> 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.
"I bet the company on metaverse and I was wrong." Or, "now looks like a really good time to lay everyone off because all the other companies are doing it too"
A favourite Mr. Robot scenes has everybody at the AllSafe office
wearing a giant badge with their most fundamental truth written on it.
It mocks a "post-privacy" some fools advocate, via the cynical eyes of
Esmail's hacker character Elliot.
Point being; human relations don't work on "truths" but on carefully
managed mutually secured fictions and personas to protect us and
preserve power relations. Traditionally we call those "manners"
(tactical lying so others can save face etc). But for the comedy of
unexpectedly volunteered truths, who wouldn't enjoy a Mufti Day, where
everyone at work gets to speak the unvarnished truth with absolute
impunity for a day?
Would telling the truth be better if the real truth was “We’ve been waiting for a good excuse to drop a bunch of people and boost the bottom line short-term so we can get some loans”?
p.s. I’m making up a scenario based on other businesses, I have no idea what meta is doing these days
I don’t think it’s that simple — yes maybe in private you could say that, but this would set them up for an investor revolt or make them come across as huge assholes if they say things like that.
They may be true, but telling it to everyone is definitely not always better.
Of course. It's not about the best move or what looks better. Nobody cares for that.
It's about the truth. That's what people care about in the end. And if none of it was said here, parent is pointing out that Mark is truly an ass. Something like "laying off people because other companies are doing it" is pretty fucked up.
The tech industry labor market has been cooling rapidly this year, it's not only ad-tech companies, and certainly not only in companies who might have over-hired due to betting everything on metaverse.
For better or worse (obviously for worse) his relationship with the company is fundamentally different than that of every other employee. He’s a founder and holds a majority of voting equity. That makes him inherently unaccountable in a way that is nearly without precedent in the modern corporate era.
What does that even mean? He won't have to work for a few centuries instead of a millennium? Lol.
Compared to his employees' livelihoods, a billionaire losing some bit of their immeasurable wealth is irrelevant. He made a stupid bet and doesn't suffer any real consequences for it because Meta has no real accountability.
If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
Personally I think beyond a couple billion it serves no purpose for quality of life for anyone and we only care in order to crudely "keep score" of who's in charge of more "stuff" since it can't really be liquidated or repurposed other endeavors efficiently and these people are de-factor world leaders in some capacity (a private industry analogue to GDP if you will).
It's not a logical inconsistency to point out that dollars matter a lot less once you have enough.
The difference between having a dollar and ten dollars a day is huge. The difference between a hundred and a thousand a day is still big, sure, but you're probably not going to die of starvation either way. And once you're in dev salary land and higher, you're counting bedrooms, acres, cars, vacations, yachts...
The wealth inequality thing matters not because Bezos has spaceships and Zuckerberg only has 3d glasses. It's that we still have millions of people with food and shelter insecurity, regardless of how much the richest have.
It's not a linear thing. Zuckerberg losing a few million is utterly meaningless vs a regular family losing a few thousand.
> If we want to treat the numbers as meaningful and make low effort quips about wealth inequality being bad for society when they go up then we must also concede that it is meaningfully bad for him when the numbers go down if we are to be logically consistent.
No. If wealth inequality is bad, that does not imply wealth is good.
If we simply assume inequality is the bad thing, then we could deduce that the best society would be hunter gatherers with zero wealth, and Zuck losing wealth is a good thing, because it makes society more equal.
It is therefore logically consistent to say "wealth inequality is bad and Zuck losing wealth is good".
That wealth is not “immeasurable”. It’s just hard for someone to understand when their point of comparison is personal finances.
It directly impacts his ability to start new companies, new charities, etc. This is on the scale of wiping out the abilities to create fabs, do infrastructure projects, etc.
It has nothing to do with ownership being good or bad. It’s having people with vision and acumen for financially sustainable businesses setting up these projects for success.
Look at how much the Gates foundation has done for Malaria. What government institution has been able to compete on that level with or without sucking down involuntary tax dollars to support it?
Capitalism is just as often not the meritocracy you think it is, but just capital buying up production...
Not sure what you're getting at with the Gates foundation. Throw enough money and good people at a problem and chances are they'll eventually arrive at a solution. National Parks, Manhattan Project, Apollo, Interstates, dams, the B52 or F22, darpanet, etc. Republicans starving the beast is what kills government. It works fine in many other countries or even ours in past decades.
