It means nothing especially with 50% voting shares. The funny thing about these layoffs is how they just go by the C-Suites without even denting their value.

I guess in an ideal world, the board removes him as CEO?

When you actually take responsibklity and accountsbility in the real world and not the bs world of C-suite executives, it means there are consequences for you. Might mean he steps down from his position, it might mean he gets a his compensation package cut, it might mean something else. But it means more than empty words.

He goes and asks an executive recruitment firm to find a successor and spends more time on the board.Yeah it sounds tough but if he&#x27;d hired a guy who oversaw what&#x27;s just happened, he would have fired him.

I would expect that he doesn&#x27;t say he would take responsibility if that doesn&#x27;t mean anything at all.

Honest question - what do you expect it to look like beside making the statement and giving employees a more than gracious severance package to back up the words?

Only he can punish himself, effectively. He has control of the company.

My english is non-native but I would expect when someone says &quot;I take accountability and responsibility&quot; to means exactly that and I have a hard time figuring out what else it could mean.The OP sounds like they would expect the person to perform some sort of public penance or resign. Which IMO is the wrong thing to do when making a mistake. The correct thing is to own up to your mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot.  I know its a &quot;cry me a river&quot;, &quot;worlds smallest violin&quot; type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people&#x27;s livelihoods. I&#x27;m not implying Zuck has or doesn&#x27;t have empathy, I don&#x27;t know him. I&#x27;m just saying this likely has an impact.  It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well.  Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some?  We&#x27;ll know in a couple quarters.

This question comes up in every layoff thread.It doesn&#x27;t mean &quot;this will have negative consequences on me personally&quot;.It means &quot;I don&#x27;t blame anyone else for this&quot;.

He&#x27;s not my favorite person, but he did use language that said he, personally, predicted the business conditions wrong, overhired, etc.  You don&#x27;t have to look far to find layoff messages that blame covid or other outside forces and don&#x27;t take any blame.

Its just business speak for &quot;I&#x27;m sorry, its my fault&quot;.I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a bad thing. Its always worthwhile to apologize even if there is nothing else to be done.

Meh, it&#x27;s inconsequential given he&#x27;s never going to want for money.

Guy has lost dozens of billions of dollars. As far as accountability goes he&#x27;s pretty up there.

Honest question - what does &#x27;take accountability&#x27; and &#x27;take responsibility&#x27; actually look like for Zuckerberg here?

5 years =&gt; 26 weeks = 0.5 years of pay, right?

Possibly dumb question, but how did you get to two years?

I suspect OP may have been going for a variation on the old &quot;Programmer returns with zero eggs and 12 gallons of milk after having been asked to get one gallon of milk and if they have eggs to buy a dozen&quot;-joke, but it falls flat in this instance since it relies on an interpretation bordering on deliberate misconstrual (i.e. applying the modifier &quot;for each year of service&quot; to the whole phrase &quot;16 weeks plus two additional weeks&quot; rather than just to the latter fragment &quot;two additional weeks&quot;).

16 + (2 * 5) = 26In my book that is 6 month&#x27;s pay

You&#x27;re getting 16 + (5x2) = 26 weeks of pay, not (16+2) x 5 = 90 weeks.

16 + 2 * 5 = 26, implying six months’ pay, not two years?

isn&#x27;t it just 26 weeks extra? 16 weeks + (2 weeks * 5 years)

5 years service would be 26 weeks &#x2F; half a year, no? Am I reading this differently to you?

I think it would be 5 years times 2 extra weeks - 10 extra weeks on top of the 16 weeks severance

You may have misread &quot;weeks&quot; as &quot;months&quot;.

16 + (5*2) = 26 &#x2F; 4.33 = 6 months? Unsure where you&#x27;re getting 2 years.Edit: Lol - OP posted less than 3 minutes ago &amp; there were no replies. Before I finished my comment there are now a dozen others with the same.

?  No coffee yet this morning, but isn’t 5 years 26 weeks of pay for severance?  And depending on how the severance contract is written, you might not be able to work elsewhere during part or all of this.  Perhaps just 60 days due to WARN (in the us) where you are “working” for meta before the money is unencumbered.  Read closely.  If you have a lawyer friend, ask their opinion.

If you want a math problem corrected, or have math homework kids, post it as a comment here on HN.

&gt; Severance: We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶.̶ ̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶5̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶,̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶2̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶p̶a̶y̶.̶I was wrong here. I read it as 16 weeks per each year of service.

No RSUs though, which make up 30-50% of compensation depending on level.

Or have something similar guaranteed by EU Worker Protection. I was made redundant a few years ago and was paid 4.5 month salary on my last day.

