is just trying to "establish dominance" in the age old battle of Capital vs Labor.
Edit:
This might seem conspiratorial, but we know practically all tech CEOs are in multiple group chats with each other. They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries. It's not like they haven't been caught doing this in the past.
I got to the end, got positive feedback and wording that said they wanted to move forward. Then the recruiter I was working with was let go in the 2023 layoffs. I tried reaching out but got nothing back. Pretty soured over the whole thing.
Meta has always been hit or miss on recruitment. I don’t see much value in engaging with their recruiters at all given how flaky they are, it might be better to just go with an internal recommendation.
do internal recommendations not end up in the same pipeline (+/- one step)? Or is it that with internal recommendations you at least have someone on the inside following up?
Same pipeline, but if it's a friend who wants to work with you then you have someone who is not in recruiting who you can ping for updates if the process gets stuck.
Depending on the company, there may even be referral bonuses so there's a financial incentive for your "insider" to follow up.
Not that I don’t believe you, but how does that even happen?! And if it was truly recruiter error, wouldn’t any reasonable hiring manager get it sorted and reschedule?
I go so far as to immediately say no to any candidates who have Meta in their history. Every meta person I’ve interviewed has been an asshole in one way or another, and not a fit for my team.
Meta, like many big tech companies, has some fantastic engineers, some lousy ones, and some in between. At this point I don’t pay too much attention to where someone worked previously, and try to get to know candidates individually. They’re all just different people, like you and me!
There are definitely things you should adjust depending on where a candidate is from. People tend to inherit things from the overall culture, particularly if it's been a major part of their career. It's better not to ask an Apple employee what they worked on in any detail, or an Amazon employee why they're leaving, for example.
Helps avoid potentially uncomfortable situations on both sides and increase the signal/noise ratio.
Generally a bad practice to automatically say no based on a single entry on a resume, no matter what that entry is. If Meta was their first and only job, maybe you could justify that view.
But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.
Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.
They are all on auto pilot.
And they dont know how to disengage it. Its really scary being around these people.
Source: worked for 2 years on exec staff of large corp CEO. Had to leave cuz its really out of control heading no where. The main goal is survival. Thats it.
Probably true going forward. Though the previous administration had two years to investigate the quarter million job losses that happened under its watch. It does not look like either party is particularly interested in acting on this issue.
Shouldn't every layoff have some element of performance? If you're asked to downsize your team, why wouldn't you think about your lowest performer first? Now that doesn't mean the CEO should be shitting on his employees in public like Elon does, but CEO discretion doesn't change the natural incentive to keep your best people.
Layoffs might have to with what a person is working (project is no longer business priority, just cutting based on performance might lead to delays) or what team a person is working on (whole org gets the axe).
A friend of mine went through the whole Meta layoff grinder last year. Guy is a Caltech PhD, literally any company would be lucky to have his brain available. It's surreal to me.
The narrative about there not being enough "talent" available in the US is such a hilarious, brazen lie. I'm disgusted at the entire industry. SWEs are negative on Amazon, Meta, etc but IMO nowhere near close to hating them enough.
They'll say whatever they need to to make the number go up, as if they didn't calculate all of this beforehand and then let people go when they saw the economy go down. Ignore the narrative.
Companies just want an excuse to save money without making wall street panic, as well as the usual cost cutting measures they've done for decades. They feel they captured the market so they aren't spending money keeping people away from competitors (and ofc startup funding is much worse too. No one to rise up). These layoffs are not a reflection of anyone's abilities as engineers.
> They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
This is super tangential to this post, but All In is a wild podcast. While one guy is re-discovering the purpose and mechanism of taxes, some other guy is claiming that it's good actually that the entire government now has to justify itself, to him, from first principles. All to a cheering crowd of fans who think these guys are obviously the smartest guys alive.
It's an insane look into a completely stupid world.
You've pretty much hit the crux of the entire problem in this one comment.
Some decidedly very dumb people who have a lot of confidence and a very large sum of money are basically controlling the zeitgeist both politically and culturally and it is not looking pretty.
It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.
Their interviews were one of the easiest things I ever did. Pay 150bucks for Leetcode, sort by company, memorize the solution and show up.
Even when solving problems in the real world, nobody sits in a dark room until moment of genius strikes. We always try some tactics others have tried and only then innovate.
> So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
Any employer who has that attitude isn't an employer you want to work for.
Just because someone didn't do well at one company, under one boss, in one team, doesn't mean that will be the case somewhere else.
As long as you come away having learned something - some new skills, what you could have done better or when you should have realized it wasn't the company/job/team for you, what you do well or don't, what work drives you or you just can't get motivated by. If it was a personality clash, did you come away with a lesson learned or realized you needed to work on interpersonal skills, that sort of thing.
