Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview questions. Many of those engineers were perfectly smart and capable. Meta have built so many amazing systems. So, the only explanation I can produce is that there's just too little work for too many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of meeting hours over coding hours per person went through the roof in the past few years in Meta.
People bring up "overhiring" every single time. We've had like 3 years of these massive layoffs already. How many "corrections" do they need?
I'm beginning to feel like the "overhiring" line is a concerted campaign
I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:
1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.
2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.
Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.
I can understand that, but when you have a dozen friends in these companies talking about how overstaffed they are and the whole "FAANG companies keep devs on payroll just so they can file 5k people to make investors happy" thing makes sense. None of these companies actually pause hiring when these layoffs happen, which is a major indicator of what's driving the layoffs. It's all artificial.
Firing 10% every year is just good old Jack Welsh-style workforce intimidation.
its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.
There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.
I think it is also a matter on how the Meta stock comp works - and that people hired during the slump in stock price became very expensive once it came back up.
More like “we need to lower median salary”
Unemployment is an economic feature for wage modulation, not a bug.
It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.
And for even longer if they’re hiring 8-10% per year through normal processes.
In the year 2040, they’ll still be using the same excuse. “BigTech lays off another 10,000 from all the overhiring done 20 years ago during COVID!”
It’s almost as if a group of 80,000 dynamic humans in a wild uncharted environment might mean decisions are made that have to be re-evaluated in a year!
And then how many years in a row after that can you keep blaming the single re-evaluated decision?
Overhiring wasn't a single decision.
They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that
Well, one could start by looking at how their total employee counts have changed between now and the beginning of the pandemic.
I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.
Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.
Oculus? Not created, but if you buy a VR headset, Meta Oculus is one of the top choices.
This comment put everything into perspective. I can't name anything beyond Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp that Meta's created and I've used in the past 10 years.
I've never even (knowingly) used the LLama models tbh.
If you consider Marketplace its own product it’s a massive win but they haven’t monetized it beyond some very ineffective post boosting and advertising. I honestly think they could charge 10% of list price for items over $50, plus membership levels that reduce or remove listing fees. and make a significant amount of money.
true. It's like the the only reason I open FB anymore....craigslist that isn't a PITA.
And WhatsApp and Instagram were acquisitions, not creations.
I would say the Quest 2 and 3
It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.
I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...
> There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
“Qualified” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Just like the first dotcom boom and crash, there were people in other fields who got into software during the boom time and went back to whatever other field after the crash.
Also there isn't one profile of software developers.
At least 3 tiers: the FAANG level, the mid-size tech companies, then all the developers working for non-tech companies/administration or in IT service companies.
Even in those categories, workers aren't swappables.
“There is a population of qualified workers […]”
In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.
A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.
If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly.
SWEs (and most any role for that matter) definitely can be minted in ways besides graduating with a relevant major. On top of that there's also H1Bs and contractors. Plus "overhiring" doesn't necessarily just mean absolute headcount, it could be compensation, scope, middle managers, etc. The definition of "qualified" is also malleable depending on the incentives.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
Beyond the previous points, this also assumes the supply of labor is independent of the demand, and it's clearly not. As the demand increases, so does compensation, outreach, advertising/propaganda, etc. Everybody can overhire simultaneously as a result of pushing for growth of the supply of labor.
> It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere.
Not everyone, but it go through the roof, or at least it did in my country. I know a lot of people who doubled or even tripled their salary during that time as these companies went absolutely ape shit. They were getting 50k increases with each position change. I've not seen anything like it before, and I honestly wonder if i'll ever see anything like it again. Kinda wish i'd been in the job market at the time, but I was off with health issues sadly so missed that boom.
> So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered.
They did? Again, at least in my country. Smaller shops felt the pain, as tons of people left for the pastures of big tech.
> Small businesses have been identified as the biggest losers of the 2020–2022 explosion in big tech hiring. While demand for digital transformation grew to previously unseen levels, smaller firms and businesses were severely disadvantaged by intense competition from large companies for talent, resulting in a multi-year skills shortage where less than 50% of small business vacancies were filled, compared to 65% for large firms
Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
Meta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range.
Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either
Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.
Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).
Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.
Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.
If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...
Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...
I am convinced Mark Zuckerberg does more harm than good for Facebook
like literally they lucked out on the landing the business model early but it feels it has been in an ongoing decline and everything else they have tried has failed spectacularly (and particularly things Mark has put his whole weight behind)
They never became anything more than the ad company
Alright, apart from Instagram, WhatsApp, Llama 1 & 2 and somehow managing to sell nearly 10M less nerdy google glasses what has Zuck done for FB?
Pretty sure they bought Insta and Whatsapp. I mean, that's not nothing, buying a successful business and keeping it successful for over a decade. But neither Zuck nor Meta made those platforms; they were both established successes in their own right before acquisition.
They used the Facebook app to spy on smartphone users and detect Instagram and WhatsApp success to decide to buy them.
> keeping it successful
I’m no Zuck fan, but he’s done much more than keep them successful, they have grown a lot.
I remember everyone making fun of him for overpaying for IG and WA. Now both in hindsight look like amazing acquisitions.
Only The Zuck saw the value though. Why didn't MS, Amazon or Google buy insta? Or some Softbank vehicle?
I’m sure the others saw the value too. It just wasn’t worth as much to them as Zuckerberg was prepared to pay. Not surprising given it’s a service that directly competed with FB in the social space.
Probably because Instagram wasn't a direct competitor to any of those other companies (except maybe Google+, which wasn't even a year old at the time that FB bought Instagram). I don't know why softbank didn't get them.
This is the case with most tech companies. Google bought Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, Maps, etc. etc.
Although in this case Meta bought companies that were already established and successful.
Google bought Android before it had released products.
Google Maps was purchased, but was Where 2 actually a successful product prior to that?
I feel like you just cherry picked from my examples. YouTube was certainly successful - Google bought them because their own Google Video competitor was a flop. DoubleClick was also obviously huge. Where 2 had a successful product, it just wasn't web based (nor do I think free), so didn't have anywhere near the distribution that Google enabled once the team ported it to run in a browser.
Instagram had around 10mn users at acquisition, so they might not have gotten to where they are without FB. Whatsapp was a successful product that didn't make any money.
One step further. Besides Facebook itself whqt has zuck been visionary about ? Instw and WhatsApp was bought. He thought chatbots was the thing in ‘17, then abandoned it for VR and metaverse, all the while chatbots start taking off. Every time he’s in an interview he talks like he’s some savant, really he got lucky with fb and done nothing since
Let’s go another step further!
The continual success of fb and instagram has not come from zuck but through glorified A/B testing on steroids whilst lighting employee’s asses on fire each quarter to move the metrics. Visionary genius? My ass. Only Steve Jobs proved he is worthy of that title.
Bro is a fraud. He always was - remember he stole the idea for fb. Thankfully he’s getting found out.
i argue that most ideas aren't necessary novel, so stealing idea isn't necessary bad.... e.g. i don't think google search was entirely novel, but was well executed.
honestly - meta has built quite a lot of cool things, but c-suite is probably to be blamed for what's going on today.
Search was not novel, but PageRank was novel.
was it actually? I don't know the full technical behind this but wiki does suggest: "A search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services, designed by Robin Li in 1996, developed a strategy for site-scoring and page-ranking.."
This is before Google.
Stealing an idea is different from lying to people in order to steal their actual business, which is more like what Zuckerberg did.
Did he really steal the idea? I thought the idea was just a message board for Harvard students. That isn’t novel.
The original idea was this:
>I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
Lots of things, but he then chucked all the profits at a stupid idea that he even renamed the company for.
Look at Meta's profits by year.
Meta profits are good but they’re closing in on the $100 billion dollar mark in their Meta Quest/AI fiasco just because you can afford it doesn’t mean you should do it. See another company called Oracle for a similar path.
build and tear down metaverse. zero sum.