4 months of severance + 2 extra weeks for every year of service i.e. 20 weeks (~5 months) if you&#x27;ve been there for the last 10 years. So ~9 months paid holiday in total. Not bad at all.

4 month&#x27;s paid holiday? This is the kind of severance that would make me wish I&#x27;d been laid off.

Is it if you are not a home owner still? The problem with not being a home owner is that you have very high burn rate because the market was able to optimize for housing profit extraction - that is, significant portion of the compensation of high earners ended up in the pocket of property owners.Suddenly, these high earners are no longer high earners but they can&#x27;t instantly transfer their situation to property owners which means they have only 16 weeks or a bit more to start receiving at least equal paycheque. It often takes more than that to start working somewhere white collar and since Meta is not the only one doing lay offs, it probably means that they will not be able to start receiving similar paycheque when they continue having the same burn rate(or maybe higher, because inflation).I don&#x27;t say that Meta is necessarily wronging these people but I can&#x27;t keep but thinkıng about what it means being compensated for the work you are doing and the security of your life. If you take home 10K every month and distribute 9K of it just to sustain life then your compensation is actually 1K&#x2F;month.Tech layoffs are happening this year and its probably well justified but I have a feeling that other parts of the economy is also not functioning right and people will get screwed because their business relationship(compensation and cost of doing business structure) isn&#x27;t fair.

That seems pretty standard to me.Here the law mandates a three months notice. Then severance depends of how long you have worked for the company. It is a quarter of a month per year you have been employed for the first ten years and a third of a month per year after that.But this lay off would most likely be illegal here anyway. You have to face a downturn or unforeseen events impacting your ability to compete to do mass layoff here and Meta is still hugely profitable. This is putting your shareholders before your employees.Generally when you want to downside here, you compensate people who agree to leave and the sums involved are more generous than what Meta is giving.

That sounds pretty good. Even better than good.

I doubt that&#x27;s the most important part. Maybe for yourself.The overall tone and high-level business decisions are much more interesting.

Severance summary:<pre><code> Severance. We will pay 16 weeks of base pay plus two 
 additional weeks for every year of service, with no cap.

 PTO. We’ll pay for all remaining PTO time.

 RSU vesting. Everyone impacted will receive their November 
 15, 2022 vesting.

 Health insurance. We’ll cover the cost of healthcare for 
 people and their families for six months.

 Career services. We’ll provide three months of career 
 support with an external vendor, including early access to 
 unpublished job leads.

 Immigration support. I know this is especially difficult 
 if you’re here on a visa. There’s a notice period before 
 termination and some visa grace periods, which means 
 everyone will have time to make plans and work through 
 their immigration status. We have dedicated immigration 
 specialists to help guide you based on what you and your 
 family need.</code></pre>

You really think he penned this? This is a PR release made by a team of people that he put his name to.

Totally agree, Phony Stark behaves abysmally towards his staff - not just at Twitter, but also at Tesla.When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;G3HpY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;G3HpY</a>This is quite viscous and what does that say about what kind of person he is? Or when he hired a PI to dig up some dirt on the rescue diver saving those kids from the cave - just because the diver didn&#x27;t think Elon&#x27;s mini submarine idea wouldn&#x27;t work. And he called the diver a Pedo as well.Someone with that kind of mindset and in power.... is dangerous.

I agree. He doesn&#x27;t win me over because of this, but he deserves credit. I think many executives need to learn this from him.Regarding Zuck being a robot. I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;s less human or less humane than regular people, but him and most (if not all) rich people are ditatched from reality, and have lost touch (if they ever had any) with the understanding of struggle and what people have to go though in their day to day lives. And the sad thing is they surround themselves with individuals that sheild them from criticism, and most likely even praise their mistakes and shortcomings.I remember reading about a Muslim king or Sultan that had hired a guy to stand by his side and whenever a guest praises him, he would remind him of God, that he&#x27;s nothing but a human, that he will be judged just like everyone else, and that he&#x27;s not superior in anyway... Etc.

You treat recently conquered people differently from the people you have governed for many years.

What exactly is the added humanity that you see?&quot;I take responsibility&quot;?Which means...nothing? For the rest the layoffs are near identical. You hear that you&#x27;re no longer needed, access is revoked, and severance in both cases is relatively generous.

As much as people hate Mark Zuckerberg and accuse him of being a robot, he showed much more humanity in his message in respect to Ironman Elon.

