According to that chart 2021
was anomalously low and it has been linearly returning to normal for the past four years.
AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!”
Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle (at least as far as layoffs go). And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
I wouldn’t call the massive levels of investment by both private equity and municipal/state governments “business as usual.” The sums being thrown down and/or promised are staggering. People/groups that lose are going to lose big.
Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
> Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012.
WhatsApp can be dubbed a success as well, and Oculus wasn't a flop. And, what does that tell you about the company? They can only acquire and integrate products. Why? Because Leetcode (LC). Fk LC, Hard!!!
It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang.
But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… For years this has been said, and for most of us isn’t something we’ve been able to experience until recently. Yet, now we can see how chatbots have made sane folks lose their minds, by simply being too agreeable. I think it’s a grim look at what it’s like to be hyper wealthy. The odds that they’ve completely disassociated from reality, IMHO, have increased exponentially after seeing the effects on “normal” people. The only difference is us plebs, don’t have the resources to then bring our distorted view of reality to life.
I guess he had nothing to lose by making those big bets really.
He’s got one of the biggest free cash flow machines in the world, so he’d rather swing and miss than not swing and be left behind, given that with $200B top line, there is essentially no financial penalty for a swing and a miss.
It does look goofy to have made such a big gamble on something as stupid as
Metaverse in hindsight, though.
I do think he had a point. He should just have put it on the slow burner. Not throw billions at it against the steady stream of technological improvement.
I do think virtual interfaces will be a thing when the tech is ready. Not really ready player one style but more like what they have in the expanse for computer tech.
Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.
They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.
Sure, but youre just talking about semantics here. When Mark asks himself "have we been successful" your definition of success is irrelevant. If the lay offs were because of the company had no successes as the OP posits you have to reason from the decision makers definition of success.
there are plenty of amazingly lucrative businesses that do really well, like online casinos, tobacco companies, etc. that happily milk their users and don't bother with improving human condition. You can call that "successful product strategy" i guess, but to me that's still pretty repulsive. You can also call this hyperbole, but i really am very much repulsed at this: increasing addictiveness for the weak minds to extract more revenue.
We agree that the product is lucrative and the ethics are nonexistant.
> increasing addictiveness for the weak minds
This kind of statement is like saying only fools fall for spearphishing attacks. IME, there are lots of attacks on your attention, and it only takes one mistake.
If you have not been targeted yet, it's just a matter of time. For example, look around here at the Factorio users. "It's just a fun game." Ok, but how many hours a week are you spending on it? Looks like an addiction to me.
I know not everybody agrees with me, but when you are logging hundreds (thousands?) of hours on WoW, League, COD, ... it quacks like a duck.
Mark Zuckerberg is no longer the kingmaker that he was during Facebook's peak, and he is desperately trying to create the next platform to be the one in power once again.
It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
Wasn't it primarily acqui-hire? Meta's AI strategy is what exactly? The best time for them to release a Chat GPT clone was 2 years ago. The second best time is today.
There seems to be slightly less comment spam and pig butchering fake profiles on Facebook lately so maybe that counts as a minor success? It might not look impressive from the outside but it's technically challenging and helps to keep the advertising revenue rolling in.
That's going to happen in all of big tech (already happening at Amazon and Microsoft). These companies have too many employees. It was never really justified and with AI even more so. I've been in big tech and directors often tell everyone to hire when they can rather when they need. For example, if they know a hiring freeze is coming, they will try to hire as many people as they can before it happens. It's rare to find people in big tech where their incentives align with the company. (and the blame is not always on the people themselves)
As for Meta, I give Mark credit for trying, even if he failed so far with all the VR stuff. The main disappointment is about Llama cause it's clearly an execution problem. With Meta's investments in AI throughout the years, not being able to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI is a big failure.
From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.
I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.
If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.
What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
Every big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time.
The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.
They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.
Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
Your contracting business is done because of AI competition, because money is drying, or because you're finding permanent alternatives due to being sick of it? There's more than one way to interpret your message, and I'm curious.
I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever.
My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway.
I think I have a chance.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch.
Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail.
Google's projected AI capex spend is $170-180 billion for this year. It's unreasonable to think AI would not be a reason for companies to consider layoffs.