Are you trolling? that would be worse for literally everyone involved. Have you held yourself to this standard in your professional life? it seems so absurd
Yeah, in 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. Told my team we'd all be laid off soon. I finished the project I was on first and was the first laid off due to no more work.
The overlords saw they were losing control with people opting to WFH and great resignation … so they said “What audacity … inflict pain and suffering on the mortals”.
My prediction: after a rough period, the situation stabilizes and a pattern emerges: most white-collar workers will try to land a job with companies offering remote and hybrid work whereas the rest will have to have a stationary job and work their way up to upgrade to remote/hybrid.
Or, the dynamics behind the two events are very similar and there’s only so many different ways to describe it, so you shouldn’t expect significant variation in how they’re described.
Not everything has to be 100% brand-new and unique.
I replied by editing my original comment. I got flagged, so I thought it appropriate to edit my comment to motivate what I posted.
My comment ‘Sheep commentors everywhere’ was a reply to your post ‘Corporate robots everywhere’, intending to mirror the original comment.
I tried to elaborate this in my edited update of my comment above. I can see why it got flagged, but my intention was different to how it was understood, IMO.
I experimented with making a GPT-3 excuse generator for getting out of work/school a while ago^. We can look forward to a future of incredible synergy, as employees dodge work with AI generated notes and are summarily fired by an AI!
^I didn’t get very far because realistic excuses were boring and I had more fun trying to get it to come up with increasingly bizarre ones:
“I can’t come in today because…”
- I'm made of glass, so I'm stuck in the mirror dimension
- I am now a living manifestation of numbers, so I can't leave my house
- I've become a sentient, living version of the internet, so I am now the human race's collective conscience
- I am now an extra dimensional being made of fire, so I am now on fire
- I am now a living, malevolent, super intelligent, hyper dimensional cloud, so I am now an intangible, invisible, shapeless, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinitely powerful, god like entity, I am now everything and nothing
I haven't seen inside very many, but when I was at university I participated in bargaining with the execs there; I've also interacted with execs of the small- and medium-sized companies I've worked at. Regardless of the purpose and scale of the organization, they all seemed to be emitting the same blandishments, always loosely correlated to context...
Exactly. GPT3 for conversations, some humain actor giving enough materials so the C suite can appears in all hands and the likes thought realistic model ( not the meta crap )
Why stop at the c-suite? We may not be close to being ready to disrupt software engineering but the trend is heading in that direction. We already passed a milestone for code generation.
Realistically, C-suite probably will probably target engineers first before letting themselves get replaced by AI. It may be fractionally partially responsible for the current layoff.
I dare say that once some are out the others look to them and copy what they can if it worked.
I bet they may even adjust severance etc to be slightly better than previous ones to make the company look better. Facebook can afford to spend money on PR.
We must have massively different world views, or at least different definitions to colluding. This doesn't survive Hanlon's Razor. At worst, this is corporate corner-cutting, not collusion.
Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.
My take would be:
* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.
* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.
* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.
* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.
But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn't grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.
We have to remember that these companies weren't affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.
They claimed their monthly, daily, and total engagement are all up in this quarters earnings. Ads shown up 17% price per ad down 18%. Doesn’t seem like losing users.
Many large companies have pretty rigid comp review processes and cycles. If you’re a high performing employee who got a stock refresh earlier this year there’s a good chance you’re down 50% or more at many companies. Switch companies and there’s a chance you’ll get a new grant for the original gross value but at the new lower share price.
If your belief that it’s macro trends rather than individual company performance that’s depressing share value it could be a very profitable time to change roles (assuming you can, obviously there’s also an influx of people looking for work in the past few weeks).
I am talking best employees. People who will find good job no matter what. People you need to keep because they are actually the ones who make the show going.
You got hired thinking you will get some amount of money (salary + shares) now those shares are worth little even before they got vested.
So you cut your loss and get hired at some other place that will give you more of your comp in form of salary than shares because you feel burned.
Smaller / newer companies with investment money to burn who expect results. Although I can imagine investors are slowing down a bit as well - actually they have done so I believe for the past half decade or so.
well it could be all of the above....what i find odd is that the Facebook CEO already knew that demand for ad revenue would already drop in 2023 and they were still hiring up untill now....they should have started cutting costs earlier
Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:
"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."