The transition to mobile-first was a good call. Probably the last good call though. Oh, and buying Instagram.
And WhatsApp. And the VR glasses seem to be a success.
And whatsapp.
I think it’s hard to not have any kind of boss. There’s nobody to provide the critique needed to improve the products.
> to improve the products.
Meta had ~100B in EBITDA (or 60B in net income) for 2025. What critique does he need from a product/business standpoint?
Everyone has clients and if your employees aren't incompetent sycophants they can give you actionable feedback.
Not a commentary on Zuck specifically, but many powerful people with fragile egos build an inner circle of incompetent sycophants
My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.
My favorite story from "Careless People," was when his team let him cheat and ultimately win at Settlers of Catan.
Very true the White House currently is an example of that.
I mean he’s got boz in his circle - is that short for bozo?
The only good things at Meta are the things they bought (Whatsapp and Instagram). They haven't made anything original in a long long time.
Besides selling democracy for pennies on the dollar, Zuckerberg knew what to buy before everyone else knew what it was worth.
In 2012, everyone around me was lauging at the absurdity of a 0 revenue photo app getting acquired for $1bn. My peers/superiors in the ad business thought Facebook would flail in digital marketing. Oops.
The metaverse might be a big pile of bollocks, but isn't the whole point of being a billionaire to indulge peculiar unpopular obsessions?
No he bought everything out of paranoia to shut out competition.
They tried organically to replicate instagram etc but they failed even though they had wayyyy more resources. Their attempts sucked. So their approach was to target for acquisition or copy features if they couldn’t.
There’s plenty of evidence of this re. His comms around those events.
Only someone who had so much luck in finding a product that clicks, would know the worth of buying such a product
Totally. I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that if I had to pick a FAANG to put all my retirement savings into Meta would absolutely not be my pick.
Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Meta is going to have higher ads revenue than Google this year.
Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
That has been the talking point since facebook launched.
> Social media is an extremely competitive landscape, with competitors rising overnight.
This is not true at all. There are two players. FB/Instagram and TikTok. Using one does not preclude using the other. Other than tiktok, who was the last new player in social?
> Google, Apple and Microsoft dominate the world with their products and platforms. Facebook & WhatsApp certainly doesnt.
Whole countries literally run on WhatsApp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Telegram has 1B users (which is surprising to me, I thought it was an ex-Soviet thing), and there are entire geographic strongholds, such as Russia and China.
Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
> There are all kinds of social media, its segmented by userbase, and culture/geography.
Your own link has Meta with 3 of the top 4 platforms. Can you really see any of the competitors overtaking them in even the medium term?
> Russia and China still use iPhones and Windows, but entirely skipped out on Facebook and Whatsapp.
China doesn't use Google either, and while they might use Windows they're staying off Azure which is where Microsoft's main business is these days.
Yes there are countries which stay off Meta. But they are just as embedded in the workings of the world as any of the companies you mentioned, probably more so. Government decisions are made by people using a mix of Apple, Google and Microsoft hardware - but all of them are communicating over WhatsApp.
3B Facebook users!
And for all the scorn it gets on HN, Facebook still works for some of my use cases: high school friends, low-contact relatives, obscure geography groups, the Philippines.
You don’t consider YouTube to be social media?
I wish WhatsApp would get nationalized. I absolutely hate having to use it.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Short of social media being classified as something like alcohol or cigarettes, you will lose money on this trade. You’re betting against ingrained human nature.
If you try and hold a short position for 25 years, you will lose all your money, even if you were right.
I'm convinced that 99.9% of folks online who claim they're going to "short a stock" have never actually shorted anything in their life.
> Heck, if I was forced to either short or invest Meta with all my retirement savings now betting on it's value in 25 years.. I'd short it.
Not a good idea. Meta has hundreds of leavers to find more profits from anywhere.
Apple also has an entire international retail arm.
And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft. Also their hardware business is roughly 50-100X the size of Google's hardware business in scale and distribution.