3. Google is spending so much on AI that they can't afford to keep paying people, but they are ok with this because they are convinced the AI investment will replace the people at an eventual cost savings.
Google (and almost all other BigTech) is spending on scaling compute (data centers/securing power generation/chip contracts). My comment was not related to AI producivity and its impact on reduction of workforce. I believe a company spending nearly all its free cash flow on scaling compute (or borrowing money to do so) would have a different opinion on the economics of human capital.
Does that include R&D? Google is an AI _provider_, which is a considerably different profile in terms of spend from companies who are consumers. I would expect Google to be investing considerable resources to keep up with Anthropic and OpenAI.
Atlassian hasn't made money in 10 years. Of course they can't ride on the latest stock slop meme, that company is such an unmitigated disaster it beats even their terrible software. And now they keep spamming me with that Rovo garbage, god I hope they go down among all of this.
I dont think zuck cares especially much about the stock price. He's certainly not beholden to any shareholders. He's doing this because he genuinely thinks it will help the company to trim the fat.
I’m down for that. There are so many “facilitators” in middle management, some really good and quite a few bad ones and many making no difference. I don’t know how people thought they were good positions to hire for.
Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were?
Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
Again you assume a year delay on a workers full salary before the company gets compensated. Cash flow rarely works like that.
Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs, so uber doesn’t need an account with a full years salary for every driver somewhere at the start of the year. Get paid before the worker and the worker is in effect giving you a zero interest loan.
Now for a consultant the company may get paid after the worker but the company is rarely waiting a more than a few weeks.
It's not the boomers' fault, they were misled into believing the social security system they were paying into was a genuine savings system, not just a perpetual wealth transfer system from the young to the old.
It was really FDR who abused wartime power to make a constitutionally illegal program. Now we’re in a complete demographic mess which is basically unsolvable because the pyramid is inverted.
FDR essentially pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill by threatening to veto any assistance to the poor/elderly that didn't include social security. Basically his goal was to make the poor starve if social security didn't pass, and blackmail politicians into being forced to vote for it.
Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.
FDR also bullied Congress into passing laws and threatened their individual reelections using his cult of personality the same way Trump has been doing for a decade now to keep the moderates and fiscal conservatives in his party from making any noise.
From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like.
To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.
It was specifically sold as 'insurance' to the public around the time it was being passed.
Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.
Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.
It’s the business cycle, mostly. During the pandemic, low interest rates drove a boom in risk investing that flowed downhill into tech company balance sheets. Of course everyone used the money to hire lots of developers and engineers - probably more than were needed for the business opportunity they were exploiting.
I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.
There is never just one cause, but I do think AI is one of them.
Not in some AI "dey took er jerbs" kind of way, but because businesses are turning their investment focus towards AI-related ventures, like building data centres, and away from investments that require tech workers. Non-residential construction jobs, for example, have surged.
Well yes, Meta even said so explicitly about their upcoming layoffs. They're offsetting the capital expenditures into data centers, and "preparing for greater efficiency brought on by AI-assisted workers".
So who is getting that money then? Contractors building sites? Is it going off to the silicon manufacturers? Is Nvidia getting a large part of the pie?
Also, whether Covid is to blame or not, all these layoffs (not just the Meta one) contradict some of the most common rationalizations I've seen for how AI won't destroy the labor market but rather expand it.
If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
I have an explanation (or rationalization, if you wish) for this.
The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.
In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
Many companies really got bloated during COVID. From what I can see online, Meta doubled their number of employees between 2019 and 2022. How long does it take to correct from that amount of hiring?
Some of these companies have increased headcount since their post-COVID cuts.
Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
It takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3.
The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.
Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.
AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.
Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
It's probably a mix of AI productivity boost and market cycle. There is some substance to AI job loss, but I believe jevons paradox will eventually catch up to transformer-based LLM capabilities.
I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day.
Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting.
AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.
It's a fools errand to ever believe in job security. Even if you're absolutely right on your importance, management can always remain stupid longer than you can remain employed.
It truly feels like a farce. I've survived a few rounds of layoffs and I've seen both shitty engineers and our best engineers let go. I assume our good ones are too expensive? It seems like HR just does some spreadsheet magic to grab people without any regard for performance or title.