It would be truly horrible if someone in the &quot;life&#x27;s achievement&quot; position of Zuckerberg would layoff with communication similar to what as a hostile takeover daredevil would do, and it would be truly pretentious if a hostile takeover daredevil like Musk would layoff with communication mimicking that of a &quot;life&#x27;s achievement&quot; builder. Both are avoiding the worst options.

There&#x27;s nothing impressive or inspiring about this message. You have twelve hours to send emails ...

Quite a difference between this message and the one Twitter (i.e. Elon Musk) sent to its employees.

Are engineers the only people in tech with high salaries?

FTA:&gt; While we’re making reductions in every organization across both Family of Apps and Reality Labs, some teams will be affected more than others. Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year. We’re also restructuring our business teams more substantially.It&#x27;s not all engineers let go.

Volume scale is too different. US workers might churn at .5%&#x2F;month - that’s maybe 500k job losses. Even if Facebook pays 10x average, that’d be equivalent $ to ~3 days of normal churn.

Yes. Hopefully starting with housing prices &amp; rents in certain areas.Though the US is ~3.3e8 people. Don&#x27;t expect layoffs of ~1.1e4 to have a substantial national effect.[Edit - &#x27;s&#x2F;1e3&#x2F;1e4&#x2F;&#x27; correction.]

11,000 people is around 0.003% of the US population.  These layoffs alone will not meaningfully impact the US economy.  Of course, these layoffs are not in isolation, and the economy is obviously cooling.  But, alone, no, it is not a mechanically meaningful factor.

FB alone certainly not. Even if these 11k people would be earning on average 300k&#x2F;year, their combined income would be only around 3B&#x2F;year. The US national income is around 25.000B&#x2F;year.

The good news is that there will be so much bigger profits to trickle down. (sorry for posting sarcasm on hn)

Might affect the housing prices in CA, which in turn might affect housing prices in other states as there will probably be a domino affect.(Assuming there&#x27;s a few thousand laid off in CA)

My opinion here is that tech companies are generally a lot more data driven and quicker to move. So I see these layoffs as them taking the possibility of a recession seriously and being well prepared for it when it does happen.This kind of graceful termination is preferable to sudden, forced changes caused by external events, such as a stock market crash or a company going under (e.g. Lehman going under in 2008).

Corporations are like schools of fishes. They all swim in one direction until suddenly they swim in a different direction.So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.

Considering the greatly inflated tech wages in top companies, aren&#x27;t those layoffs alone likely to impact the US economy?

People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don&#x27;t see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.

Obligatory link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;sounds-easy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;danluu.com&#x2F;sounds-easy&#x2F;</a>

Yeah, I was just thinking few days ago how absurdly large Twitter&#x27;s workforce seemed to be.

Pretty sure content moderation is excluded due to outsourcing

Ad sales and content moderation don’t scale as well as engineering, I suppose.

A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.

Hilariously enough, most of the front-line moderators are outsourced, so it&#x27;s even worse than you think.

I suspect those are not employees and not counted in this at all.

The moderators and reviewers alone probably make the bulk of it.

When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive.Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.

Yeah this tracks with what I&#x27;ve seen too.As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it&#x27;ll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on.In terms of reporting your &quot;team&quot; is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.

Yeah this is what I would expect is the correct answer - it looks good to have a big reporting structure under you.

&gt; is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcountshould&#x2F;do they consider other metrics: revenue, active users, etc under management?

My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I&#x27;ll have more status in my current organization too.Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that&#x27;s usually not how incentives align.Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It&#x27;s easy to become a manager without this. You don&#x27;t get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don&#x27;t have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it&#x27;s really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI&#x2F;DEI&#x2F;VR&#x2F;etc.).

They do a lot!Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.Maybe 1&#x2F;2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support&#x2F;infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.

Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support).  The comparison is nowhere near being valid.

Amazon handles physical products, that’s a completely different game

If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m.&gt; In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;234488&#x2F;number-of-amazon-employees&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;234488&#x2F;number-of-amazon-...</a>

So does McDonalds and they only have 200k.

It&#x27;s huge but meta is one of the 50 biggest companies in the world so having so many people isn&#x27;t very surprising.

Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.

That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.

&gt; I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go_How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That&#x27;s an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

Depends on the balance of what sort of roles are laid off.

While it might not saturate the US job market as a whole, it will saturate the parts of the local programmer market that can come even close to matching the sorts of salaries these people where probably paid.If they&#x27;re willing to move to anywhere in the US and&#x2F;or take a 50+% pay cut then they&#x27;ll have no problem getting a job. If they all want to stay where they are and get paid within 20% of their current salary then lots of people will end up without a job.

Did I misread or you live in a small central EU country with 200.000 open tech positions?