"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."
I think the whole "many predicted" statement that several large tech companies have used to thin out all the pandemic hires is cover for the fact that they boom-hired during the pandemic knowing full well they would very likely have to shed those hires when things went back to pre-pandemic levels and the opportunity for short-term profit was over.
Shopify called it a "bet", which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.
Also saying "many predicted" is less culpable than saying "we kinda knew we'd have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?"
That seems a bit unfair. Every successful founder is irrationally optimistic about their own business — that's partly how they became successful in the first place. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that Zuck, Lütke, the Collisons, and many, many others all made the same wrong directional bet and ended up over their skis for perfectly sincere reasons.
In case one has trouble recalling, way back in the dark ages of 2.5 years ago, when these investments were first being made, neither the duration nor the outcome of the pandemic were at all clear to anyone.
Who said anything about fair? When has fairness ever factored into business?
If a company sees an opportunity to make money, short or long term, they take it. That's just good business, right?
There is a cold calculation that happens.. If we do this, will we come out ahead at some point in the future? Yes? Then do it.
If "this" means hiring a ton of people that you might have to let go in the future, then so be it. That's how all companies operate, all the time.
The difference here is that the time between hiring and layoffs has compressed, and the bets that companies make are shorter term.. Hire thousands of people, drive massive quarterly profits for a while, then let a bunch of them go. Thank you for your service.
This is how a lot of existing industries work already.. Warehouse/factory work, seasonal work like construction and farming/fishing.. That's why those industries have unions too, because if this becomes a repeating pattern, the average worker suffers from poor job security and constant upheaval for the sake of corporate profits.
I said this in the discussion around Shopify's layoffs as well: as a worker in tech looking for a job, you need to start thinking about how much your role contributes to the bottom line, and also about the timing of your hiring.
If you are hired during rapid growth, then assume your job security is much lower, because your employer is making a bet, as opposed to planning for a calculated and safe long term expansion.
Most large fast going tech companies "predicited" this but that doesn't mean they really believed it. The alternative at the time was to say..."we grew 100% in the last two years but with covid restrictions limiting etc wr think that growth will be more like 80% and revenue down x%" that would have sent massive shocks to investors and stocks would have dropped overnight as companies like Meta had been setting a long precedent of "beat and raise" with their earnings calls. Essentially everyone was hoping it would continue as they didn't want to see equity and comp and valuations down. What's funny is that it all happened anyway over the course of the year. Believe me from first hand experience there were many people in these companies raising flags late last year that it can't continue but were essentially ignored. Hope is not a strategy!
That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.
The two will be forever conflated (and there's an excellent argument that Putin made his move on new territory while the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions). However, literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice, to me is obviously the biggest cause of what we see now (and what is to come).
Exactly how does the war in Ukraine economically affect, for example, the US?
> the rest of the world had weakened itself with years of self-imposed Covid restrictions
This is a pretty bold political statement: it’s saying that people weren’t worried about getting sick and that the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy. Things like the business owners complaining that retail sales were down even after they got exactly what they asked for suggests that’s not the case.
> literally shutting down globe-sized sectors of the economy for months or years at a time, with no notice
Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
>the millions of people who died, had long-term illness, or were caring for their relatives weren’t contributing to the economy.
They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks. No, in a purely pragmatic sense, they don't contribute much to the economy, especially as any wealth they do have gets immediately re-distributed on death anyway.
If we were talking about some terrible disease (like Smallpox, for example), where the young and old alike died in huge numbers, then the argument would be different.
>Can you give details on where you believe this happened?
Are you kidding me? Maritime shipping and aviation are two obvious examples.
First, while the death rates were highest among the oldest people there are still a ton of people who were not close to death anyway. It’s also not true that losing older people is necessarily neutral - economies do better when money circulates, not when it’s tied up in a lump sum going into someone’s retirement account.
Note also that I mentioned people who were impacted but not killed. Again, there are millions of people in prime economic years who became substantially less productive - and someone in their 20s or 30s might be missing key career steps which will lock in much of that permanently. Similarly, there are millions of people who stopped working or started working less to care for the previous groups. All of those have a significant economic impact.