Not OP, and nothing makes it impossible, but from my experience in big companies, being visible is way more useful than being productive.
I got further faster by just answering emails right away than by churning out code. I got constant kudos, which got me promoted, and invited to more meetings, which led to less actual work. All because I just started replying to emails sent to our group. In retrospect it feels pretty perverse.
In lean companies and startups...perhaps not so much.
There's little to no evidence that companies are actually doing layoffs to focus on "AI-enabled" work.
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
Mangers and executives have better tools now to track a tech workers output/performance, they will cut the useless/low performers/in over their head people who were hired during preceding years. A small tech team with proficient intelligent devs augmented with AI can replace 100's of duds.
My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.
The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)
No what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.
It's baffling that with current iteration of hype mania all of the lessons about metrics were thrown out of the window. Goodhart's law anyone?
All of a sudden all of the terrible, horrifying methods of measuring lines of code, commits, tasks etc. resurfaced, like world was hit with an amnesia meteor.
The framing of this makes it seem like this is a sharp change in trend, but this long-running layoff tracker shows no evidence of this.
2020 and 2023 both had serious layoff spikes, but the 2023 spike trailed off to an asymptote that we're still hovering around.
https://layoffs.fyi/
This is missing a lot of data. Companies that I know for a fact are doing mass tech layoffs are not listed here.
If you go into the larger field, the trend since 2021 is overall concerning, particularly if you factor in Trump's desire to just stop reporting: https://www.macrotrends.net/3208/us-layoffs-and-discharges
According to that chart 2021 was anomalously low and it has been linearly returning to normal for the past four years.
AFAICT, the general populace is anxious about AI. So, the news knows they can get clicks with “You are right to be afraid. AI bad.” Meanwhile, CEOs know they can get stock boosts by saying “We are so AI we don’t need expenses. Infinite ROI!”
Put together we’re getting a ton of scary reporting on what looks like a quite normal business cycle (at least as far as layoffs go). And, everyone being afraid to hire is the only thing actually making it self-fulfilling.
I wouldn’t call the massive levels of investment by both private equity and municipal/state governments “business as usual.” The sums being thrown down and/or promised are staggering. People/groups that lose are going to lose big.
And Meta has another round coming, soon the only thing left at the company will be data center staff.
Apparently 20% to be laid off soon.
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/meta-planning...
Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
> Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012.
WhatsApp can be dubbed a success as well, and Oculus wasn't a flop. And, what does that tell you about the company? They can only acquire and integrate products. Why? Because Leetcode (LC). Fk LC, Hard!!!
It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang.
But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
I guess they read William Gibson's 2007 novel Spook Country and tried to build that. It had virtual street art as a plot device.
https://williamgibsonbooks.com/#books
In other words they haven't really pushed the vision forward since the Jaws 19 hologram in Back To The Future 2.
It's easy to get caught up in your own hype when you're surrounded entirely by people who always tell you what you want to hear.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… For years this has been said, and for most of us isn’t something we’ve been able to experience until recently. Yet, now we can see how chatbots have made sane folks lose their minds, by simply being too agreeable. I think it’s a grim look at what it’s like to be hyper wealthy. The odds that they’ve completely disassociated from reality, IMHO, have increased exponentially after seeing the effects on “normal” people. The only difference is us plebs, don’t have the resources to then bring our distorted view of reality to life.
I guess he had nothing to lose by making those big bets really.
He’s got one of the biggest free cash flow machines in the world, so he’d rather swing and miss than not swing and be left behind, given that with $200B top line, there is essentially no financial penalty for a swing and a miss.
It does look goofy to have made such a big gamble on something as stupid as Metaverse in hindsight, though.
I do think he had a point. He should just have put it on the slow burner. Not throw billions at it against the steady stream of technological improvement.
I do think virtual interfaces will be a thing when the tech is ready. Not really ready player one style but more like what they have in the expanse for computer tech.
Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.
They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.
Sure, but youre just talking about semantics here. When Mark asks himself "have we been successful" your definition of success is irrelevant. If the lay offs were because of the company had no successes as the OP posits you have to reason from the decision makers definition of success.