I&#x27;m quite interested in learning which small central EU country has 150k outstanding programming jobs.

You&#x27;re right but its not as if only Meta are firing or we&#x27;re anywhere close to this recession ending. There&#x27;s gonna be a bunch of pain to come still unfortunately.

most of the people being laid off are not programmers

I think the pay will go down its the meta and google etc that have been pushing up the salaries without the demand from them the pressure on salaries will bring them down.

&gt; I&#x27;d be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.Most of meta enigneers won&#x27;t be working for 120k midwest coding job if they can avoid it. So spread will be focused on similar pay positions vs distributed unifromly.

Isn&#x27;t that forecasted by the same people who now says that they didn&#x27;t see this coming? :)

Yeah, fly ‘em all to a “small central EU country” which shall henceforth be known as LuxemValley. As a bonus, ‘errbody working in LuxemValley shall be known as the SiliconBourg and be issued a mug, backpack and Chemin de Fer paddle. :DSeriously, under current law, H1B workers will be even more locked-out of US jobs until these newly RIFed US workers land somewhere, but India doesn’t really depend on H1B contractor revenue like it did during the mass RIFs of the “Dot Com Bust.” No, now Indian citizens can work comfortably, efficiently and economically from India, like many of the far more expensive (and now RIFed) US workers had been doing from their US homes. For those RIFed US workers to compete with more economical India-based workers, they’re going to need to either get very small and crawl under the door to struggling US employers (by lower their salaries while abandoning remote work) or maybe they’ll need to cut expenses by moving to a “small central EU country” and get paid in Euros.

I reckon 11k would pretty well fill all the available tech roles in Czech Republic (which fits the &quot;small Central European&quot; description). God knows where they&#x27;d live though, rents + prices would explode

I don&#x27;t see it, I used to get a few emails from recruiters every day.  The other day I got 1, and it made me realize it&#x27;s been literally weeks since I had one.  Lots of companies froze their hiring.  The music is stopping, and there&#x27;s a lot less chairs.  Not everyone is going to find a new seat.

True, but these aren&#x27;t ordinary engineers who&#x27;ll settle for ordinary salaries. These are the top paid engineers in the industry - there are practically no places that can hire all 20,000 of them at their current salaries.

It does mean that a lot of folks will be looking for work, expecting really big salaries. Because they have become used to a very high standard of living, these salaries will actually be required.MANGA companies pay ridiculously well.I suspect a lot of &quot;Reality sh*t sandwiches&quot; will be in people&#x27;s lunchboxes.

Does the small EU country you are living in pay FAANG level salaries (200k and more) for their developers? Because in the small central EU country where I live, they always say skilled workers are in demand until you tell them your desired salary ;-)

Similar here. Over the summer my country of 3m people, reached its yearly immigration quota in tech jobs of 16,000. And that doesn&#x27;t include people moving inside the EU or refugees from Ukraine.

the effect this kind of thing has on the broader market is that it makes everyone else reconsider their hiring plans.  I doubt there will be as many open positions after this announcement and it won&#x27;t all be from hiring

The real problem to worry about is hiring practices, shitty HR people, algo-based auto rejecting and shitty fucking interviewers... THIS will have impact on these people suffering to find a new position....So really what needs to happen is companies need to be reaching out URGENTLY to those have been kicked to the curb.There is thousands of years of experience this population carries.

In the small central EU country where I live, that wouldn&#x27;t even saturate the open programmer positions - just about 1&#x2F;10 of it. I&#x27;d be very surprised if it saturated the US market in any measurable way.If anything this just means these people will be working on more different products, and that means more opportunities for even more programmers in the future.

Also a lot of those people are going to take time off. A large number of high earners that have worked at a place for a decade and now have ~9 months paid vacation.

Very different roles. Also, corporate America employs millions of people, so this is not a significant percent.

I wonder if comments like yours are said in good faith or in fear or out of pure ignorance. Or all of the above combined.Proportionally these numbers would not make a difference in a small European country.

Y&#x27;all. It&#x27;s not eng being laid off. Or, at least, only marginally.This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.

The US alone has over 12 million people in tech. This few workers, for a field that has incredibly low unemployment and lots of open positions, is not going to have a problem absorbing newly unemployed.

Honestly, tech companies that were formed in the last decade have very little to show in terms of value creation. Majority are unprofitable. Most will never make profits in a recession AND tighter monetary environments.At the end of the day, businesses have to generate profits. You can only defer that so long. And most tech companies have been deferring it for a decade now.

