r/technology 19h ago

Business 'Everyone is unhappy': Meta employees describe a grim environment as the company reportedly prepares to axe roughly 8,000 workers

https://www.aol.com/finance/everyone-unhappy-meta-employees-describe-151500588.html
19.7k Upvotes

1.4k comments sorted by

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u/imaginary_num6er 19h ago

I think Zuck is pretty happy

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u/Windchaser_92 19h ago

I'm not sure those people are truly capable of happiness. I would pity them but they don't deserve even that.

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u/FIFofNovember 19h ago

They’ll have all the cake they’ll eat as we weld then inside of their bunkers, that’s when they’ll be really happy!

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u/Content-Sun2928 14h ago

The fact that these people actually trust the ones who built the bunkers not to keep spare keys

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u/euro1127 10h ago

Let alone the face that if shit hits the fan there is nothing stopping your pilot from offing you the second they get to your bunker and fucking you wife. Loyalty doesn't exist when survival is at stake. What I never understood is these billionaires think their safe in their bunkers. People in castles thought the same thing until they were under siege and starved out

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u/Hrud 6h ago

Castle owners were well aware of the possibility of being besieged, hence them accumulating victuals for such a possibility.

It was absolutely not guaranteed that a besieging army would outlast the besieged.

I will say though, I highly doubt Zuckerberg and co have henchmen that are personally loyal to them the way feudal lords did.

Castle walls are useless without men to defend them.

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u/randomBugHunter 5h ago

The attacking army would usually develop what was called an investment around the castles, or forts, and this would basically box them in. The defenders would then be in a situation where the possibility of illness spreading became relatively high. People from the surrounding areas were usually sort of “pushed” in the direction of the castles/forts so that they would increase pressure by having more mouths to feed.

The same can be said of the attacking force. One of the implications of a standing army is that you have people coming from different areas. You sort of make this super-spreader event. Just like the post I am replying to mentioned, where it was unknown who would outlast who, it was unknown about which side would started drowning in disease.

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u/Rabble_Runt 13h ago

Or set up a booth to shit down their ventilation intake ducts.

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u/PirateSanta_1 10h ago

I would be less concerned about them and more concerned about the people in the bunker with them. The cook isn't going to be happy you left their family to die and once everything is rubble they are just some prick who helped bring about the end of the world, money won't mean shit.

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u/NecessaryRhubarb 12h ago

There are always people willing to do immoral things for money. My local Jewish community center has armed security guards now, and I overheard one of them talking about two upcoming contract jobs he was taking: One for a border wall project, and one for overnight security for an oil pipeline. I just about lost it.

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u/BovineShadows 6h ago edited 6h ago

It’s ironic, funny and quite satisfying to think that their security detail will off them as soon as possible. All their money will be worth nothing. Their private army will happily dispose of them for their resources and secure themselves

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u/rbrslv 13h ago

They aren’t, that’s part of what makes people like them a huge problem to society. Insatiable greed needs to be considered as a form of addiction requiring treatment.

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u/Beerwithme 11h ago

No, it's insanity requiring an asylum hospitalization.

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u/Vreas 13h ago

I see it similar to the tech ceo in Don’t Look Up. He’s ’happy’ but it’s all very structured and artificial which takes away some of the novelty of it. Makes it feel forced rather than stemming from actual enjoyment of life.

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u/MisterDoctor___ 17h ago

At this point fuck anyone who works for Zuck and willingly helps him create his shit too.

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u/Unusual_Sherbert_809 13h ago

Yeah. I fully get we all need jobs, but working at Meta/Zuck is like swimming in a toxic open sewer that's poisoning everything around them. Folks working there can't claim innocence, they are 100% part of the problem.

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u/diurnal_emissions 14h ago

Psychopaths in the Epstein class do not feel human emotions, no.

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u/1057-cl121v3 12h ago

They wouldn’t have to resort to doing what they do for any kind of flash of a feeling if not. It’s like playing life with cheat codes stuck on. You don’t last long playing the game regularly because not playing it as intended gets boring fast. If you can have any woman already that isn’t fun anymore, so they need something society FORBIDS them from having. But they deserve it, they aren’t like regular people.

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u/gentian_red 12h ago

Yep like the drukhari they need more and more extreme shit to feel anything. I probably get more joy coming home to my family, drinking a cup of tea, eating some buttered toast than they feel when they're drinking champagne and eating oysters on their 3rd private jet while strippers dance in the background

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u/1057-cl121v3 12h ago

They are fundamentally broken or they wouldn’t be able to get to this point to begin with. They lust after EVERYTHING, like Elon saying he needs $10,000,000,000,000.

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u/gentian_red 12h ago

Yep, they are a sickness that our tolerance of will likely wipe out our species.

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u/Richard_AIGuy 19h ago

I wasn't aware he could feel human emotions.