Finally, maritime shipping wasn’t shut down, certainly not for “years”. It was significantly disrupted by the disease but that wasn’t a policy choice.
Air travel (notably not cargo) was restricted for months, not years at the global scale, but it also bounced back quickly thanks to heavy government support in most countries. I don’t think it would be enough to explain the economy on its own as a lot of business went virtual and people found domestic outlets for the money they’d have spent on international travel.
Finally, I’m not saying that there was absolutely no impact from policy but rather that some people have had a tendency to blame policy more than the actual disease, or ignore the benefits from those choices. We saw this a lot with groups like restaurant owners where lifting safety measures didn’t improve business as much as they’d hoped because many of their customers didn’t want to engage in high-risk activities, or especially when their outspoken political positions drove people to competitors. In many ways this is natural: people want to believe things could have been better by choice because then they can imagine it being better if they were in charge.
> They were dominated (at least by the publicly-available figures here in the UK) by retired folks.
You're saying here that most of the people who died were old, which is true. But you're also saying that this means that not many young people died from covid, which is untrue. It's untrue because a small proportion of a very large number is still a lot of people. Covid killed very many economically active people.
The US has given over $8B in aid. Also natural gas prices are going to hurt this winter. Gasoline prices hurt this summer, both directly and in transport costs.
Only a fraction of that $8B in aid was direct cash payments to Ukraine. Much of it went to US defense contractors and was recycled into the domestic economy. Higher fossil fuel prices hurt US consumers, but most of that value is flowing to US energy companies and ultimately to US investors. The vast majority of fossil fuels burned here are also extracted and refined here; we only import a little.
Reading the notes at the bottom, it seems like the number might be somewhat realistic, but should really be called the cost of shipping fuel and securing it to Afghanistan, some of which was probably used for aircon.
Yes, I agree, I don't think that $8B is a lot of money for the US, especially in the military context. I was just surprised at the number and shared some back story.
Agreed. It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, and that at best the restrictions could just kick the can down the road a while. It was also covered up by printing cash at enormous scale.
Now when the economy starts bleeding, supply chains struggle and inflation moons, people try and pin it on Putin and deny they ever supported it.
It’s cognitive dissonance at best? incredible dishonesty at worst.
They should blame Xi. All these economic decisions wouldn't have happened had there been no COVID. The Chinese government deliberately released this lab-made bioweapon/virus, to see how it would negatively impact most of the world. From economies struggling, to people getting polarized and more divided, and supply chains getting affected, their move has been a massive intelligence success for them.
If anything, the western world needs to take a lot of strict action against the Chinese and also the tons of CCP sympathizers in their countries.
It'll be like the wars in Iraq and Libya. Vitally important at the time, but you can't find anyone now who will say they supported them.
Then again, how can you blame people? Most people do what they are told, and the person who glared at you last year for breaking some Covid rule or the other could equally likely have a conversation with you today about some horrible outcome they've had thanks to Covid restrictions, and never link the two.
It wasn't blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease, especially because it wasn't.
There is room to disagree on how much and for how long we should have distanced, and which government interventions were more useful, but I (and most people?)
think doing nothing would have been much worse.
> It was blatantly obvious that the cure was worse than the disease,
That's not how I remember it - governments locked down to prevent health systems collapse while a vaccine was created, tested and scaled for mass production. After successful vaccine deployment restrictions were lifted.
"health system collapse" was the inevitable outcome of any other approach to dealing with Covid.
"health system collapse" is worse than all of the other present and future side-effects, including the effects of denying healthcare to huge numbers of people over the past 2.5 years.
"health system collapse" didn't happen anyway. At least where I am (UK), it's increasingly clear that our response to Covid has blown open all of the existing cracks, and it's hard to say that we "saved" the NHS.
3 weeks for me to get a remote GP appointment right now. This will be killing more people than Covid ever did, so we are in the red before we even get onto anything else.
Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn't be more different:
+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.
+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple's changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn't seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.
+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.
It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years. Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not. Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.
Not surprising. I've been a part of a team that developed these memos.
When it's bad news, it's never about the truth (well, rather it's not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.
I just don't buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.
In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.
The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course).
They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".
a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that term
I wouldn't be surprised therefore if the structure/content is part of a consulting company's latest material
This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at https://stripe.com/en-it/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons...
The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe's memo and adapted it to suit their needs?