Meta chops another 10,000 employees, closes 5,000 vacancies Meta – which claims without irony to be "building the future of human connection" – is laying off 10,000 more staff and will close open vacancies on 5,000 roles as it hunkers down for a "Year of Efficiency." This is the second time Meta has cut jobs to slash costs, the first coming in November when CEO Mark Zuckerberg axed 11, …
The real tragedy here is the tens of thousands (!!) of mugs who were duped into working for these arseholes and their "silly con valley" company in the first place, when they could have spent their lives doing something else. They were enlisted to make the world an even worse place, where the people are psychologically manipulated "at scale" to the will of whoever has cash to spend.
I really wish that Facebook, Google (especially YouTube), Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, TikTok et al will follow Twitter into a bottomless void of Hell. We would be so much better off without them. In fact the whole of California might as well sink into the pacific as far as I care. It would be a net benefit to the world, like cutting out a tumour.
However, what Meta and the other technocrats are doing by sacking all these people is trying to ensure that the cultists at the centre survive. But they can't do that if nobody wants to work for them anymore.
YouTube in its state, yes, but YouTube is a very good source of learning for a lot of people. The amount of free guides people put up gives so many disadvantaged people access to education and knowledge they normally wouldn't have. There are other companies like Odysee but unfortunately the likes of Odysee aren't anywhere near as big yet.
You could say the same about TikTok, right?
But the people who post "educational videos" on YouTube and TikTok have absolutely no teaching qualifications, nor do they necessarily have any in the subject they are talking about. All they have is a great deal of narcissistic self-importance and this rubs off on the kids, who all want to be "influencers" and "YouTubers" these days. All you need to be a successful YouTuber is an excess of self-confidence and the ability to stick a gormless face and some click-baity text on each of your video thumbnails.
There used to be these things called "Libraries" and later, "The Internet", where you could learn about pretty much anything for free, provided you knew how to read.. But these days you don't have to read, you just get endless shite fed from a "recommendation, engagement-optimisation and advertising" algorithm. Aka "auto play next". I'd go as far as saying that YouTube and TikTok are likely reducing the literacy rates amongst population, at the same time as increasing their tendency to distrust qualified teachers and academics, preferring to believe whatever YouTube has learned that they are most likely to believe, whether it is true or fake.
The "YouTuber" is one thing I would put into Room 101.
You might as well have kids taught by ChatGPT.. Actually, come GPT-4 where it has perfected the art of making clickbaity mesmerising YouTube videos full of believable bullshit, It probably will start to replace the YouTuber.
I think you're tarring all content creators with the same brush there. Here's a few things I learned on YouTube, from people who weren't technically "qualified", but had useful experience to share.
- How to take a particular model of laptop apart in order to fix it
- How to make a certain kind of rip cut on my table saw
- How to plan and build a water system and electric system for a camper van conversion
Hell, I even got a good start to my IT career with a set of VBA tutorial videos. I don't think any of the above should have been followed blindly - in each case I did some additional fact checking and research. But in each case they were extremely useful.
None of the presenters of these videos fit the "narcissistic self-important" stereotype that you portray.
Yeah it's true that there are some decent YouTube videos. (although I wouldn't go near a VBA tutorial.. That would be a bit like the "how to poke your eye out with a fork" videos that must surely exist on the platform)
I guess my point really is that the recommendation algorithm always goes for the click-baity narcissistic self-important knobs like Linus Tech Tips, "Veritaseum" et al. (Especially if you browse it without cookies.. i.e. that's the default starting point of the algorithm)
I would also put Twitch Streamers and other social-media "influencers" into Room 101.
Er, if I wrote a book about bricklaying or ancient philosophy then I would struggle to get it published. It certainly wouldn't find its way into a library. I certainly wouldn't be allowed into a school to teach kids about it.
Whereas on YouTube all you need to know is how to game the recommendation algorithm, and you can make up any old bullshit about any subject and get it into classrooms around the country.
Zuck has majority voting in the boardroom. His Class B stock gets 10 votes per share. Plus another holder of class B shares, Moskovitz, has a voting agreement that stipulates that he'll vote the same way Zuck does.
As of the end of Q4 (December 31, 2022), there were 2,225,763,078 Class A stock (publicly traded) and 366,876,470 Class B stock (not traded). With 10-to-1 voting power, that ~367M shares votes like ~3.67B shares, dwarfing Class A share's voting power.
Yes, it's a public company, but one person own all the voting rights. I never did understand how he pulled this off, as he basically took a company public, but retained all the control.
"...the share holders could help end that but just selling all their shares..."
But, they would loose money doing that.