Given that these CEOs are all colluding in some form all the time, do you think it's still possible to start a company as an outsider and make it a big thing without getting eaten up by them, or is that just dead in the water?
The last three Meta recruiters got a broadside from me about the insult of implying that I would join an organization run by a bottom-tier Trump lickspittle. I can't imagine how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances.
> how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances
Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.
“Left” isn’t the right framing at all. The axis of division these days is really democratic vs. authoritarian. Rule of law vs. “might makes right”. I know few educated, intellectual people who find the latter appealing (though they do exist and are loud).
I can’t imagine a lot of folks that excel at math and science are leaning hard into the party gutting the NSF and actively trying to undermine the entire scientific community.
I think that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos fit this profile, but look whom they are supporting now. Simply being part of the scientific community may not be a sufficient criterion. Other factors, such as wealth or power, may have a greater influence on their political affiliations.
The biggest predictor of political affiliation is located in the wallet. It’s not a perfect predictor but it’s pretty good, and it gets better the fatter the wallet is.
What is bizarre now is that the biggest wallets are supporting economic uncertainty.
I don’t know. I’ve met good scientists who were terrible human beings and would have been willing to defund everything except their field, because obviously everything else is useless. I have no stats, and I think they are far from the majority, but they exist. Scientists are not superhuman and some do actually vote for the face-eating leopard party.
Top SWEs tend to live in rich cities that have those jobs and lean left; they just blend in with the demographics of where their jobs are located. Like, I’m sure if there were a lot of SWE jobs available in a rich conservative city like…Riyadh…they would be leaning more right.
The top paying fully remote jobs are in AI and Crypto (blockchain). And my experience shows the top are libertarian, which is right wing if you only see the spectrum as left / right (I see it as freedom / authoritarian)
I wouldn’t have joined a year ago but it sounds like it’d be a good culture fit now. They can hire good software engineers who live in the middle of the country and happen to be Republican.
> is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that.
Ironically, you made that up lol. I know a few people who have worked at Meta as SWEs. A close friend still works there as a PM. They've all been pretty open about the work culture at Meta.
Life isn't all about money. Especially in this day and age.
>"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up
If you really don't think companies aren't taking advantadge of this strict job market that is putting a lot more SWE's in their seats instead of jumping; I wish you the best at your current or future job.
Of all the companies battling, I can see Meta win. If they can keep their users on their platforms, they will stay alive. Look how easy it was to sway elections with one social network. Imagine applying AI to a much larger network.
Most despicable of companies.
Keeps laying off people and destroying lifelihoods in the process, cutting stock awards for others but executives get their bonuses increased by a cool 160%
indeed. But I guess people will ride the wave in automating their career away as long as they get theirs. I can only imagine how Gen Alpha is going to experience this workforce.
I always thought of automating my career away as, you know, a success story. Your solutions and knowledge become code, which lets the next generation build on top.
I initially would agree. Automate the tedious stuff and then you or the next generation builds more tech on that. That's how it worked for some 3-4 generations in tech.
The unfortunate part here is that there may not be a next generation with the way the incentive structures are setup. If there is, I highly, highly doubt any of Gen Alpha will enjoy the compensation that SWE's in the 00's and 10's did. We're aiming to be the next EE's in terms of career trajectory. And we certainly don't have the safety nets needed for a post-jobs world as of now.
https://archive.is/OFC3C
The AI drive was so successful they were able to slash staff, cut stock awards for remaining staff, and find money left over for executive bonuses. AI is truly amazing.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-introduces-200-exec-bonus-sc...
[AI CHRO](https://ai-chro.org) strikes again. I got an instant Fire Next Half rating on the assessment portal.
> The group reduced its annual distribution of stock options by about 10 per cent for most of its staff
I thought the reduction would be much bigger given the headline.
At this point we need to accept that zuck has no talent. He simply stole someone’s amazing idea and got lucky. Every single idea he has come up with since has been a tragic failure.
Ohh. He's a good as long as he pays good stocks..
You dont need talent to succeed. Just grit and certain ruthlessness. If the market awards this behaviour then whatever.
Meta recruiters keep reaching to wanting me to run the gauntlet - that is their interview process.
Every time they email me, I'm tempted to ask why would I join Meta where I'll have to pour all of my energy and emotions 50-60hrs per week only to be laid off... for absolutely no reason. And Meta/Zuck have recently been going around saying the "layoffs are based on performance". So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
> The company had raised its quarterly dividend by 5 per cent last week to just over 52 cents, in another boost for investors.
Meta doesn't HAVE TO make this 10% employee pay cut for its infra buildout. Zuck is just trying to "establish dominance" in the age old battle of Capital vs Labor.
Edit:
This might seem conspiratorial, but we know practically all tech CEOs are in multiple group chats with each other. They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries. It's not like they haven't been caught doing this in the past.