Is your baromiter of success the acquisition of cash?
there are plenty of amazingly lucrative businesses that do really well, like online casinos, tobacco companies, etc. that happily milk their users and don't bother with improving human condition. You can call that "successful product strategy" i guess, but to me that's still pretty repulsive. You can also call this hyperbole, but i really am very much repulsed at this: increasing addictiveness for the weak minds to extract more revenue.
We agree that the product is lucrative and the ethics are nonexistant.
> increasing addictiveness for the weak minds
This kind of statement is like saying only fools fall for spearphishing attacks. IME, there are lots of attacks on your attention, and it only takes one mistake.
If you have not been targeted yet, it's just a matter of time. For example, look around here at the Factorio users. "It's just a fun game." Ok, but how many hours a week are you spending on it? Looks like an addiction to me.
I know not everybody agrees with me, but when you are logging hundreds (thousands?) of hours on WoW, League, COD, ... it quacks like a duck.
Mark Zuckerberg is no longer the kingmaker that he was during Facebook's peak, and he is desperately trying to create the next platform to be the one in power once again.
It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
Curious to see how they can turn moltbook into a money maker. Do they sell ads to agents?
Wasn't it primarily acqui-hire? Meta's AI strategy is what exactly? The best time for them to release a Chat GPT clone was 2 years ago. The second best time is today.
They have a ChatGPT clone app already, but it's not very good.
I tried asking it some technical questions that Gemini can handle just fine, and it quickly started giving false information and contradictions.
My guess is data collection. Maybe the data can be used to improve or train agents.
Llama should be mentioned in the same conversations that ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek dominate. If only it wasn’t so inaccessible…
They have an app for it. I think it's as accessible as any of the other models you mentioned. It's just not as good.
Not so good right now but they haven't released one in a while. Llama 3.1 was pretty great when it came out.
There seems to be slightly less comment spam and pig butchering fake profiles on Facebook lately so maybe that counts as a minor success? It might not look impressive from the outside but it's technically challenging and helps to keep the advertising revenue rolling in.
I think their Meta Glasses are genuinely good, great form factor. I mainly use it to take photos or videos and not much their "Meta AI"
Its surveillance business seems to be growing.
threads?
you don't often see screenshots of threads posts on other sites like you do twitter/bluesky.
Sure, but I’d argue that 140m dau, 400m mau is still success.
Considering the overall impact of Threads, those statistics are certainly ... interesting.
It is somewhat integrated to Instagram with billions of active users. Not saying a whole lot.
I do.
also just another clear ripoff. they copy, they acquire, but they cannot seem to innovate.
Meta seem fairly innovative. Their r&d labs seem to produce some really cool things.
The basic issue is none of it seems to be making any money when it ends up in products and services.
Main reason there seems to be that their walled garden approach is tolerated at best. They just aren't very good at it outside of a feed.
Their Libra cryptocurrency project is another example.
It’s a lobbying firm now isn’t it?
That's going to happen in all of big tech (already happening at Amazon and Microsoft). These companies have too many employees. It was never really justified and with AI even more so. I've been in big tech and directors often tell everyone to hire when they can rather when they need. For example, if they know a hiring freeze is coming, they will try to hire as many people as they can before it happens. It's rare to find people in big tech where their incentives align with the company. (and the blame is not always on the people themselves)
As for Meta, I give Mark credit for trying, even if he failed so far with all the VR stuff. The main disappointment is about Llama cause it's clearly an execution problem. With Meta's investments in AI throughout the years, not being able to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI is a big failure.
From my experience in some large tech firms, you could easily cut 20% of the workers and not see much impact. There is so much bloat, process-people, meetings-people, etc... Even if the cuts aren't from AI, execs will use AI as a reason to make these cuts.
Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.
I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.
If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.
What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.
Every big company I’ve worked for has an immense about of bloat. Whole departments that exist just because someone wanted it to exist at some point in time.
The health of an organization is often linked in their ability to fire people.
The money tree is over. Companies now have to pick between gpus and employees. They picked gpus.
Lots of different companies argue with the AI for some time before they call me, but they always call me.
