Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).

Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.

It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).

The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.

The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.

It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".

A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.

The domestic jobs aren't coming back.

AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.

Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.

I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.

they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.

There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.

They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)

So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.

I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.

Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers

I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.

Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.

To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.

I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.

To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.

Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?

If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.

It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.

If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.

I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.

Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.

I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.

That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.

That said, IMO they are right...

They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.

I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.

The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...

To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.

Sort of.

Wikipedia @ 2:

> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

Britannica:

> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.

> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

Wikipedia @ 3:

> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.

Wikipedia @ 2:

> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."

[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!

Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.

Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.

People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.

Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.

The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.

For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.

Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.

Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.

Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).

Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.

Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.

If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...

Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...

That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.

So? They likely already had too many in 2021.

>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.

But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.

Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.

Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.

Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.

Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.

about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.

And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.

- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race

- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store

They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.

Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.

I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.

I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...

1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.

2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.

Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.

There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.

What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?

The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.

Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!

All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:

1. Correcting pandemic overhiring

2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.

So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.

The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.

That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.

If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.

In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.

Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.

In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.

Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.

4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.