Were you around the dot com crash? It was much worse than what is going on, layoffs happened left and right. But the future would have never been better for tech jobs. So no, incorrect to say anything for sure.

Obviously, if this continues at this rate. We&#x27;ll be able to judge in 3-6 months the full impact.Anyone who tells you otherwise is living in Lalaland.The main thing is figuring out what&#x27;s the full impact. If it&#x27;s 10%+ of tech workers, the golden days are over for the vast majority of tech workers.

Which is about how many people Google itself hired over the course of the Pandemic, for context.So it&#x27;s not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.

Add to that thousands of smaller companies laying of 10 people here, 100 people there. We will not hear about it, but it quickly adds up.In addition, we go from a phase where people new in the job market (students etc) were being hired quickly to no one hiring them. So there are both laid off people and new entrants added to the pool.

Try ~50,000. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;</a>

If you include Stripe, Klarna, Netflix, Uber, Robinhood, Snap, Lyft, etc. tech layoffs in recent months have topped 100,000 now.

&quot;Can someone think of the shareholder value?&quot;Keep in mind it&#x27;s always about people, not about soulless entities.

Even if not true (and it very well could be be true), most hiring managers will assume that the people let go were the low performers in their roles.

It will have a big effect on salaries, however, it&#x27;d be a momentous opportunity for upcoming startups to pick up some bargain basement talent.

The US has 2.7 million developers.  Who knows? They may have to sully themselves and become “enterprise developers” like most of the other 2.7 million developers…

It tracks the layoff, any tracker on who got hired after?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;</a>

salaries rarely and hardly ever go down. however inflation does exactly that in real terms. This is an interesting article about it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interfluidity.com&#x2F;v2&#x2F;9566.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.interfluidity.com&#x2F;v2&#x2F;9566.html</a>

They are actually going down because of inflation and the lack of a full compensation for that. You get the same money but it&#x27;s worth less.As for unemployment figures; apparently they are very low right now. Which suggests companies actually need to offer more to be able to fill open vacancies. A few tens of thousands highly employable people leaving the fang companies is not going to change that.

Lots of these peoples compensation package is largely equity based. Their pay has already taken a major hit.

Shouldn&#x27;t salaries just go down to pre-pandemic levels like the headcounts? (not even sure if they increased during the pandemic)According to the companies that&#x27;s all that&#x27;s happening here.

So you&#x27;re implying only people who are passionate about tech should be allowed to work in tech?  This does not hold water for almost any profession.  Tech pays extremely well, and if you can do the work, who cares how you feel about it?

I dont really care why you got into it so long as you remain excellent while you&#x27;re here. the Problem is the (seeming) correlation between money driven motivation and apathetic (sub)mediocrity.

I remember the dot-com (and Y2K) bust, when all the people who got into tech for the money (and not the love of it) suddenly decided to switch career. I hope the same happens now.

This is a pretty slick use of AirTable, ngl.

A link if you need to keep track of. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi&#x2F;</a>

more than that. Here&#x27;s a tracker: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;layoffs.fyi</a>

It&#x27;s not a given that everyone will be looking for a job immediately. They&#x27;re getting a multi-month severance package. Some will look immediately - some will take a breather and start looking in a few months - some will take the time to switch careers or go back to school. Also, it is 15,000 people presumably located around the globe - not just 15,000 people in Menlo Park.

Comps will come down from the stratosphere but good devs will not be unemployed long. They may fall to less exciting roles at banks or other traditional tech, but there&#x27;s still tons of demand.

It was obvious that those days were going to end eventually, it was never going to be sustainable. A few people I knew were deciding between job offers at beginning of this year and I straight up said take the most comp, this shit isn’t gonna last forever…

Non-developers in the Bay Area dream of this happening.

I think the folks who rode the ride a couple years back got it good: somewhere around 2012-2019 was great time for someone who had worked at marquee tech companies, had massive stock options, and commanded premium on the job market when they moved on from their orgs.