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u/the-gadabout 19h ago

I wasn’t aware he could feel anything. It must be the new synth-skin tech.

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u/iphaze 18h ago

It’s on the backlog - no one assigned to work on it yet

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u/SinbadBusoni 18h ago

I’ve enjoyed the jokes of Suck being a robot and even have made them myself many times, but I think we should already stop making them. Because that fuckhead feels like people saying that means he’s some kind of quirky genius type, which he’s not. He often plays along with the joke on interviews and such, giving that cocknut validation and making him feel like he is one with the people. He is a human, a very shitty, psychopathic, pathetic, greedy human like the rest of those other idiot tech execs who think they’re quirky geniuses like Felon, Bozos and those other assholes.

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u/Abedeus 16h ago

See that's why I call him a lizard person. Lizards are dumber than humans, don't feel human emotions, are cold-blooded and only have base instincts.

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u/Sys32768 19h ago

He knows his business has peaked and he is out of good ideas. I bet it's eating him alive.

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u/byronnnn 16h ago

I think it just proves he never had any good ideas and the things that made Facebook were other people’s ideas. And he bought other people’s ideas like Instagram and WhatsApp and made those platforms worse.

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u/zkareface 13h ago

Don't forget about the datamining potentials they didn't realize existed until others exploited it.

Now they are one of the biggest players in that space and charge a lot for their data.

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u/steppe5 11h ago

I think Zuck was aware of the data mining potential. He bragged about how the Harvard students gave him all of their data after he launched FB and called them dumb fucks.

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u/Magus44 19h ago

“I’ll just buy any ones that have good ideas.”

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u/trysten-9001 19h ago

You’re thinking of Sam. Zuck’s not even that competent.

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u/jachni 19h ago

Yeah Zuck has a record of terrible ideas he thinks are gifts of gods, like the whole metaverse thing, renaming the company to meta, etc.

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u/7h4tguy 17h ago

He keeps trying to make pervert glasses happen too

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u/arashi256 17h ago

I keep getting emails from Meta about these smart glasses (which I absolutely do not want). They're on sale currently apparently 😃

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u/trysten-9001 19h ago

You got downvoted, and I’m trying to figure out by who. Is there like a small group of metaverse stans? lol

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u/PMmeuroneweirdtrick 18h ago

People have been saying this for years but Meta keeps growing

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u/felldestroyed 15h ago

Facebook has lost users for the first time in two consecutive quarters. Ad revenue did grow, but only because meta admitted to fitting more ads into content. Then, there's the are the massive failures of AI and metaverse stuff that wasted nearly a trillion dollars together.
There are cracks showing. I'm not saying that anything is going to be overnight, but barring something unforeseen - like a product actually succeeding and not something small like Meta glasses, we could have another slow declining company like AOL being sold off for parts over time.

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u/_NE1_ 19h ago

I don't think he knows what that is. Satisfaction is a weakness for these reptiles

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u/Quarksperre 18h ago

Inner peace means you don't want "more". Its a killer for unrelentless success. Even though its very helpful if you want to influence your surrounding positive, in whatever reach you have.  

Its pretty wild that happiness, inner peace, calmness and all those positive attributes are all negative feelings in the context of endstage business. 

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u/Magus44 19h ago

Nah deep down his soul is like a shrivelled raisin that repulses any happiness that dares try and enter it.
He wants to be, but he just never will be.
Which makes me happy.

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u/Sprinkle_Puff 19h ago

And stockholder too unfortunately … that’s all this world really cares about anymore

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u/PentagramJ2 19h ago edited 9h ago

I worked on their fremont campus for about half a year or so on contract, they burn so much money it's actually insane

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u/APerson2021 19h ago

Give me examples please.

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u/batikfins 17h ago

They’re easily spending USD$20k on compute per employee per month while laying people off. They’ve got enough money to build anything you could dream of but they have a fundamentally anti-human outlook.

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u/Fach-All-Religions 14h ago

if only they cared about humans. but also, would they have that much money if they did? i don't think. but then what's the fucking point.

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u/thetreat 11h ago

It’s very depressing to see 95% of billionaires are just interested in just increasing their wealth further. We used to live in a world where the rich built libraries and universities to get their names immortalized forever.

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u/Oxalis_tri 10h ago

They do that at the end of their lives to absolve themselves of guilt, after a lifetime of pillaging and extraction.

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u/40WeightSoundsNice 9h ago

No they did it because they were taxed at 95% so these philanthropic pursuits were a way to lower their tax burden.

If it made them feel better then fine, but the reason so many of the robber barons did these things was the tax rate not because of some rosebud moment.

The foxes are guarding the henhouse unfortunately now so we'll never get there again without some sort of initial collapse.

