- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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Meta is one company that I morally wouldn’t work for UNLESS they paid me 3x what I make now. One of my old managers just jumped to meta and is going to be making 2.8x what I make. I could suffer it for 2-4 years to buy and pay off a house…
Yet somehow, Facebook still managed to transfer an eye watering $50bn to capitalists in 2025 through dividends and buybacks. That is the equivalent of $633,639/employee. Tech workers need to unionize!
It’s kind of sad in hindsight. I remember around 8-10 years ago or so a conversation about unionization amongst programmers came up and almost universally the response was “lol why would I ever unionize? Just hop companies.”
Welp.
It was always stupid do dismiss unions.
The software engineering was in a stupid bubble just waiting to be popped.
But no one cared, since they got paid so much.
AI was the bubble bursting.
So far it’s not looking like it is.
The AI is too expensive, and technical debt it generates will cause the AI bubble some strain, and if that goes, software development will be stronger for a while. At least on the senior level.
Tech workers are labor aristocracy, so collaboration with capitalists is rampant. Even here on Lemmy, in the tech comms you will find a higher than average rate of capitalist apologism.
But as the market adjusts they will be exploited just like the rest of workforce. This was already the case with some sectors, like videogames, which were more exploited than others. When there is a hefty supply of workers and a stable 5% unemployed, ready to accept any conditions, those $200k+ incomes will be a distant memory.
they are also pay very high enough to not unionize,
More programmers for tech co-ops and open-source projects.
I mean sure, it won’t cover these people’s mortgages or probably even healthcare. That sucks, it really does. But let’s starve big tech of the expertise that they so obviously disdain, and contribute our time and energy to building better alternatives.
i have “being laid off” PTSD or something because every time i see a headline like this i say FUCK
Banafa says he urges his students to use AI.
“Don’t be left behind. I mean, if you see any kind of new tools in AI, any new projects by the big name, by OpenAI or Google, go and learn it. Get certifications, take classes that would make you in the front of the line when it comes to hiring,” he said.
You can smell the misguided desperation from the person quoted through the screen.
They’re laying off 10% of the workforce and simultaneously rewarding employees who waste as many AI resources as possible, including the one employee who burned $1.4 million in tokens in one month.
It’s a contest in tech right now who can signal the hardest that they’re “AI-first,” and Zuck continues to show his lack of imagination and independent thought by lighting 10% of the company on fire to make the most smoke in a valley already choking on its own smoldering fumes.
Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn’t stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It’s like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who’ve burnt more calories have probably done more work but it’s not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I’m going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I’m not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.
Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.
Yeah the thing that pro-ai zealots don’t get is that if they’re right and AI is the future, then being left behind is ultimately not up to you. The point of AI is to leave workers behind. Embracing it doesn’t do anything to save you, it just accelerates the end of your own job.
Lay off 100% and be done with it. Fuck Zuck and his employee stooges.
I don’t understand how Facebook has so many employees. What do they do, what does their standard day look like.
If I don’t show up to my job there’s loads of tasks that wouldn’t get done but Facebook is a website, it can’t honestly need so many employees especially when they never really change anything.
Meetings and meetings about how to enshittificate more (example: premium subscription for WhatsApp is now already in A/B testing phase) and find a way to skirt laws and regulations
I don’t mean this in a way that suggests Facebook is culturally important and good in any fashion, but Facebook does a LOT of different things and in fact is a multitude of websites and features in a trench coat. Whether they are bloated with employees or not, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to have a metric ton of employees. Also it’s not just Facebook, it’s Meta as a company so there are plenty of people working there who have nothing to do with the website.
They change the flavors in the frozen yogurt kombucha machine.
facebook is one of the backbones of the internet. that’s why.
Right that’s why I mean that what does the average Facebook employee do when they get in in the morning?
the same as any other employee at any other tech or other company. mostly emails and meetings. a few hours of actual work.
is there a big seven lay off tracking website ?
because i’m pretty sure they have laid off 123% in the last 13 months
There was this site making the rounds a few years ago and it still seems updated: https://layoffs.fyi/
That’s the stuff. Thank you.
Not including the cuts mentioned here, it looks like meta has reduced the number of employees by about 20% so far compared to last years highest count.
The other have seemingly kept hiring so their staff cuts have not shown in official numbers as far as I can tell. source
Incoming record earnings and board remunerations!
Shouldn’t have gone all in on the Metaverse, eh, Fuckerburg?
Don’t worry, they’ve definitely hitched their horse on the right Next Big Thing this time!
He didn’t and doesn’t care.
zuckerborg thought he could download the thoughts of humans into his robot body, but he doesnt have the technology to do so.
Zuckerberg: If I burn all our fossil fuels and lay off thousands more employees, then finally AI will teach me what humans call love.
Couldn’t they just fire zuck, since he’s made himself redundant? I bet that’s a hell of a lot greater decrease in expenditure than 10% of the staff…
He’s majority shareholder or has some trick to never be dethroned.
No AI could replicate zuckerberg’s robotic nature.
Don’t know if they can. If I’m recalling correctly he holds enough Class B shares to retain supermajority voting power.
I mean I’m sorry but I am not going to cry of you work at Meta.