They'll never be able to explain what they want to the AI, and even if they could, it couldn't solve the problem anyway.
Nevertheless I'm not going to be contracting much longer, I'm writing software by hand to compete with the garbage shat out of Claude's VibeCloaca. I already have customers, I just need to ... tune a few things before I scale, so that I don't have any customer support problems at scale. :)
Your contracting business is done because of AI competition, because money is drying, or because you're finding permanent alternatives due to being sick of it? There's more than one way to interpret your message, and I'm curious.
Sick to death of it. The work is still there.
I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever.
My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway.
I think I have a chance.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch.
Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail.
We'll see.
Good choice
They picked the enshittification generators over paying people to enshittify by hand.
Well, maybe they can spin up some fake users with all those GPUs to use their shitty site.
(Oh, heh. I just remembered that they actually did that: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/10/meta-acquired-moltbook-the...)
Cutting layers of bureaucracy not replacing with AI
Google's projected AI capex spend is $170-180 billion for this year. It's unreasonable to think AI would not be a reason for companies to consider layoffs.
There are two ways to interpret your comment:
1. Google is getting so much productivity out of their AI that they need fewer people.
2. Google is spending so much on AI they can’t afford to keep the people they need.
Or
3. Google is spending so much on AI that they can't afford to keep paying people, but they are ok with this because they are convinced the AI investment will replace the people at an eventual cost savings.
That seems to have been Dorsey's approach. The business has been stagnant, so cut the roster and bet big on some future returns from AI.
Google (and almost all other BigTech) is spending on scaling compute (data centers/securing power generation/chip contracts). My comment was not related to AI producivity and its impact on reduction of workforce. I believe a company spending nearly all its free cash flow on scaling compute (or borrowing money to do so) would have a different opinion on the economics of human capital.
I subscribe to the second point of view. Several companies fall in that bucket. Oracle comes to mind.
Does that include R&D? Google is an AI _provider_, which is a considerably different profile in terms of spend from companies who are consumers. I would expect Google to be investing considerable resources to keep up with Anthropic and OpenAI.
I don't think it includes all of the R&D. From what I've read that's the amount they will spend on infrastructure for AI.
I guess some of that infrastructure will get used for AI R&D, but there are other R&D costs such as salaries that wouldn't be included in the figure.
Some of this smells purely nihilistic. The market rewarded layoffs with higher stock prices, incentivizing more layoffs.
It sure didn't reward Atlassian. If anything it accelerated the long, downward slide.
Atlassian hasn't made money in 10 years. Of course they can't ride on the latest stock slop meme, that company is such an unmitigated disaster it beats even their terrible software. And now they keep spamming me with that Rovo garbage, god I hope they go down among all of this.
I dont think zuck cares especially much about the stock price. He's certainly not beholden to any shareholders. He's doing this because he genuinely thinks it will help the company to trim the fat.
Let's do the government, and boomer welfare next.
I’m down for that. There are so many “facilitators” in middle management, some really good and quite a few bad ones and many making no difference. I don’t know how people thought they were good positions to hire for.
Remember before Covid many a company deadweight showing us the vast amounts of unwork they did at their companies on their YouTube videos? Proudly showing how idle they were?
Not all the firings are deadweight but a lot are. There is also a general tightening of budgets and people who are part of dead-end programs that are being let go. When the economy was hotter companies would keep these people to add at the margins; I think now that money is still tight they’re not keeping that luxury.
In a zero interest rate environment, literally any return on investment justifies spending.
If interest rates are 3.8%, the company needs at least a 3.8% return every year on your yearly compensation to justify your job.
Not if they are compensated during the year.
Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.
If the company is spending $100k to employ you, you need to deliver $103.8k/year of value.
Again you assume a year delay on a workers full salary before the company gets compensated. Cash flow rarely works like that.
Uber driver does what 2 weeks of work before getting paid, they also front the cost of their car and gas etc. Meanwhile users are paying as soon as the ride occurs, so uber doesn’t need an account with a full years salary for every driver somewhere at the start of the year. Get paid before the worker and the worker is in effect giving you a zero interest loan.
Now for a consultant the company may get paid after the worker but the company is rarely waiting a more than a few weeks.