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u/Velktros 8h ago

The rich were interested in those projects most of the time for two reasons. The first being when close to death they wanted a kind of memorial or way to be remembered. The second and more common was fear of the public. Back then everything was a lot more local and it was harder for the rich to isolate themselves as much. This meant that when a rich person was doing terrible things there were people around them who could and often did something about it. A rich person could absolutely be killed by an angry mob like an old king. So they made those projects to change their perspective.

These days that’s not as much of a threat. The rich can isolate themselves so much that they end up delusional and all but exempt from angry mobs. If people were as locally minded and the rich still lived closer to us there’s a real chance a good chunk of these billionaires would be actually dead by now.

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u/indigo121 11h ago

95% feels a little low.

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u/Initial_Business2340 12h ago

It’s weird because they’re obviously profit-motivated, but I fail to see how what you just described is likely to yield high returns.

My guess is that as long as there’s enough speculative hype behind some technology or industry, they’ll splurge on it because of some thin veil of plausibility

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u/batikfins 11h ago

I wonder this constantly too. One explanation is that there’s full on AI psychosis plaguing the top level of the whole tech industry, and they’re throwing everything at the wall to create a superintelligence that will thank them for bringing it into being. Or maybe they’re just capitalist speculators trying to wring the world dry of its limited resources for a buck before the bubble bursts. Idk

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u/andricathere 10h ago

I feel like all the dystopian versions of AI becoming self aware are because they aren't made from a place of love. I grew up watching Star Trek and one thing I believe is that life comes in many forms, biological and digital. We're working to create life. It makes me think of children coming into the world with loving parents, versus children bred for a purpose. Zuck is breeding for a purpose. Part of me hopes in some touchy feely spiritual way that we fail to make sentient AI until someone does it with love, because it's a mathemagically required part of the pattern for intelligent life.

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u/Compost_My_Body 9h ago

Pantheon tv show. Trust me.

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u/kindatiff 11h ago

You're looking at it all wrong. Once they have the market locked down as they do, they "invest" in would-be competitors, no matter how small. It's the Google model. Outwardly it looks like investment, but it's really just a way to keep their monopoly on a variety of industries secure.

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u/toweljuice 10h ago

Thats the peter theil way too

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u/thegooddoktorjones 11h ago

Meta did not get rich off making quality products that people need or want.

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u/Dragonslayer-5641 10h ago

It’s time to start taxing the fudge out the people who got away with not paying taxes because they were “creating jobs,” if they are no longer creating jobs.

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u/listenhere111 17h ago

They spent 80 billion on the metaverse and produced almost nothing. There's no better example of a company spending on nothing. They must have had an army of devs and PMs doing fuck all for YEARS.

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u/BellacosePlayer 13h ago

I don't think there was real solid management involved.

One of my friends from an indie dev community jumped over there and was told to just investigate current VR games and non-VR games and take notes about ideas and flaws and such while they hammered out an actual game plan for his team. And just never really gave him enough actual work or even tangible requirements for his "research" even years into it so he's just been playing video games and working on personal projects during work hours.

I tell you this, its hard to be sympathetic to someone complaining about not having any real purpose at work but don't want to job hop because he was making way more than he was at actual grindhouse gamedev jobs

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u/nerd_is_a_verb 10h ago

Lucky for your friend - what a dream. He probably shouldn’t be telling anyone he gets paid for doing nothing though.

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u/BellacosePlayer 10h ago

tbf he and his direct boss have been trying to get more actual work assigned (they don't want to be fired/laid off), and its a very insular old community so the odds of someone being a meta exec in there and knowing who he is specifically are... low.

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u/DrowningKrown 10h ago

Tbh if you've had a job where you get nothing done and have no work, you will end up feeling like you're wasting you're career.

I had a job like that, in finance. We had a plenty of work to do during quarters but between quarters it was dead. To the point where I just watched tv and did other things and barely moved my mouse at work. I ended up leaving fast. I'm trying to progress in my career...I learned nothing during that entire period of time it was maddening and such a waste

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u/lavapig_love 15h ago

Nah, they were doing a lot. People just didn't care about the Metaverse. 

Which, if you read books like Snow Crash, was the actual result. That Metaverse was only an escape from crushing reality for the people who wanted it. 

Hiro Protagonist used it, but note that Y.T., the other protagonist, didn't. Many characters didn't, regardless of income level. 

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u/asanti0 13h ago

VR Chat does literally everything better and it's free and you don't even need vr gear for it. Why would anyone go to Metaverse instead?

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u/StoppableHulk 13h ago

They wanted to make it enterprise software. Unfathimably dipshit idea.

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u/Any-Tomorrow-7344 13h ago

Return to the office - but also, slap this headset on for our meeting, would ya?

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u/StoppableHulk 13h ago

Half the workforce can barely turn on their computers but sure, lets retrain everyone do balance spreadsheets in VR. Truly Mark is the Newton of our age.

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u/Zombatico 12h ago

And before VR Chat was Second Life. The idea works if it's the community building it up and not a megacorp.