The headcount analog for Google is Apple. And if you subtract out the retail employees Apple looks surprisingly efficient, having much less non-retail staff than Google (although both heavily use contractors).
Meta on the other hand...is pretty much the definition of bloat.
It's been more than a few years since I worked at Apple, but they were always unique in the tech space in that their retail division dwarfed headcount. If I recall correctly all of OS X Lion was produced by around 3,000 engineers (and probably less, since I think that count included iLife and iWork).
Aren’t they sort of unique in that they… have a retail division, as a real ongoing thing (I’m sure MS tried an MS store but I’ve never seen one).
Well, unique other than Amazon I guess.
> And an entire desktop OS and desktop software suite in pretty much all categories to compete with Microsoft.
Not even close, if you include Office and Mail/Outlook. And if you include corporate clients, Apple is just not on the map. I've gone from a Windows first company to an Apple first company, and it's a night and day difference when you see how well integrated things were for Windows.
I mean, individually you can say Teams sucks (terrible, really). And Outlook sucks as a consumer. But the way you can get all these things working with Office was very convenient.
> Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited
Seriously? Walk outside and see what people are holding in their hand.
Meta has Facebook which was OG enough. MySpace was the real movement although you could argue LiveJournal was before that. Instagram was bought, WhatsApp was too. So really all Meta has is Facebook, everything else has been synergy.
Apple / Google and as I hate to admit are innovators of the modern tech world. While they've bought their fair-share they still produce and create and have existed prior 00's. Two devices dominate the market and it's not going to change any time soon.
You either use iOS or Google. Urgh, this is how the world has become. Windows or Linux, X or Y; why did Z have to die.
By this logic you should factor that android was an acquisition, as were YouTube, doubleclick, deepmind and Waze
I forgot about that. Back to the drawing board.
Apple innovate in hardware.
What Google innovated during the last decade?
Apart from the Transformer architecture that enabled the AI boom/singularity/civilization-reshaping-event/whatever-this-is? Not much, I guess...
Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.
Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.
Different scenarios
The only part of Google that makes money is their ads business. And Meta is beating them at it.
You are wrong. Google makes ~73% of its revenue from ads compared to 98% in Meta.
Makes money, implies profit and not revenue
Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta
Also Google has a whole YouTube inside of it
Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.
That’s like saying email powers entire economies. It’s not WhatsApp that’s providing the value there, and if they press to hard to try and pull revenue from it, all that communication would flow into another channel.
> Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America.
Whatsapp had 55 employees when Facebook brought them for $19 billion.
Neither needs a lot of innovation, just some maintenance. How many developers do you think Telegram has?
WhatsApp is one of the buggiest UIs I use daily. Random things like images/messages stacking on top of each other, seeing the HD and low definition videos as two separate things in favorites, never being able to view the HD one, sometimes the messages never scrolling quite to the bottom, just amateur level stuff, I'm a bit impressed with how bad it is.
Whatsapp is 5 years late in terms of features if you compare it to Telegram. It is here simply because of platform economics, nothing else.
Except those are both done.
WhatsApp could not change for the next 50 years, and it would continue doing that just fine.
I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:
- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race
- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store
Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.
"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"
That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.
Heck, I could build Facebook in a weekend!
You're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple).
about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.
And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.
> If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.
Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.
> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.
Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.
Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.
Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.
Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.
Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.
I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.
Meta was over hiring engineers from about 2015, if we're being honest.
Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.
Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.
But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.
The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.
Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.
This is actually a false premise pushed later to justify layoffs. They started overhiring in 2018-2019. They just continued a preexisting trend through 2021.
Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).
Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.
Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.
Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.
> No operating systems, no processor design,
Meta bought Rivos, and as far as I can see do a ton of work related to Linux kernel stuff (I heard about this in the context of eBPF). But datacenter side, not consumer.
Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.
Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.
Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though
> Meta is going to surpass Google this year in revenue. I agree on the diversification front though
Meta might surpass Google on _digital advertising revenue_.
Google's overall revenue is still ~2x Meta's
>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.
So? They likely already had too many in 2021.
>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.
Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.
choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png
They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.