I just can&#x27;t really believe this at all, unless these companies entirely crumble. It&#x27;s just not feasible for the majority of folks to live comfortably in the Bay Area with a family at less than $200k TC.I make ~$300k&#x2F;yr and could probably swing $200k&#x2F;yr if I didn&#x27;t save anything (I save ~$100k&#x2F;yr currently). I just can&#x27;t imagine it being reasonable with housing + other costs.1. Housing costs are elevated here more than anywhere else in the world.
2. Cost of goods is drastically higher here than other parts. The (roughly) same amount of groceries from a local Sprouts here (we spend ~$100&#x2F;wk), is almost always $30 less everytime we go back home for some durations of time to be with family.
3. Cost of services like daycare or anything else necesary to let the work happen take note and charge enormously.As it stands, between housing + utilities, our spend is about $8000&#x2F;mo (factoring in the odd things as well like car repairs over time). To accomodate that, I&#x27;d need $100k&#x2F;yr after-tax, and that assumes that nothing drastic ever happens, and factors in no savings at all.We could downsize and save $10k&#x2F;yr, but that&#x27;s not really making a substantial dent long-term.$200k realistically feels like a minimum to keep any kind of young families in the area. I could definitely do with less salary if I could move, but companies are very wishy-washy about remote work.Until that is solved, or the Bay Area calms down, these salaries aren&#x27;t going anywhere. But if remote work is embraced even more, than returning to say $150k is completely reasonable.

Not really. If anything junior engineers are not going to see comp like this going forward. But it&#x27;s still incredibly hard to hire more senior folks even with big comp packages and they do command a premium.Expect the median to go down, doubtful the top 25% will change much.

&gt;Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?Well I predict two things:One, the days of $200-500k TC being common and widespread are going to end. If you&#x27;re in this bracket, or about to break into it, yeah be worried, it&#x27;s probably going to evaporate.Two, the CV value of Meta, Snap, Stripe, etc. is also going to end. I don&#x27;t think they will command the same premium in the jobs market from now(ish) onward.

I doubt that even 5% are software developers.

plenty of PMs and PMMs being let go fwiw as per my feed

The Meta layoff has many engineers affected. Probably at least ~2000

My 2 cents is that it&#x27;s going to be mostly recruiters, sales, customer success, and other misc operations folks. That&#x27;s the pattern I&#x27;ve been observing since the post-covid layoffs have begun.

They can try. But it would be a better time to build a team without the overhead of renting office space. I guess it depends on whether companies see an opportunity to wind back leverage from employees or to embrace new possibilities.

Makes me wonder if there’s enough layoffs coupled with a recession, corps would use this to get people back in the office and eliminate WFH.

The difference here is that it is all at once, and those same companies are slowing hiring. Net effect is that there are loads more people with prominent names on their resumes competing for those jobs that the recruiters are canvasing en masse with. Right now if you replied to one of those positions they&#x27;d likely turn you down after a screening call because the calibre of candidates on the market is really high.

There are hundreds of thousands of new software jobs in the US every year. Way more globally. This is a drop in the bucket.Shit, I get messaged about a thousand software jobs per year and I&#x27;m just one guy.

Not all these people have the same jobs though so I’m not sure what you are getting at.

Yeah, it&#x27;s a great time for these people to finally learn to code

August US added 315K jobs including 68K professional services and 7K information (idk what those categories actually mean).There&#x27;s jobs for everyone who was laid off, but unclear if they&#x27;re as good&#x2F;lucrative.source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;heres-where-the-jobs-are-for-august-2022-in-one-chart.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;09&#x2F;02&#x2F;heres-where-the-jobs-are-for...</a>

if reports are to be believed, large swaths of these layoffs were in business and recruiting units, much less so engineering, so not exactly 15k+ new applications coming in

I googled but I see zero references to &quot;hold out&quot; compensation. Is that actually a term?

Outside of the 2:1 job postings to job seekers ratio, none of what you&#x27;re saying here is correct.

&gt; they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked forAre you assuming a 4 year cliff or why would one lose 4 years worth of stock?Interesting point you&#x27;re bringing up. Personally I wouldn&#x27;t count unvested stock as part of my wealth.

Per last job report in US, there were two positions for every person finding normal jobs. For IT, I would think that ratio is twice. However, the biggest issue that people have to deal with: (1) Meta paid 2X to 4X higher than regular employers so that’s massive pay cuts for the folks, (2) they lost the unvested stock aka their hold out compensation of past 4 years they worked for.So, this would be huge financial setback for impacted people akin to losing half of their wealth and cutting down their future income as well in half.

Will this saturate the market for all open programming&#x2F;software engineering positions? No.Will it disturb the market for engineers expecting to make $500k&#x2F;yr 2 years out of school? Absolutely. But most tech stocks being down 50%+ YTD had already done that.I think there&#x27;s going to be a lot more layoffs announced from far more companies over the next 6-12 months. I think all of those people will be able to find jobs, but I think many of them will have to settle for significant pay cuts. The insane TCs driven by an inflated stock market that were seen in certain markets&#x2F;from certain companies are certainly going away for a long while.Personally, I wish that people in our industry would push for a larger base salary-based comp and less stock-based.

Yes, because they will be replaced with offshore labor or visa workers.