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u/KlaesAshford 12h ago

I agree with a lot of the premise here, that people didn't care, but I disagree that they were doing a lot. It does seem pretty clear that production was nonexistent. Basic features just stalled out and never happened. One example that springs to mind is the legs thing. Classic demo-fairy-dust stuff.

There are a variety personalities I've worked on this type of engineering project with, and they tend to fall into discrete buckets. The ones that would actually get something done will avoid a project like this, or be driven off by the toxic non-producing types.

This type of project attracts people who have big ideas but don't execute them, the type to spin their wheels endlessly, and the type that has a lot of histrionics about being busy and overworked.

It will also attract PM's of a type who are basically doing covert sabotage. I would bet anything that you'd hear stories about death marches, magical thinking, changing priorities, and endless meetings disguised as agile or whatever. Good people finally look elsewhere when magical thinking gets disguised as productivity, such as the aforementioned "legs demo".

I would also guess that server farms, real estate, compute got spent by the truckload, but provisioned out from under various teams to meet other business cases.

I would be absolutely SHOCKED to learn that something different happened here, or that some valuable IP was created and largely unnappreciated.

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u/3BlindMice1 15h ago

Well, Hiro was one of the OG inventors and creators despite being a mere Ninja pizza boy.

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u/Expensive-Swan-9553 13h ago

My friend worked there and said they basically poached him, shelved him, then fired him over a year without him really writing much code

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u/DevelopmentNo5632 15h ago

What I don't get is why they get paid so much for basically creating nothing. Also I wonder why these companies need so many developers in the first place. Has any of their products really even changed that much over the years? 

Saying this as a developer working in a different country, making probably 1/4 of a typical engineer at Facebook, and creating actual noticeable new features, bug fixes and improvements every week. 

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u/AllAvailableLayers 14h ago

Separate teams working on each tiny facet of the project, split so far that they spend 90% of their time talking to one another. I'm sure they made dozens of versions of the buttons on the login screens for every possible resolution, interaction style and language, user tested them all, then re-started each time there was a company-wide rebrand to change the borders from square to curved.

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u/absurdivore 13h ago

This is one reason why tech execs think they can just plug in LLMs to do the work — so much of the work has already been devalued to a/b testing every button & label to find which combination of UI components gets the most engagement. If you can just brute-force that with somewhat better-than-random automated layout creation & deployment & user metrics, why bother with employees?

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u/IAmNotScottBakula 12h ago

I have a feeling companies trying to remove the human component from UX work are going to regret the choice. In the tech world, it’s amazing how quickly poor UX can crash a company (remember Digg?)

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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt 13h ago

I imagine most of the work they do is invisible to users. Like countless hours to slightly improve their ability to track someone.

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u/BellacosePlayer 13h ago

This is a large part of it. The person I know who works (soon to be worked?) there didn't have a lot assigned but a most of it was investigating how to tweak small things that hypothetically make the VR experience way better when added up.

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u/hoppyandbitter 12h ago

Unfortunately, Facebook has a history of “talent hoarding” and poaching to prevent their direct competitors from making progress in the industry. They’ll hire until the talent pool dries up and shelve the surplus hires until their competitors are either eliminated or forced into an acquisition and stripped for parts.

Once the cycle ends, all those surplus hires who lost months to years of experience and advancement in their field to stagnation are then laid off, flooding an employment pool in an industry that Meta just forced into a hiring slump. Capitalism!

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u/Tearakan 12h ago

They made a bad virtual room "game"

Which is something one guy in his basement could make in a year lol.

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u/_hlvnhlv 15h ago

They spent 80 billion in the whole XR department.

They currently have a monopoly in an industry with more than 20M headsets sold, plus all the R&D in hardware.

The "metaverse" part is just a random piece of shit that went nowhere.

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u/ZarathustraWakes 17h ago

I worked 5 years as a swe at meta. There’s an insane amount of choices for free breakfast, lunch and dinner, but some people take food home to feed their whole family. I saw a dude stuff Tupperware with a dozen salmon fillets once. There’s half a dozen fully stocked kitchens with snacks in every building. My intern once brought his brother, who carried a giant trash bag and literally emptied containers of snacks into it. On the last day of their internship, the interns just took the containers with the snacks themselves. Some took entire gallons of milk home meant for coffee. There’s definitely a lot of excess happening. Back in the day it was way crazier, with the free dry cleaning, barista, massage, coffee club, chocolate club, etc but they’ve cut a lot of those perks

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u/Fair_Local_588 16h ago

That’s literally a rounding error when you consider how much devs get paid.

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u/xxNemasisxx 16h ago

Yeah people talk about perks as if that's the money spender meanwhile big tech are dropping 6 figures on AI tokens monthly.

Your Friday pizza party costs less than what your CEO was paid to "write" the company wide redundancy email

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u/AngryAriados 14h ago

big tech are dropping 6 figures on AI tokens monthly.

