back to article Twitter layoffs were bad but Meta's mass ejections could take the cake

More Silicon Valley layoff rumors are swirling and this time it's Meta that might be planning the first broad reduction in the company's history. While exact numbers are unknown, Meta is planning a smaller cut than the 50 percent culling Musk kicked off at Twitter last week. Still, Meta's layoff volume could be far larger …

  1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    Which makes me wonder

    -> lost nearly 75 percent of its value

    Why was it ever "valued" that highly in the first place? I guess that some people made some money out of this.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Which makes me wonder

      Because that's what idiots investors were paying

    2. sarusa Silver badge

      Re: Which makes me wonder

      Facebook made $115B in advertising revenue last year, which was a jump of $30B over 2020. It's been going up $10-20B/year for the past 6 years. And it dominates the online market for gullible old people. Given that, if you hadn't been paying attention to what else has been happening, then you might have thought the Evil Online Empire would continue to grow forever and the stock valuation would be warranted, at least in comparison with other tech stocks with crazy price/earnings ratios.

      Thankfully, this year has ripped that bandage off. Earnings have declined for two quarters in a row. TikTok is eating FB's lunch. Young people hate FB. FB has no vision for the future except Zuck's Metaverse that nobody wants. Unfortunately, like AOL, FB will still have hundreds of millions of dumb old people who think FB is the Internet (MAGA voters, Brexit voters), so it can linger indefinitely like herpes, but any reduction is welcome.

      1. NeilPost Silver badge

        Re: Which makes me wonder

        Dumb old people … with the money.

        Kids have little to no money, other that what they can acquire from their parents - the aforementioned old people.

        You also untie a bandage, you don’t rip it off .. you have the wrong metaphor - that’s a plaster/Elastoplast/band-aid you are thinking of.

        I do agree they should get rid of low performers and make redundant people involved in the money pit Metaverse project through failing to find position in the reallocation pool … Mark Zuckerberg should be first in line.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Which makes me wonder

          > Kids have little to no money

          That's not how it works. "Kids" have literally a lifetime of consuming ahead of them.

          1. Baximelter

            Re: Which makes me wonder

            A "lifetime of consuming" isn't much use in the present. Particularly since "kids" have the attention span of a mayfly. Tiktok may be big today, but it is likely to be gone tomorrow.

        2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

          Re: Which makes me wonder

          Zuckerberg retains over 50% of voting rights…

        3. naive

          Re: Which makes me wonder

          >> Dumb old people … with the money.

          Really.. ?. I am old, use FB since it is a handy platform to share with other car nuts, besides that I feel a lot smarter than generation smartphone who does nothing else but stare at their "mirror of Erised" smartphone screen. I really feel sorry that their souls have been stolen so they are forever enslaved by Apple or Google.

          Reality dictates that Facebook is a capitalist company that is forced to compensate their billions of dollars high bills with selling what we give them for free: our privacy. That is how the internet works, since nobody wants to pay for anything.

          Accusing FB of being a threat to democracy and freedom, by not removing content so aggressively as Twitter used to do, shows a real lack of understanding what democracy and freedom represents: The right to freedom of speech, a right to debate and information exchange, not to be impeded by 20-some lefties with a 3 day beard who at will remove user generated content they don't like.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Which makes me wonder

            In an ideal world, you're not wrong. In the past, as a prospective politician (I'm not, but bear with me), I could do an interview with a national paper. I could tell the reporter and thus the whole nation that I was "opposed to hunting, in favour of abortion, blah blah blah." Now people know who I am. All the people. Politicians who go door to do see a street of ten houses. 3 are definitely voting for you - no point knocking on those doors. 3 are definitely voting for the other guy - skip those doors too. Now you're left with four doors representing the undecideds. Much less work than having to do all ten.

            Facebook doesn't just know the basics, like your name and date of birth. They know your likes, your hobbies, possibly your income level, and a whole lot more. Some of this is gleaned directly (because you said you liked Status Quo or because you played the 'which Hollywood actor are you' game), some of it is from your friends (they all play golf - a good bet that you do, too. Not to mention the selfie in the clubhouse) and some of it comes from the use of Facebook pixels on all kinds of sites that you didn't know about.

            What do they do with this information? They use it so their customers (their actual customers) can buy ads. Going back to my politician example, now I can create a blog post or an article or something which states "I love hunting". I can ask Facebook to send it to a very specific demographic. I can have a similar but opposing view and send that to another very specific group. I can avoid mass media, or give hollow, watery answers to the mainstream, and use the pinpoint accuracy of Facebook ads to put the very message you wanted to hear into your inbox - "tax deductible golf club dues"?

            So Facebook has gathered most if not all of us into various little advertiser bundles, and now we're being sold market-specific lies.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Which makes me wonder

            At least your username is appropriate.

      2. HandleAlreadyTaken

        Re: Which makes me wonder

        I find it somewhat ironic that you call (old) FB users dumb and at the same time seem to think TikTok is the smart choice of younger people.

