Ain't it great, the faang have been defanged and will only attract talent through very huge volumes of cash.

This has been a dumb layoff season by every measure.

It's not so much about whether or not they do much work. It's about the breadth of that work. FAANG devs tend to be relatively focused in their skillsets, if they need to cover a different skill set those companies just hire someone full time for that role (or many someone's, creating a whole department).

In mid-level and especially in small enterprise companies there's a lot more of breadth than depth. You don't need someone who can squeeze milliseconds out of a particular framework or compiler, but you might need someone who normally writes code to set up a config for nginx or help data put together a report for the next board meeting.

The complexity of the tasks isn't necessarily as high in smaller companies as in FAANG, but the variety can be much higher. In some jobs I've done SSRS, Nginx, Excel, and worked in C++ in a single day. and that was as a Ruby/Rails developer.

Context switching and more general technology skills are things we've tested for/asked about when interviewing ex-FAANG employees, where someone coming to us from a nearby competitor or similar industry might get a more general set of questions about their experience with ancillary technologies, rather than being tested against it directly.

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So the theory is that they were overpaid and did not really do much work while at FAANG to develop their skills? So basically layoffs make sense?

I love this so much, cause it doesn’t answer the question of the efficiency of WHAT? Their profits? Their “product”? Those are two different things. From the layoffs being pushed, it’s most likely their profits they are worried about, but only short term. They are thinking quarter by quarter and it shows with the decisions they are making. Layoff people today, make more tomorrow, then be fucked when you need more people and no one wants to work for a company that lays-off people for short term capital gain for investors.

This clusterfuck is going to be a bigger disaster than the dot com bubble in 2000.

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Basically there were way too many people and a lot were mediocre.

Sure. Marketing / creative/ Ops / retail are the immediate 4 that spring to mind. Meetings went from fast and slick to way too many people all sitting in meetings / zooms all talking platitudes and essentially saying nothing. Was shocking to watch given how much each FB person was paid. They were only interested in how much they were getting paid / perks. Basically they lost their enthusiasm and way.

Just the concept of spending days to interview at this garbage company only to be laid off by them anyway? Just wow, no thanks, I'm not that dumb.

What roles/depts do you consider the majority of the “bloat” coming from if you don’t mind me asking?

To a degree this applies to a lot of FAANG (Exceptions Apple and, if you count them, Microsoft).

I've done a lot of hiring at mid-sized companies, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it a black mark, but it does create this sense of a candidate that's both very expensive, and possibly very coddled. The hiring teams at mid-sized companies definitely tend to assume that someone who's worked at FAANG may be missing what's considered fundamental skills at lower levels, where they assume other mid-sized company developers probably have those skills.

It leads to some more basic questions coming up in interviews for ex-FAANG candidates that might not be asked in the normal interview process. At some companies, with some interview groups. I want to be as clear as I can, this is something I've seen at some midsized companies. It's by no means an absolute truth or even a majority of companies.

At others it might be a full on black mark, at others it's probably a leg-up over the competition. There's really no accounting for personal biases, and it's not really worth worrying about building your career around them.

MySpace 2.0 hopefully.

Facebook is a social media platform just like Reddit. Reddit doesn't stop you from posting misinformation - why should Facebook?

Solve the misinformation problem at the source.

Stay on topic, big brain

I’ve worked with FB for about 6 years. They went from lean to full fat bloat brigade in no time. Meetings went from things accomplished to clueless fucks who could not make a decision as they were trying to think what their line manager wanted. It became a mess. They could drop another 40k staff and they’ll be fine

after spending billions on his stupid Metaverse...

Stupid: "Dese ppl are jawb creheyturs!"

These aren't sign ups; they are Daily Active Users. And even if that were the case, the trend from the last several years is clear; upward. Reliably upward.

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And what seems more likely? That Meta is attracting more DAU by forcing them to create basically interstitial accounts for third party activities?

Or that Meta is successfully converting people into DAU as they implement more features and relent on more dumb choices (like re-integrating Messenger back into the Facebook app rather than requiring you to use a separate app)?

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Reels, for example, has experienced explosive growth on Facebook. I don't understand why people use it given the user experience, terrible ad injection (including in the middle of short form videos), and basically rebranded content. But people are using it. A lot. And their profits show that. Meta is printing money still despite it all. They aren't firing people because of financials, no matter what they say. Their books are public since they are publicly traded, and their books say they are a growing moneymaking machine.

The difference in scale between Twitter and FB+IG is so massive, no one on the Meta side cares. No advertisers were ever placing ads on Twitter and not on FB+IG.

As a programmer I’ve heard working at Meta is considered a black mark on your record and you could have hard time in the future getting a job. I don’t know if this is true or not.

>I doubt it…there is a lot of dead wood in Facebook to get rid of.

You're correct; in Mahogany Row.

Firings should have started and ended there. Instead they will just fire everyone else and foist the work upon whoever remains behind so they can do the job of more than one person.

It really chaps my ass that the media keeps referring to it as "laid off."

They aren't being laid off; they are being mass fired.

These companies aren't hurting because of the economy. Meta is still posting profits; they just aren't growing as fast the do-nothing ownership class would like. They are still throwing tens of billions of dollars away every year to chase some pipe dream of a person who is deeply disliked by basically everybody for being a duplicitous weirdo.

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Laid off also implies no fault of the employees, but that isn't what the actual implication is. How many of us have seen reassurances that it is just the lowest performers being fired? That's not being laid off.

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"Lay off" the executive team for starters.

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It should be abundantly clear to everyone that workers assume all of the risk in enterprise.

Year of happy fun joy.