To be fair to Meta, they definitely did overhire during the pandemic. I know a couple of folks who went to work in AI and Infra at Meta a couple of years ago, but left early last year before the layoff. One of them is now back at a hedge fund in NYC and said euphemistically most at Meta weren't good enough for hedge funds.
Meta also flew me out to California a couple of years ago and, based on my interview experience, I didn't get the impression that their bar was very high.
Upvoted and agree, however, like with all these social media services we can choose to just not use it and let others use it if they wish because there are some uses to it for those that aren't just narcissistic. Our old manager used to use it just to share photos with her relatives in Australia. Her account was private and only they could see it.
But when sites insist the only way to sign up to their site is using a "facebook login", then it becomes a problem.
Even when you are just sharing photos privately amongst friends, the real use of Facebook is to allow Facebook to learn more about You and your Friends, so that it can sell you to the highest bidder, via its advanced social manipulation algorithms. It can tweak the probability of what you will buy next in the shops, and It can tweak the probability of the way you might vote at the next election by controlling what you see on your news feed.
Yes, this is important; but it doesn’t need to mean 3 days a week or more in an office.
We have quarterly team get together for a few days - work during day, dinner and hotel stay at night - our team is very together and strong. Sitting next to people who might get irritating after too long would likely weaken those relationships!
Pre-covid, I'd spend an hour driving to the local branch office, fire up Skype/Teams/Slack/Webex and send and receive emails. Once or twice a year the whole team would fly to head office for a week of in-person meetings.
Post-covid, I walk into my home office, fire up Teams/Slack/Discord and send and receive emails. Cadence of physical meetings TBC, it's not been long enough to see.
For many people, it's far better to have occasional, pre-planned week-long meetups.
A lot of team bonding happens during face-to-face, but little to no actual work.
Why would I want to bond with my colleagues?
For all I know these colleagues get drunk, go driving, kill a pedestrian and drive off without stopping.
I don't want to sit next to a sociopath thank you very much!!
The same goes for business attire in a none customer facing role, you’re not employing me for my fashion sense, cunt
> you’re not employing me for my fashion sense, cunt
No, but your employment -may- have something to do with your general politeness and demeanour, . i.e. if you assume all your co-workers are sociopaths and call your boss a cunt, they might have some reason to sack you. :)
A little from column A … etc
I joined post Covid, did some induction and eased from on site to predominantly remote working over a few weeks. But the team is international, the “on site” office only has a couple of regular tenants.
Being able to shake hands a break bread with people whom you collaborate with helps humanise otherwise text based and occasionally video based interactions.
e critical work ahead."
A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling
Zuck must have been listening to the preaching of Elon the Magnificent.
Cutting a team in half does not lead to more fun and job satisfaction.
Zuck could have used a good number of the people laid off today to build a decent alternative to the shit show that Twitter has become since Elon the Mighty took over but no...
A plague on Zuck and Elon.
So what happens in 12 months time, when you've had your year of efficiency? A year of doing fuck all?
Aren't you, as a tech company, meant to always bear efficiency in mind, so you can automate when possible and increase productivity?
Or is this really a Musk-style effort to slash the payroll, hoping that driving the remaining employees to breaking point will deliver the same amount of work as before? Hate to tell you this, but stressed out, nervous staff aren't going to be concentrating on efficiency, but rather gaming the metrics to try and keep their jobs.
No, the year of collusion, all the big tech players, except Apple, are laying off. I recently read that these companies were hiring people to do 'non-work' just to keep them from working for the competition. Maybe the Zuck, Elon and the other guys have had a meeting down at Carmine's Clam bar, and agreed that its time to stop wasting cash, and hurting each other's bottom line.
> ... engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates ...
If they'd actually thought about it, rather just done statistics, they might have wondered if that could be paraphrased as "inexperienced engineers can't achieve much without the help of more experienced colleagues". But then statistics is a mathematical tool for dealing with ignorance, after all.
I heard those guys were still trying to resuscitate the Sony Home service. It’s basically what Meta is trying to be, except it had become abandonware since about 2015. Maybe some laid-off Meta staff could jump on the project and help bring it back from the ashes?
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/11/26/playstation-home-revived-by-fans/amp/
For some reason I read that as "highly efficient". I guess I owe myself a new keyboard..
But yes, exactly! WTF are all these 87,000 employees doing??
Although I do know that some of them are contributors to, or occasionally the maintainers of, several important open-source projects, and that is the one thing that does make me shiver when Zuck and his tech-bros reach for their hatchets.
....when managers who have enough money they never have to work again say "This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week"
Easy to say when you can afford fuel, afford someone to drive you in, won't get fired for being late or put on report like you're back at fucking school and don't have a 2hr commute every day.
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