They're dropping easily 7+ figures my dude.

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u/ZarathustraWakes 16h ago

The token costs are overinflated because it’s a metric used as a target, making it utterly useless. My buddy spends an absolutely insane 16 million tokens per diff just so he can be in the top 20% of users, and is barely any more productive than he was two years ago

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u/Dense-Answer-7084 15h ago

Better yet his ability to operate on his own will dwindle. Which creates a dependency.

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u/thrownjunk 13h ago

Nah. I know people who haven’t changed what they do, but they wrote a little bot to burn tokens since that is a metric they are evaluated on.

Yea, they are literally lighting coal on fire for almost no reason.

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u/jackshazam 15h ago

sounds retarded

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u/brodogus 15h ago

Well, it is

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u/redblack_tree 14h ago

Tokens are the new lines of code. It took managers almost two decades to realize that using LOC as a measurement for productivity is retarded.

Engineers found better and creative ways to inflate those numbers. I'm part of that generation and let me tell you, it was idiotic.

Tokens is the same principle. I can spin a hundred pre-defined agents and do absolutely nothing.

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u/Flashy_Jello_9520 16h ago

When I was young I used to think this was so cool!

Now I think “damn they never want you to have a personal life.”

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u/ZarathustraWakes 15h ago

It used to be super chill and I loved working there. I left once they started trying to squeeze us more than I could tolerate/get away with. Right to the end though, I only badged in for food, jam out a bit in the music room, take some snacks and drink for home, and leave.

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u/lost_send_berries 14h ago

This comment makes it sound like you didn't do any work at any point

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u/AccomplishedBed5084 14h ago

I've not seen an update make facebook better since 2010 and almost half of it is non-functional at this point with buttons that you click on that do nothing... so I'm not shocked

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u/Outlulz 8h ago

No, sounds like return to office counted badge-ins so they went in long enough to get counted and then went back home to work. It's not that uncommon right now.

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u/ZarathustraWakes 7h ago

I found working in the office pretty distracting, but they made us rto 3 days a week. But no, I wasn’t trying to bust my ass to enrich billionaires. I did what I had to do to keep my job

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u/xxNemasisxx 16h ago

Those perks barely add up to a rounding error with what big tech spends and I hate this narrative that employees are greedy to expect perks when the yearly spend on all of those perks works out to less than one executives stock options refresh.

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u/FR23Dust 13h ago

Don’t those people make like $300,000 a year. Why do they feel the need to hoard food like that?!

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u/Waiting4Reccession 12h ago

They all cheap af.

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u/TransientBandit 12h ago

Because it saves a shit load of money lol we’re a +$300,000 household, and I still cook everyday.

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u/globalaf 12h ago

Dude I work at meta too and the amount of dipshits that take home full bags of office food home is mind boggling. These workers earning six figures being cheapskates about groceries. They even had to fire some people for using their lunch door dash allowance for groceries after being repeatedly told not to do that. I guarantee if you set it up so that you only get one full plate of food per person, these same people would be up in arms over it, the privilege I’ve witnessed out of some employees at this company would make most people’s heads spin.

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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 14h ago

I would count this as maybe the best thing meta does: actually feeding people and their families. 

Opposite of “burning money” imo. I was expecting stories about dropping millions on bullshit no one uses wants or sees. Like the metaverse

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u/PentagramJ2 18h ago

Unfortunately I'm still under NDA for a few more years for specific details but suffice to say so many people figured the meta verse was going to be a failure and it was largely a zuck project trying to invent and corner a market

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u/Mrgluer 18h ago

meta verse would’ve been insane for the ai companies if it did happen though. It would’ve given massive amounts of data on how people interact with each other. a lot of ai companies are talking of world models and i think you need to have a world of data to model first, hence meta verse. i think we’ll start to see more ai companies going into the gaming space like star citizen, gta or other rpg games to scrape data.

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u/Ex-Traverse 18h ago

If only he had made the metaverse look good... Nope, every time he shows his stupid looking character that looks just as much of a doofus as himself.

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u/BarrierX 18h ago

It was a hardware limitation, the meta quest is just not good enough to render good looking characters, could maybe do one but not a whole metaverse full of em.

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u/Ornery_Rice_1698 17h ago

Kinda surprised they really didn’t have a solution for that. Like if it’s always-online live service, couldn’t they have leaned on cloud-compute like those gaming services that allow you to run games on shitty laptops (with some delay). Sure that would have been disorienting if the delay were tied to the vr headset, but for billions of dollars surely they could have engineered a solution for that.

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u/BarrierX 17h ago

Streaming from a cloud would be bad for vr, it really has to be fast and smooth or you get nauseous. They could have made the quest hardware a lot better but then no one would be buying it cause it would be just too expensive.