I got to the end, got positive feedback and wording that said they wanted to move forward. Then the recruiter I was working with was let go in the 2023 layoffs. I tried reaching out but got nothing back. Pretty soured over the whole thing.
Meta has always been hit or miss on recruitment. I don’t see much value in engaging with their recruiters at all given how flaky they are, it might be better to just go with an internal recommendation.
do internal recommendations not end up in the same pipeline (+/- one step)? Or is it that with internal recommendations you at least have someone on the inside following up?
Same pipeline, but if it's a friend who wants to work with you then you have someone who is not in recruiting who you can ping for updates if the process gets stuck.
Depending on the company, there may even be referral bonuses so there's a financial incentive for your "insider" to follow up.
That's brutal. I had a recruiter get both dates wrong for both stages of an interview process at a company I really wanted to join.
Not that I don’t believe you, but how does that even happen?! And if it was truly recruiter error, wouldn’t any reasonable hiring manager get it sorted and reschedule?
I go so far as to immediately say no to any candidates who have Meta in their history. Every meta person I’ve interviewed has been an asshole in one way or another, and not a fit for my team.
Meta, like many big tech companies, has some fantastic engineers, some lousy ones, and some in between. At this point I don’t pay too much attention to where someone worked previously, and try to get to know candidates individually. They’re all just different people, like you and me!
There are definitely things you should adjust depending on where a candidate is from. People tend to inherit things from the overall culture, particularly if it's been a major part of their career. It's better not to ask an Apple employee what they worked on in any detail, or an Amazon employee why they're leaving, for example.
Helps avoid potentially uncomfortable situations on both sides and increase the signal/noise ratio.
Generally a bad practice to automatically say no based on a single entry on a resume, no matter what that entry is. If Meta was their first and only job, maybe you could justify that view.
But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.
Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.
Not in my experience.
I've helped hire/onboard a couple of really great former Meta engineers, and currently collaborate with a bunch of great engineers at Meta.
So what else are you prejudiced about?
People who worked for cigarette companies.
They are all on auto pilot. And they dont know how to disengage it. Its really scary being around these people.
Source: worked for 2 years on exec staff of large corp CEO. Had to leave cuz its really out of control heading no where. The main goal is survival. Thats it.
they’ve been caught doing it before, but now there isn’t a federal government who will prosecute them.
Probably true going forward. Though the previous administration had two years to investigate the quarter million job losses that happened under its watch. It does not look like either party is particularly interested in acting on this issue.
Shouldn't every layoff have some element of performance? If you're asked to downsize your team, why wouldn't you think about your lowest performer first? Now that doesn't mean the CEO should be shitting on his employees in public like Elon does, but CEO discretion doesn't change the natural incentive to keep your best people.
Layoffs might have to with what a person is working (project is no longer business priority, just cutting based on performance might lead to delays) or what team a person is working on (whole org gets the axe).
A friend of mine went through the whole Meta layoff grinder last year. Guy is a Caltech PhD, literally any company would be lucky to have his brain available. It's surreal to me.
The narrative about there not being enough "talent" available in the US is such a hilarious, brazen lie. I'm disgusted at the entire industry. SWEs are negative on Amazon, Meta, etc but IMO nowhere near close to hating them enough.
They'll say whatever they need to to make the number go up, as if they didn't calculate all of this beforehand and then let people go when they saw the economy go down. Ignore the narrative.
Companies just want an excuse to save money without making wall street panic, as well as the usual cost cutting measures they've done for decades. They feel they captured the market so they aren't spending money keeping people away from competitors (and ofc startup funding is much worse too. No one to rise up). These layoffs are not a reflection of anyone's abilities as engineers.
> They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
This is super tangential to this post, but All In is a wild podcast. While one guy is re-discovering the purpose and mechanism of taxes, some other guy is claiming that it's good actually that the entire government now has to justify itself, to him, from first principles. All to a cheering crowd of fans who think these guys are obviously the smartest guys alive.
It's an insane look into a completely stupid world.
You've pretty much hit the crux of the entire problem in this one comment.
Some decidedly very dumb people who have a lot of confidence and a very large sum of money are basically controlling the zeitgeist both politically and culturally and it is not looking pretty.
It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.
>So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries.
Aren't cartels against the law?
Exactly. Slash staff, tweak job titles and descriptions, hire them back at lower wages and/or as contractors.
Go Zuck.
Their interviews were one of the easiest things I ever did. Pay 150bucks for Leetcode, sort by company, memorize the solution and show up.
Even when solving problems in the real world, nobody sits in a dark room until moment of genius strikes. We always try some tactics others have tried and only then innovate.
> So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
Any employer who has that attitude isn't an employer you want to work for.