So, after Twitter and Meta layoffs there will be around 15,000 people looking for the job. In one moment. With other layoffs it can be counted over 20,000 people IMHO.
Will this over flood the market and bring expectations and salaries down?

&gt; do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?If they are offering above and beyond severance for the US, why would they be looking to &#x27;get away&#x27; with anything like that? They could &#x27;get away&#x27; with offering the US workers the minimum possible package yet they didn&#x27;t. Maybe they don&#x27;t want to burn bridges, or maybe they want the good (or non-bad) PR, or maybe the management are decent humans, but they are doing it for some reason and there is no indication to think that the reason wouldn&#x27;t also apply in other national jurisdictions.

Im really curious how severance in non-US jurisdictions works in these cases. Both stripe and Facebook are offering WAY more than required by UK law for example. Do they offer similar packages to any UK staff laid off? Or do they assume that with a better social safety net they can get away with just following their legal requirements?

Yeah seriously, I read the meta announcement and thought &quot;Did you just steal Tobi&#x27;s letter and do some find&#x2F;replace on it?&quot;

Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:&quot;...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years.&quot;&quot;It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.shopify.com&#x2F;changes-to-shopifys-team" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.shopify.com&#x2F;changes-to-shopifys-team</a>

Corporate robots are the same everywhere.

Layoffs have become so normalized these days, I&#x27;m sure they have templates.

Startup idea - layoff mail generator using GPT-3.

Corporate robots are the same, that&#x27;s why corporate mistakes are also the same :&#x2F;

Probably from a &quot;How to make people redundant&quot; template

Someone did crib the Stripe layoff notice at Meta.  Strange, but yeah, obviously someone at Meta did base it on this Stripe one.

well they saw the postive feedback that the Stripe comments got and plagiarised it

The wording is quite similar but I don’t think identical is the word you’re looking for.

Seriously. The sweetest words to me would be: &quot;Here is your six months severance and full medical, now get your shit and get out!&quot;

At least the last sentence reminds me of &quot;The hard thing about hard things&quot;.

That just can&#x27;t be a coincidence. American tech giants are again colluding to   control the job market for software developers.

- hey, can I copy your homework?
- sure, but change it so it doesn&#x27;t look like a copy

Don&#x27;t companies usually use consultants to plan layoffs?

Not only the structure, the wording is also identical:&quot;Today I’m sharing some of the most difficult changes we’ve made in Meta’s history.&quot;&quot;Today we’re announcing the hardest change we have had to make at Stripe to date.&quot;&quot;At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth.&quot;&quot;At the outset of the pandemic in 2020, the world rotated overnight towards e-commerce.&quot;&quot;There is no good way to do a layoff, but we hope to [...] do whatever we can to support you through this.&quot;&quot;There’s no good way to do a layoff, but we’re going to [...] do whatever we can to help.&quot;etc.

It’s not unheard of for some outside force to result in surges in profits that last much longer than 2 years.  Unfortunately, it can be really hard to tell if say the Among Us surge in popularity from streamers was going to stick around or not.  Someone in the company was trying to figure out if it would be an enduring hit like Minecraft or just another fad, and as frequently happens they chose poorly.

When has there ever been a &quot;permanent acceleration&quot; in revenue growth for any company? Or do I misunderstand what they&#x27;re saying?

Everybody used the same AI to write the memo.

Both can be true. But maybe one sounds more sincere than the other.

Is this even true? I thought the monetary policy of the Fed (as a reaction to Covid) simply made investments cheaper.

a few days ago I heard a new for me term and immediately I thought of gartner etc. And guess what, a quick google search and for sure gartner created that termI wouldn&#x27;t be surprised therefore if the structure&#x2F;content is part of a consulting company&#x27;s latest material

That wasn’t my memory from early 2022. It seemed like much of the economy today was impacted by the Ukraine war. But maybe that’s just coincidence. Lots of people also felt that tech companies were overvalued.But my memory may be playing tricks on me.

I think the whole &quot;many predicted&quot; statement that several large tech companies have used to thin out all the pandemic hires is cover for the fact that they boom-hired during the pandemic knowing full well they would very likely have to shed those hires when things went back to pre-pandemic levels and the opportunity for short-term profit was over.Shopify called it a &quot;bet&quot;, which was a surprisingly honest way of framing it, by at least admitting to the risk and uncertainty that existed around all their growth.Also saying &quot;many predicted&quot; is less culpable than saying &quot;we kinda knew we&#x27;d have to eventually do this, but hey short-term profits, right?&quot;

&gt;Who predicted this?Every investor who continued to buy stock in these companies as they doubled in price, along with companies like Peloton, Zoom, Carvana.The laptop class genuinely believed we&#x27;d never do anything in-person again.