Do you see the broader point I'm making, which is that non-zero interest rates means delivering value isn't enough anymore?
You'd calculate return on investment based on invested capital, not on expenses, so this does not follow.
That's .. not at all how interest rates work.
It's not the boomers' fault, they were misled into believing the social security system they were paying into was a genuine savings system, not just a perpetual wealth transfer system from the young to the old.
It was really FDR who abused wartime power to make a constitutionally illegal program. Now we’re in a complete demographic mess which is basically unsolvable because the pyramid is inverted.
FDR essentially pioneered the modern use of the omnibus bill by threatening to veto any assistance to the poor/elderly that didn't include social security. Basically his goal was to make the poor starve if social security didn't pass, and blackmail politicians into being forced to vote for it.
Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.
FDR also bullied Congress into passing laws and threatened their individual reelections using his cult of personality the same way Trump has been doing for a decade now to keep the moderates and fiscal conservatives in his party from making any noise.
By far the worst president in history, who should have been hung for treason against the constitution.
How were they mislead?
From day one, Social Security was a "new money pays old money" scheme, the one thing that makes it Ponzi-like.
To be fair, the boomers got screwed in the 1980's SS reform to pay for their parents (but had it sweet before), so maybe this is just paying it forward.
It was specifically sold as 'insurance' to the public around the time it was being passed.
Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.
Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.
AI as a real impact or more as an excuse?
It’s the business cycle, mostly. During the pandemic, low interest rates drove a boom in risk investing that flowed downhill into tech company balance sheets. Of course everyone used the money to hire lots of developers and engineers - probably more than were needed for the business opportunity they were exploiting.
I think AI is being used as an excuse for layoffs rather than the cause. Companies don’t have the cash and times got a bit too rich. This is the cyclical pull back that has been going on for decades.
There is never just one cause, but I do think AI is one of them.
Not in some AI "dey took er jerbs" kind of way, but because businesses are turning their investment focus towards AI-related ventures, like building data centres, and away from investments that require tech workers. Non-residential construction jobs, for example, have surged.
> Not in some AI "dey took er jerbs" kind of way
FWIW, I read this as equating a particular regional accent with stupidity.
I imagine it wasn't intentional, but it's something to consider.
It's a South Park reference. It very much is equating the accent with stupidity and backwardness.
In their defense, they make fun of nearly everyone. But they definitely were mocking White Southerners there.
In the episode, it's not what I'd call a southern accent.
Nice of you to share a little about yourself. Pleased to meet you.
What do you think makes you feel unsure if you were intentional or not?
Well yes, Meta even said so explicitly about their upcoming layoffs. They're offsetting the capital expenditures into data centers, and "preparing for greater efficiency brought on by AI-assisted workers".
So who is getting that money then? Contractors building sites? Is it going off to the silicon manufacturers? Is Nvidia getting a large part of the pie?
And for how many more years are we going to be calling this a post-Covid market correction?
In a very real sense these are still ripples from the death of Franz Ferdinand.
I would argue this is more a result of the defeat of Xerxes at Thermopylae.
Xerxes had a victory at Thermopylae
You say po-ta-to, I say po-tat-o!
Not in a very useful sense, though.
If you can show that the death of Franz Ferdinand necessarily caused tech layoffs in 2026, I'll listen. I don't think you can, though.
I think you could absolutely draw a causal link, it wouldn't explain why 2026 instead of 2024 or 2028.
Also, whether Covid is to blame or not, all these layoffs (not just the Meta one) contradict some of the most common rationalizations I've seen for how AI won't destroy the labor market but rather expand it.
If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
I have an explanation (or rationalization, if you wish) for this.
The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.
In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
Many companies really got bloated during COVID. From what I can see online, Meta doubled their number of employees between 2019 and 2022. How long does it take to correct from that amount of hiring?
Some of these companies have increased headcount since their post-COVID cuts.
Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
I mean hell we are still feeling the impacts of 2008 crash and monetary policy.
It takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3.
The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.
Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.
AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.
Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
It's probably a mix of AI productivity boost and market cycle. There is some substance to AI job loss, but I believe jevons paradox will eventually catch up to transformer-based LLM capabilities.
I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.
