6-7 38* minute interviews, while the interviewee is trying to squeeze in showcasing their skills and experience, the interviewer is obsessed with figuring out a rigid set of pre-determined "signals"

Once these candidates actually start work, their success in the team is a complete coinflip

* 38 minutes = 45 minute scheduled - 2 minute intro - 5 minute saved for candidate questions at the end

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.

Cowards.

It would really be poetic justice if some former employees of established companies went for the jugular of massive SaaS incumbents.

Sadly, they are never the ones to be sacked.

I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).

I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.

I think it is the start of a downwards spiral.

whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.

AI is a huge bubble right now and although it is useful and future models will be more so, the truth is that it’s a lot of pie in the sky too.

Meta pays top dollar. They also pay enormous sums for what management identifies as performance.

Conversely, Meta is ruthless about cutting those management identifies as low performers.

This is the deal going in. It’s not a crime.

> If America’s so rich how’d it get so sad

> https://www.derekthompson.org/p/if-americas-so-rich-howd-it-...

It really sucks for software engineers though - first these companies made a hype out of "coding" and hacking to build those monstrosities, now they switched to squeezing the accordion to keep the music going. This is not the first time and I hope not the last one - just need new Yahoos of 20s to pop up.

AGI has been achieved internally once again at Meta.

Something tells me that the workers at Meta, if given a chance to have self-determination, would run a better shop than Zuckerberg himself.

I won't be surprised if that's one of the use cases in their mind.

That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.

I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.