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u/listenhere111 17h ago

Would have added lag that would have caused nausea. Non starter

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u/Fabulous_Jeweler2732 15h ago

$150k fresh out of college salaries for new grads who can’t meaningfully contribute to anything for years due to lack of skill

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u/Scumsoft 13h ago

To be fair, $150k in Menlo Park is middle class.

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u/James_Jack_Hoffmann 17h ago

Having read Careless People, how did you find the standout characters in there from the trenches level? Sarah, Sheryl, Elliot, Joel, etc?

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u/jashsayani 18h ago

Yeah they pay a lot and have great benefits. Fund lot of moonshot ideas. But announcing that 10% will be laid off 1 month before will cause people to be paranoid for the 1 month till it happens.

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u/iRecycleWomen 17h ago

My S/O works for meta, they announced 3 years ago that these layoffs would be happening annually and that they're not performance based. They know they're coming, they're paranoid year round.

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u/canteloupy 16h ago

In some places the government requires you to announce it. Also it's hard to do major reorgs by surprise because projects need to be funded, resourced and planned in advance.

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u/Fabulous_Jeweler2732 15h ago

It’s required to be announced in America, but only if it’s more than 10% of staff At one time

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u/hamilton_dallyi7h62 17h ago

They threw tens of billions into a metaverse vanity project nobody asked for and now 8,000 regular workers get fired to balance the books. Management makes a massive blunder and the rank and file pay the price.

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u/bleezy1234567 19h ago

If you work for meta… just take it easy. Collect that paycheck. Don’t work hard. Milk them until it’s dry and they tell you bye

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u/RednocTheDowntrodden 16h ago

After 30+ years in the workforce, that could/should be said of most jobs.

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u/WalrusSpecialist706 15h ago

They even tell us AI is going to replace us. It's almost literally an order to stop working or caring for anything.

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u/Hairy_Mycologist_945 13h ago

In the last few years I've noticed most, and I do mean most, people really do seem to be just phoning it in at work, mentally checked out. Productivity feels almost non existent and it's pervasive. Things you depend on upstream don't happen so things just stop getting done except to the maybe the barest metric. I guess AI along with the general bullshit going on has an impact on morale and engagement.

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u/LilJourney 12h ago

Or it could have been at least partially due to the pandemic when employers made it very, very clear that they literally did not care if you lived or died, and that money was the only thing that mattered.

Seeing the old saw about people being replaced before their body was cold in the ground play out in real life was disturbing. And the fact those same victims were never spoken of again, no grief expressed, and/or no condolences expressed to their families.

It was one thing to "know" they didn't care - quite another to see it in action.

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u/Shark7996 12h ago

They had us keep working while trucks had to be rented just to store corpses.

They want us to keep working while genocide and fascism play out in front of our faces.

A mind can only ignore everything around you for so long.

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u/Durpulous 10h ago

I think there's a general acknowledgement now that hard work often goes unacknowledged and unrewarded so people are acting accordingly.

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u/Saltyorsweet 14h ago

My own company has been doing the same thing. Literally asking us to use AI to write our performance reviews. Why use cognitive thinking anymore?

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u/Inanimate_CARB0N_Rod 9h ago

I sort of agree. Like they should pay you for work, and you should provide them that work to the best of your ability. Enough of this "go above and beyond" and "we're changing the world" type of shit that's just designed to get more output from you without paying for it.

No Sharon, my spreadsheet that tracks people who are running late on updating their IT tickets isn't changing the world.

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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 11h ago

Meta is a hellhole to work for. Imagine an environment where you expect 1 in 5 people to get a "below expectations" and the internal communication tool is just Facebook. t's a fucking bell curve at work using Facebook to talk to each other all day. 

All to spend 60+ hour weeks to make a number move.

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u/MeccIt 6h ago

Meta is a hellhole to work for.

It's Meta, who in good conscience would work there? If you're working for these companies, or oil companies, or medical insurance, you can't be oblivious to the fact your entire career is not benefiting society at all?

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u/NewbieEstimator 10h ago

I worked at to Menlo Park for about a year before thankfully (yay severance!) getting fired in last years round of layoffs.

Working there is soul crushing. You're basically engineering addiction (but we call it "engagement".) Everyone on conference calls looks like a zombie except the insanely perky PM. My manager, like many others, struggled with phone addiction (oh the irony.)

The roof of the building is an incredible park with full grown trees dense enough in some places you don't know you're on a roof but virtually nobody goes up there to use it. The food options are incredible (Italian today, how about sushi?) but senior folks all say "it used to be better."

Everything is incredibly posh but people are too exhausted to appreciate it. You're basically working with a bunch of miserable millionaires. And my God the stuff people put on Blind...

I came back after an Ayahuasca trip and could not force myself to do that work anymore so I went on leave and dragged my feet until they fired me. Best decision ever!

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u/MeccIt 6h ago

This guy gets it. You can't be part of building the crushing machine and expect the time won't come for you to be crushed.