Most large fast going tech companies &quot;predicited&quot; this but that doesn&#x27;t mean they really believed it. The alternative at the time was to say...&quot;we grew 100% in the last two years but with covid restrictions limiting etc wr think that growth will be more like 80% and revenue down x%&quot; that would have sent massive shocks to investors and stocks would have dropped overnight as companies like Meta had been setting a long precedent of &quot;beat and raise&quot; with their earnings calls. Essentially everyone was hoping it would continue as they didn&#x27;t want to see equity and comp and valuations down. What&#x27;s funny is that it all happened anyway over the course of the year. Believe me from first hand experience there were many people in these companies raising flags late last year that it can&#x27;t continue but were essentially ignored. Hope is not a strategy!

All the big tech companies that are now laying people off?I mean, they probably believed what they wanted to believe, but that’s a very human failing.

&gt; Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic endedWho predicted this?The general consensus among folks I know was that the economy was in for an ass blasting once the pandemic supports were removed.

Share value is down everywhere. Where would people move to for better compensation?

&gt;expect to start loosing ad revenueThey are already bleeding ad revenue, badly.But yeah, agree with you overall. In summary, they were flush with money for a while, invested and hired like crazy, couldn&#x27;t grow revenue and productivity and are now shedding costs.We have to remember that these companies weren&#x27;t affected by layoffs at the start of the pandemic; in fact, the opposite. They boomed.

well it could be all of the above....what i find odd is that the Facebook CEO already knew that demand for ad revenue would already drop in 2023 and they were still hiring up untill now....they should have started cutting costs earlier

They claimed their monthly, daily, and total engagement are all up in this quarters earnings. Ads shown up 17% price per ad down 18%. Doesn’t seem like losing users.

I do not believe the statement.Whatever the reasons were (and we can probably guess some of those), they probably spent significant effort to picture it in the most palatable way possible.My take would be:* They hired a lot of people in a short time and with this probably their productivity fell a lot. They want to remove ballast and hopefully improve average productivity.* They are scared about falling share price. A lot of Meta employees get significant part of their comp in form of shares and so falling share price will mean their best people are going to start to leave or they will have to increase their comp considerably. So they are looking to appease investors by cutting costs.* They are loosing users and expect to start loosing ad revenue. Having on idea how to improve their revenue the only way out to stay in the game for longer is to start cutting costs more aggresively.* They have no idea what to do with all those people they have hired because their CEO is doing something else at the moment. And (in my experience, not based on facts) the culture at Meta is very likely that everybody is looking up to CEO or nothing happens.

This layoff almost sounds like an opportunistic decision, rather than something that was planned long in advance.

Not surprising. I&#x27;ve been a part of a team that developed these memos.When it&#x27;s bad news, it&#x27;s never about the truth (well, rather it&#x27;s not about accuracy), but about the simplest explanation you can give that people might somewhat believe.

They thought it would be a paradigm shift and didn’t want to be caught out and dinosaured.For them that risk was much greater.

They were willing for their new employees to take that risk.

I just don&#x27;t buy that they naively thought that everything would keep growing like it did during the pandemic once the pandemic was over. It seems like a welcome excuse.

It seems to do an awful job.Input:&quot;At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth.&quot;Results in:&quot;When Covid first launched, the world was moving quickly online, and the e-commerce boom caused an astronomical increase in revenue.&quot;

Someone used <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quillbot.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quillbot.com&#x2F;</a> with that memo and replaced the company name. Job done!

the % of workers fired is  also the same everywhere. As if a single nefarious overlord is running the Valley

Corporate-speak aside, Meta and Stripe couldn&#x27;t be more different:+ Meta is funding a new business. Stripe is funding expansion of current business.+ On existing revenue, Meta has new threats which had little to do with C19 (Apple&#x27;s changes, Tiktok etc competition, ad budgets moving to influencers). Although Stripe is not public (so less numbers to analyze), it doesn&#x27;t seem like they have similar pressures on revenue.+ The main similarity is they are both subject to the impacts of inflation and rising interest rates. However, that is true for almost every large company right now.

The same HR&#x2F;layoff consultants were used by both leadership teams, i believe.

&gt; At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.This is very similar to the Stripe layoff memo at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-it&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;en-it&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;news&#x2F;ceo-patrick-collisons...</a>The structure of the two documents is very similar too. Is that a standard pattern of did Meta took Stripe&#x27;s memo and adapted it to suit their needs?

Meta lays off 11,000 people