I’ve been there, (not exactly but in a similar situation) it’s just something to stick on your resume. People get massively over excited if they hear you worked at one of the big tech companies. The automatically assume that everyone who works there is a super genius. This even works for Microsoft employees.
This happens because recruiters never know anything about the industry that they’re recruiting for, so they’re just looking for easy hints and “worked at Meta” is a good, if not particularly necessarily accurate, hint that this person knows what they’re talking about.
Only 10%? earnings must be increasing faster than ever.
Of course it is:
Their AI must be shit if they can only lay off 10%.
A good AI would let you lay off at least 50%
Yes. 10% is a rookie CEO number.
Zuck needs to AI harder. If they’re so sure they don’t need expert help, why not prove it?
What is the actual issue with these layoffs? Why do they always get spammed around and everyone gets mad. Big companies churn employees whats the problem? Do we need to celebrate when they hire 10% back in the next month.
In America, your life is very much dependent on your job. Your healthcare is intrinsically tied to it, we have little to no safety nets protecting you when you lose it, and yet it’s a country with little to no employee protection laws. We’re in the middle of a recession and there aren’t enough jobs for everyone. They will not be hiring 10% back next month. At best these employees with their good credentials will got other jobs in the tech sector pushing out 10,000 other tech workers. People will go hungry, people will not be able to get medicine they need to survive.
It used to be that layoffs were something companies did as an emergency last resort. Now people’s livelihoods are cast aside as casually as you would pick a new color to paint the office walls.
These are workers in an industry where these work patterns are common, they make far above average wage and can work from anywhere in the world. Their job mobility is very high so why feel sorry for them? This isnt the same as the only steel mill in town laying off 1000 workers.
Mobility is not high when every other company in the market does this regularly. People that just started families, moved their lives, have healthcare needs will see significant negative impact. These actions are a direct transfer of wealth from working class people to already incomprehensibly wealthy shareholders. And what’s more the actions are designed to keep people happy with what they have and reduce wages and wage growth for those that aren’t impacted. Shareholders are incentivizing immoral acts against the working class and using tech corporations to do so.
These work patterns are becoming common and that’s precisely the problem.
This industry is also very vast and doesn’t just include the big tech companies. When all the big tech companies are doing layoffs like this there is no lateral or upward mobility. Many of these employees move downwards pushing out plenty of employees without the high salaries and mobilities. Some of those less mobile employees leave the industry entirely and flood others affecting those as well.
The idea that these layoffs affect only the people laid off is not accurate. 10,000 fewer jobs means 10,000 fewer jobs. In a country that does not have enough jobs for everyone who is willing and able to work, every lob lost is a net negative for an entire industry. When this continues year over year it’s not just the big tech sycophants who are negatively affected. This shit rolls downhill to every already underpaid high school IT employee.
It was not common until about 3-4 years ago. For years, if you got hired, you were pretty much golden, as long as you were good at the job.
Also, the job market is getting rougher and rougher. Just yesterday I read a comment from someone who said they’d been in the industry for 15 years and it’s never been this bad. And another from someone who said they’d been unemployed for 18 months now.
These layoffs are being done to manipulate stock prices and signal that “we’re really great at using AI so we don’t need to pay humans anymore”. These are actual human beings as pawns in the games of capital. Doesn’t matter how much you’re earning for the company, they need you gone so they can say they’re closer to being a human-free company.
pre-pandemic hire yea you pretty much were set. but not during covid, and not during 2023 though.
Yeah, boy am I glad I finally got into the industry just before the pandemic hit. If I was trying to get into it now with zero experience, I think I’d have a better chance of becoming a lawyer without a degree, Mike Ross style.
I’m getting to the point where I can call myself a senior in a few years without feeling embarrassed. And since nobody’s hiring juniors and they still want seniors, I think it’ll be a good place in a few years. At least until they figure out AI that’s good enough to start displacing seniors en masse as well, by then I hope to just have investments to make some passive income in addition to whatever the fuck I’ll be doing to earn my bread after this. Maybe I’ll be a lumberjack. I do like playing with my Husqie.
I hope someone asks you that next time you lose your job. It’s only 8,000 people who’s lives have been turned upsidedown, you have the emotional capacity of a CEO.
These people work at Meta, they can get another job. These arent low mobility workers.
I hope someone points that out to you next time you lose your job. Your lack of empathy is gross
you have the emotional capacity of a CEO.
So people should be forever employed? What kind of childish world view is this
In sane parts of the world, layoffs need to be justified. E.g getting rid of a department that wasn’t profitable and there’s literally no other vacancies to fill in the company with the same people, or cutting costs to stay in business.
Meta doesn’t seem to be close to closing down. Their employee count isn’t really reducing much, they’re just virtue signaling AI usage by laying people off. Where I come from, it would be illegal to lay someone off and not hire them back when you’re hiring again for a similar role, because layoffs are ONLY for positions being closed permanently. Otherwise it’s a firing, and you also need justification for firing (and it’s an entirely different kind of justification).
The bare minimum would look something like https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies-and-activities/rights-work/labour-law/employee-involvement/collective-redundancies_en
Is it childish to think that companies that are profitable should not be able to get rid of their employees for no reason?
If they have to hire back 10% next month, their foolishness will be even more newsworthy.