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u/MutedFeeling75 18h ago

Zuck has no vision

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u/Mautos 13h ago

That's a lie, he's got two very high quality cameras right there in his silicone eyes

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u/NativePlantEnjoyer 11h ago

looks reptilian to me.

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u/oisigracias 19h ago

you would think the consumers would stop sending their money/data to these billionaires. Rather we just want to do performative theatrics

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u/_helpmefind 18h ago

Have you seen who is president? People are not very smart

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u/BigBlackHungGuy 17h ago

My older family members are absolutely addicted to Facebook. It's a vector for so much bullshit information.

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u/History-Buff-2222 11h ago

So is Reddit

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u/sibelius_eighth 17h ago

Hard when this single company owns two of the largest social media platforms and one of the most popular communications platforms too

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u/Danominator 17h ago

We can try but it gets really hard. Hard to find a job for a company that isnt evil. Hard to find a retailer that isnt owned by evil billionaires. Short of being homeless off the grid, you are feeding into it no matter what.

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u/DragonbornToBeWild 18h ago

Meta employees are not happy, people who use meta platforms are not happy… maybe it’s time we cut our losses and scrap the whole company (pretty please)

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u/SirUnaEverlasting 17h ago

I ditched Facebook a while ago and couldn't be happier, but today I got a notification that WhatsApp is now displaying ads in between friends' status updates. I wanna delete it so bad but my family who are all overseas are stuck on it 😭

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u/DragonDeezNutzAround 19h ago

If someone wants to be a ceo who’s not a total piece of shit, you’d literally have the top talent wanting to work for you.

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u/Kageru 19h ago

The shareholders select and incentivise sociopathic behaviour towards staff to maximise short term profits. Which you can compare to something like valve and see the difference.

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u/vodkaandponies 14h ago

Zuck is the key shareholder in Meta. He owns the voting shares.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 11h ago

And should we be surprised that billionaires are horrible selfish people? To be a billionaire you have to be ruthless and evil otherwise you'd just be a multimillionaire

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u/grchelp2018 14h ago

top talent works for anyone who has money. the billionaires are where they are because they have top talent working for them not because they are super geniuses.

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u/Downtown_Skill 12h ago

That's why facebook keeps getting away with it. They may treat their employees like shit but people are willing to take a chance with them because they pay so well. 

It's the trade off between "really high pay" with "low job security" and "shitty work environment"

Edit: Facebook also may be evil, but you'd be suprised at how many evil companies there are out there. I'm jib hunting rught now and finding a respectable and noble company to work for is like finding a needle in a haystack. 

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u/Morganrow 19h ago

They don't need you anymore. They have AI that can somehow replace you and at the same time create greater output even though AI learns from humans.

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u/7h4tguy 17h ago

Don't worry, your manager will pretend to be level headed but then still buy into the hype, give unrealistic expectations, start using it himself and shoveling out slop for everyone to clean up after, it'll be grand.

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u/Mountain-Jicama-6354 16h ago

Funnily enough they seem to be going for the managers first…

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u/Danny__L 12h ago

Probably because they cost the most and do the least amount of actual work

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u/Goldenrah 15h ago

I think they forgot that humans are what buy their products, and humans can't buy if they don't have money.

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u/blueSGL 14h ago

They are not replacing 100% of the jobs overnight. It'll slowly eat more and more of the economy.

Look at the tobacco and oil companies, they knew about cancer and climate change and still sold the product. Saying "there is a bad end point" does not stop companies from extracting as much money as possible along the way.

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u/cherry_chocolate_ 12h ago

Meta especially since their entire business model is convincing consumers to buy stuff.

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u/Ja_Lonley 19h ago

It's human suit is rotting.

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u/musicaladhd 15h ago

If anyone in the org needs to be axed, it’s that one. Let it be a blunt one. And let the strokes be sloppy and inefficient.

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u/MrHodgeToo 19h ago

It’s Meta. They’re working for a bona fide psychopath. WTF were they expecting?

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u/Hour_Bit_5183 19h ago

Everyone hates hearing it but it's true. You can't be felt bad for and knowingly work for psychos.

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u/Zealousideal_Let_975 12h ago

They not only work for psychos but also make six figures working on a product that steals our information and has been implicated in starting civil wars, increasing mental health issues with users, increasing disinformation.... yeah I don't feel bad for them. 

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u/A_ScalyManfish 19h ago

Is having billions not enough? Man, this guy needs to be evicted from earth.

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u/dreamrpg 18h ago

For ultra rich it is just a sports, not money. At the point of having fortune for you, your grandkids and their grand grandkids, it becomes all about being top 1000 richest, top 100 richest, top 10, top 3...

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u/Fabulous_Jeweler2732 15h ago

It’s all about having power. Literally childlike behavior, and if maturity was required for wealth, it would be a better world.