    3. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Which makes me wonder

      The VCs made a lot of money, especially when they convinced the "market" (usually pension funds) to buy shares while virtually guaranteeing Zuckerberg a majority of voting rights to do what he wants.

  2. Ozan

    Is the bust of the bubble of too much tracking coming? Eventually all that data wont be worth much.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Arguably worth more. If Facebook's slump was because Apple cut off tracking data for valuable iThing buying cultists then if you could track these people you would make $$$$

    2. vtcodger Silver badge

      The value of data

      Eventually all that data wont be worth much.

      Of course the data is not worth very much. You know that. I know that. I think a lot of IT people know that. But we aren't the ones that dictate "value". Valuations are set by marketing people and gamb...^H^H^H^H^H investors.

      Good, useful data has a value of course. But it's difficult to believe that the vast heaps of disorganized information being collected by every commercial or government operation that can spell dataset have much real utility. Or that what little value is there is worth the cost of collecting storing and mining the data.

      Sooner or later, this Big Data thing will quite likely come crashing down. Looks like it might be sooner. Good.

  3. Notas Badoff

    The unkindest cuts

    It is terribly revealing if I'm only worried about what will happen to the React crew? That is the only part of Fᵦₘeta that has any value for me.

    1. ElRegioLPL

      Re: The unkindest cuts

      They will keep it over other parts over their own company as it helps them stay in control of the web ecosystem given it remains, by far, the most popular front end framework

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The unkindest cuts

      Even if Meta disappeared, React would remain because it is widely used open source.

  4. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

    That's a lot of employees

    Does anyone know what 90% of those 87,000 actually do?

    1. NeilPost Silver badge

      Re: That's a lot of employees

      It’s certainly not content moderation. The normal ‘we have been too busy to look at your scam/fraud’ non-reply.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think I need a smaller violin.

  6. sarusa Silver badge
    Happy

    Well, you're working for the Evil Empire, you deserve it

    No more sympathy for terminated Facebook employees than I do for telemarketers who whine about how bad their job is or Empire grunts in Star Wars who get annihilated by their own officers. You knew who you were working for. If it were Google you could maybe try an excuse about how they weren't bad at one point, but FB has been evil for its entire existence. Maybe you can go work somewhere that isn't actively dedicated to bringing down stable democratic systems of government because that gets you more clicks.

    1. sammystag

      Re: Well, you're working for the Evil Empire, you deserve it

      I think that's a bit unfair tbh. Aren't the Empire grunts conscripts?

      1. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge

        Re: Well, you're working for the Evil Empire, you deserve it

        Clones, actually, not conscripts. What's worse, they're clones of Boba Fett, whose ship fires quad-laser cannons at a rate of 6 quad-shots per second and STILL can't hit a ship less than 3 ship-lengths in front of him. It's really not surprising that his clones are just as awful at hitting the target.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Zuckercorp has also been quietly reorganizing people out of the company by disbanding their teams and letting them time out of Meta's reapplication window without finding them a new position. While not a formal layoff, it's the same in all but name."

    Wow - using IBM tactics too? I wasn't sure he could go any lower, but it seems I was mistaken.

    I feel sorry for those who will lose their jobs. As usual, those at the top will get away pretty much scot-free.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meta

    Static

  9. El Duderino
    Go

    Lost nearly 75 percent of its value

    Come on bro, only 25 to go !

  10. Doogie Howser MD

    You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh

    ..at a company that is achingly woke but then treats its staff like absolute dirt. Typical Silicon Valley.

  11. Timbo

    87,000 employees ??

    I want to know exactly what ALL of these 87,000 employees are actually doing...

    For sure there will be "back-office" staff keeping the hardware ticking over and people selling advertising space and the like.

    They claim to have a "brilliant" search function...but you try finding a given name in a given city or in a given age range, or even a given gender (where first names are used for any gender) - it is impossible...as you can only search on the "name" parameter and nothing else !

    And given the level of AI already being used to "police" FB posts, it does seem to me that FB is somewhat overloaded in the wrong departments...

    1. David Hicklin Bronze badge

      Re: 87,000 employees ??

      >> I want to know exactly what ALL of these 87,000 employees are actually doing...

      Constantly changing the scripts that run the newsfeed to that add-ons like F.B Purity that sanitise the crap out are having to play whack-a-mole all the time.

    2. Julian 8 Silver badge

      Re: 87,000 employees ??

      the AI is dire

      I always say to show me less of the following

      birthday, xmas, religious, wellness, my friend is looking for a job, etc, and it still shows me them no matter what.

      I gave up on looking for other people as you say, it is pretty poor at that.

      and if you see a post and think "I'll read that later", then do it now. The number of times I have noted who made said post so I can go and read / view at a more suitable time and it has vanished into the ether is unbelievable.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 87,000 employees ??

      Playing ping pong, other dumb stuff, and one heavily accented Indian fellow who calls out 100GB circuits with a +91 country code.

  12. Combat Epistomologist

    The Meta cake is a lie.

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