> It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.
What about when you need a day off, or when you quit unexpected?
Either? Both? The question is too zoomed-out. It's going to be different for each company and maybe different for each round of layoffs.
Both. AI can help you be more productive with fewer people, but a growing company still needs many people commanding AI to expand into a market.
The "real impact" of AI being gargantuan spending, or something else?
The public reason given for a layoff is always a self-serving excuse.
impact of A.I - reality vs hype
reality - companies are choosing to spend money on CAPEX (i.e infrastructure things hoping that they can ride an uncertain wave into the future) and not spend on OPEX (humans)
reality - AI agents are not doing human jobs.
reality - money | debt is now more expensive. hence if you were spending more of it on OPEX stuff you would rather reduce that
reality - more coasting jobs in tech. demand for stuff that still needs to get done is super high - workers just need to get more distributed and not hoarded at the big paying firms
Unemployed people, what are you doing?
I was laid off from Atlassian this/last week. Since then I've been playing Satisfactory for 12 hours a day.
Crazy thing is, I delivered optimizations that saved 1m USD over the last 12 months, with another optimization in-flight that would save another 1m USD. I thought that was enough to protect me from layoffs/PIPs - I guess no one was counting.
AI is just an excuse for layoffs which IMO CEOs are trying to use to recover share prices from the SaaS-pocalypse. Looks like layoffs aren't hitting the same for stock prices as they once were.
It's a fools errand to ever believe in job security. Even if you're absolutely right on your importance, management can always remain stupid longer than you can remain employed.
It truly feels like a farce. I've survived a few rounds of layoffs and I've seen both shitty engineers and our best engineers let go. I assume our good ones are too expensive? It seems like HR just does some spreadsheet magic to grab people without any regard for performance or title.
Your problem was that you tried doing work. What you want to do as an employee is make it so they can’t fire you not that you are actually useful.
How would you advise making it so they can't fire you?
Not OP, and nothing makes it impossible, but from my experience in big companies, being visible is way more useful than being productive.
I got further faster by just answering emails right away than by churning out code. I got constant kudos, which got me promoted, and invited to more meetings, which led to less actual work. All because I just started replying to emails sent to our group. In retrospect it feels pretty perverse.
In lean companies and startups...perhaps not so much.
Being ghosted, hazed, and otherwise abused. No one is hiring at restaurants, etc either. A recession has probably started.
Interviewing 4 times just to get ghosted.
Trying to build my own thing.
META rumoured to be purging by Tuesday.
Calls locked in.
Take with a spoonful of salt. Those trading firms that make these claims have skin in the game.
Not sure how you empathize with people that built their robot replacements.
There's little to no evidence that companies are actually doing layoffs to focus on "AI-enabled" work.
All there is are layoffs because of interest rates and concerns about the economic outlook. Companies using "AI" as a fig leaf justification and people are apparently falling for it.
I think the age of SaaS and Software companies is over. Given by all the overhyped TikTok videos there are lots of roles which are not needed.
Mangers and executives have better tools now to track a tech workers output/performance, they will cut the useless/low performers/in over their head people who were hired during preceding years. A small tech team with proficient intelligent devs augmented with AI can replace 100's of duds.
My experience has been that a good small team, even full of people who’d stand no chance in a FAANG interview (fwiw) can outperform at least 5x as many devs in your median bigco, while maintaining a relaxed pace.
The reason for this has nothing to do with how productive the devs are per se and everything to do with bloated decision making processes and extremely high communication overhead. “AI” does nothing for that (in fact, I’m seeing integrated suggestions in ticket tracking tools making things spammier and reducing quality of tickets, so if anything, it’s making it worse)
No what happens from using those metrics is that you filter out all the people that care more about doing their job well than gaming metrics. Fraudsters tend to do really well in those situations.
It's baffling that with current iteration of hype mania all of the lessons about metrics were thrown out of the window. Goodhart's law anyone?
All of a sudden all of the terrible, horrifying methods of measuring lines of code, commits, tasks etc. resurfaced, like world was hit with an amnesia meteor.
You sweet, innocent child.
Managers understand that metrics are meaningless. The idea is to have something to point at to scare engineers into jumping higher.