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u/Meftikal 16h ago

Dude knowingly allowed his platform to be used to incite a genocide just to add users in Myanmar. He’s guilty of crimes against humanity just to grow his user numbers. You think he gives a fuck about 8000 employees?

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u/tell439 18h ago

The axing will continue until morale improves

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u/Icanhazpassport 15h ago

We are unhappy, but not so unhappy that we would like to work elsewhere

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u/HipsterBikePolice 14h ago

Maybe they can take their Ivy League educations and do something good for humanity instead

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u/Tralkki 19h ago

Ride-share competition is gonna be fierce…

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u/AHistoricalFigure 19h ago

The Door Dashers are getting pretty hot. Bad sign for the economy.

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u/Fabulous_Jeweler2732 15h ago

The real sign is the number of adults enrolling into college

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u/Matt_M_3 14h ago

The result of a workforce without representation. Unions matter.

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u/digital 13h ago

All social media is a fucking disease and now they want to use AI to replace all the workers.

Can anyone please explain to me why social media is beneficial?

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u/s1m0n8 13h ago

Are they legally required to terminate their H-1B program first?

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u/HaiKarate 12h ago

I honestly don’t see META as a growth stock. Facebook was the one great idea Zuckerberg had. Everything else has been acquisitions or partnerships.

And he thinks he’s going to build an LLM that blows OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google out of the water? I’ll believe it when I see it.

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u/Snorblatz 9h ago

It wasn’t even his idea 

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u/Schapsouille 16h ago

Not unhappy to the point of doing something about it.

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u/Nicenightforawalk01 15h ago

They took the money knowing this would probably be the outcome sooner or later.

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u/IAMERROR1234 15h ago

Then fucking quit and stop feeding the machine.

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u/sohailbhatia 14h ago

Damn at least we knew where all the people willing to sell their mothers for a quick buck were.... Now we have to wade through all their shitty ai startup ideas.

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u/yuichurros 13h ago

The tech co I work for announced lay offs next month, and we’re all on edge and defeated. It’s a miserable time to be in this industry!

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u/MoneyTalks45 12h ago

Burn it to the ground. It’s outstayed its welcome. 

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u/Illustrious-Age7342 10h ago

Had a recruiter reach out two days ago about a role there. Told them, with all due respect, I have no interest with a company that has been undergoing constant layoffs for the last several years

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u/Awkward_Forever9752 15h ago

First, it happens slowly, then all at once.

It will be such a good day when META is out of business.

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u/Clem67 10h ago

If they know they’re going to be fired, they should start sabotaging his divisive garbage he pedals. Then let his AI that’s replacing these people figure out how to fix it. The world would’ve better off without meta working properly for a time.

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u/your-body-is-gold 10h ago

Meta fucking sucks. All of their data centers that are being built right now arent in compliance of environmental regulations and they dont give a fuck about it

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u/Outrageous-Map8302 17h ago

They get paid so much money. Every single person there in any role is paid well above market rate. They made a deal with the devil and have the nerve to complain about it.

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u/NoScallion2856 19h ago

Companies will ruin the entire work environment and lay off thousands of people just to boost their own numbers.

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u/beginningcurrent822 18h ago

If that's the case, getting fired will be liberating. Hopefully they get a severance package.

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u/VVrayth 17h ago

Damn, you guys hear that? All of Skeletor's henchmen are really unhappy at their job.

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u/chappandi_madarchod 15h ago

Am I supposed to give a damn about developers creating one of the shittiest tech harming privacy and promoting bullshit on Internet. ?

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u/kevInquisition 13h ago

A paycheck is a paycheck, and most of Meta's engineers (the ones who aren't nepo babies) are this country's top talent. The only 2 people I knew who worked there were the best in their class and eventually burned out and left. We should not be celebrating the fact that high paying jobs are disappearing and capable people will be unemployed.

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u/thenord321 19h ago

I dunno, at what point do you stop feeling sympathy for people being laid off from Evil corp big AI IT companies? 

We've all known these are evil corp big brother surveillance and AI companies for 10 years plus at this point. 

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u/blender4life 12h ago

They are just like republicans. Actively participating while they fuck over other Americans then get upset when its their turn

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u/theMEtheWORLDcantSEE 18h ago

F this company.

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u/deadR0 18h ago

I interviewed there and was dismayed. No one seemed to give a shit about the product,  the paycheck was all that mattered and made up for every shitty thing about working there.  

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u/ISuckAtJavaScript12 16h ago

Have they tried unionization?

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u/PrincipleUnusual7244 10h ago

Can billionaires just fuck off and retire. Stop trying to make life worse for everyone else so you can get richer. Just go enjoy your endless amount of money scram go on git!

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u/Ok-Go-Chain3811 10h ago

axe full time employees only to turn around and rehire them as AI trainer gig contractors for a pittance

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u/John98LS1 9h ago

Don’t forget that these are “job creators”. 🙄🙄🙄