Just because someone didn't do well at one company, under one boss, in one team, doesn't mean that will be the case somewhere else.
As long as you come away having learned something - some new skills, what you could have done better or when you should have realized it wasn't the company/job/team for you, what you do well or don't, what work drives you or you just can't get motivated by. If it was a personality clash, did you come away with a lesson learned or realized you needed to work on interpersonal skills, that sort of thing.
Given that these CEOs are all colluding in some form all the time, do you think it's still possible to start a company as an outsider and make it a big thing without getting eaten up by them, or is that just dead in the water?
The last three Meta recruiters got a broadside from me about the insult of implying that I would join an organization run by a bottom-tier Trump lickspittle. I can't imagine how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances.
> how they are about to get candidates at the top of the funnel under these circumstances
Is there any data on the percentage of software engineers "at the top of the funnel" who lean left? This is a genuine question. I’ve always assumed that most do, but lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m in a bubble.
“Left” isn’t the right framing at all. The axis of division these days is really democratic vs. authoritarian. Rule of law vs. “might makes right”. I know few educated, intellectual people who find the latter appealing (though they do exist and are loud).
The rule of law is authoritarian by definition. So authoritarian vs authoritarian?
Anyway you’re wrong. There are a good number of left wing engineers out there but they’re outnumbered by libertarian chuds in the industry.
I can’t imagine a lot of folks that excel at math and science are leaning hard into the party gutting the NSF and actively trying to undermine the entire scientific community.
I think that people like Zuckerberg and Bezos fit this profile, but look whom they are supporting now. Simply being part of the scientific community may not be a sufficient criterion. Other factors, such as wealth or power, may have a greater influence on their political affiliations.
The biggest predictor of political affiliation is located in the wallet. It’s not a perfect predictor but it’s pretty good, and it gets better the fatter the wallet is.
What is bizarre now is that the biggest wallets are supporting economic uncertainty.
I don’t know. I’ve met good scientists who were terrible human beings and would have been willing to defund everything except their field, because obviously everything else is useless. I have no stats, and I think they are far from the majority, but they exist. Scientists are not superhuman and some do actually vote for the face-eating leopard party.
Top SWEs tend to live in rich cities that have those jobs and lean left; they just blend in with the demographics of where their jobs are located. Like, I’m sure if there were a lot of SWE jobs available in a rich conservative city like…Riyadh…they would be leaning more right.
The top paying fully remote jobs are in AI and Crypto (blockchain). And my experience shows the top are libertarian, which is right wing if you only see the spectrum as left / right (I see it as freedom / authoritarian)
I wouldn’t have joined a year ago but it sounds like it’d be a good culture fit now. They can hire good software engineers who live in the middle of the country and happen to be Republican.
All of the meta jobs are in bay area and Seattle. They don't do remote work anymore
[flagged]
oh is that the key? Wonderful. I'm so annoyed that they keep contacting me on my personal email over my business email.
Why? The comp is top of market, even with the stock award cuts.
"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that. Most employees don't do that.
> is a thing you've made up; you can simply not do that.
Ironically, you made that up lol. I know a few people who have worked at Meta as SWEs. A close friend still works there as a PM. They've all been pretty open about the work culture at Meta.
Shrug. Your sample isn't representative.
I worked there seven years. It is.
lol clueless
Uh, it practically is dude
Life isn't all about money. Especially in this day and age.
>"All of your energy and emotions 50-60 hours per week" is a thing you've made up
If you really don't think companies aren't taking advantadge of this strict job market that is putting a lot more SWE's in their seats instead of jumping; I wish you the best at your current or future job.
Could be a sign that the company is failing
Of all the companies battling, I can see Meta win. If they can keep their users on their platforms, they will stay alive. Look how easy it was to sway elections with one social network. Imagine applying AI to a much larger network.
It's just a chat room.
A chat room where the company decides which chats you see, and which you don't. That's pretty powerful.
Most despicable of companies. Keeps laying off people and destroying lifelihoods in the process, cutting stock awards for others but executives get their bonuses increased by a cool 160%
"We'll be paying you less so you can help us replace you"
indeed. But I guess people will ride the wave in automating their career away as long as they get theirs. I can only imagine how Gen Alpha is going to experience this workforce.
I always thought of automating my career away as, you know, a success story. Your solutions and knowledge become code, which lets the next generation build on top.
I initially would agree. Automate the tedious stuff and then you or the next generation builds more tech on that. That's how it worked for some 3-4 generations in tech.
The unfortunate part here is that there may not be a next generation with the way the incentive structures are setup. If there is, I highly, highly doubt any of Gen Alpha will enjoy the compensation that SWE's in the 00's and 10's did. We're aiming to be the next EE's in terms of career trajectory. And we certainly don't have the safety nets needed for a post-jobs world as of now.