Are these meta engineers that were let go? The one thing you learn more than anything else as a Meta engineer is how to sell your work and how amazing it is
Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?
I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.
I worked at Meta and they're spot on.
I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.
The 3-year old anecdote is a bit pointless. It literally could have been a bad day. I've burnt myself out on a problem the night before and absolutely bombed simple interview questions, too. Or it just happened to be the least competent engineer at Meta. It doesn't give much information on their average employee, though
Oh totally. In general I don’t think you can conclude anything about anyone, really. Yesterday they were someone. Today someone else.
We had the same experience with Meta engineers. One candidate had been with Meta/Facebook for seven years and had nothing to show for it. They had an incredibly hard time articulating what work they actually did. It was something related to storage, but pretty much every answer was "well, actually someone else does that part". Also same experience with basic coding, no actual skills, yet somehow manages to have a CS degree.
Someone has to be doing the actual work at Meta, but that might not be the people who are seeking out new jobs. So we get this false impression that their engineers are a bit... not good, because those are the ones actually leaving.
As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.
People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.
Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.
The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
The bureaucracy at Google has grown and grown. And then grown some more. But it is nowhere near as bad as the GP makes it sound.
> People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same.
Hmm...it's been a while, but when I was at Apple one of the reasons given internally for why products were so much better than the competition (and they were) was that Apple typically had 1/10th the number of people working on a particular product or feature.
I wonder if that's still the case.
It was less true when I was there more recently.
But Apple is still amazingly efficient compared to others like Meta/Microsoft/etc if you just look at raw headcount vs. product/service/distribution surface area.
Maybe not 1/10, but definitely on-the-order-of 1/4th or 1/6th as many.
Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).
As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.
“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”
If some engineer optimizes something in the Google search stack that makes it, on average, just 0.01% faster (not 1%, but one-one-hundredth of a percent), then they have paid their salary for the entire year. Almost in perpetuity. No matter what level they are.
Very small gains multiplied out over extremely large amounts of compute over large amounts of time add up big.
And that's why Google can spend so much money on fairly small scoped teams.
A lot of rationalization for what is fundamentally just market inefficiency: economies of scale and network effects (aka Monopoly).
Remove Google's monopoly level distribution, and then build that feature and tell me how much revenue it generates.
The value is in the monopoly which was formed by the founders and all the early employees by having the right products at the right time decades ago, not in the "upgrade now" button some worker bee added to Gmail in year 25 of the company.
Yes, that "upgrade now" button probably does generate $100M in revenue per year. But the reason why isn't because of some unique engineering talent on behalf of the worker bee.
They just pay that dude so much because activist investors don't scrutinize costs too aggressively on growing monopolies (wait until revenue growth stops) and they value stability. If you don't value stability to the same degree (you aren't a massive 200K employee org), I wouldn't hire the "upgrade now" button guy.
I've also worked (and currently work) at a big tech company and personally this has not been my experience. I'm sure it happens but it's not typical.
Given how inefficient Meta et al are, why do the pay so much more than the nimbler smaller companies? (Rhetorical question, I already know the answer: monopoly and regulatory capture)
Of course those engineers would rather have more meaningful work if it came with similar compensation and work life balance.
Hard to motivate people to work on things that destroy society. Money helps.
Want to see how motivated Meta employees are? Watch how fast their offices clear out at 5pm on the dot.
Meta offices are pretty full at 5pm lmao. In fact they are still decently full at 7pm after dinner at 6. Baffles me why people just make up random crap in areas they clearly know less than nothing about.
What do you think is an appropriate time for most employees to end their workday?
I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
Because you have to pay people more to do boring or evil work vs meaningful or exciting work
In my experience the pay difference was never that close that meaning and ethics played a role in the decision.
Cool exciting and meaningful science job: 200k
Big Tech surveillance capitalism job: 800k (at the low end)
The calculus has only been about affording housing and providing for the family.
Seems the pay is very different and thus is absolutely playing a role in the decision?
800k at the low end? Big tech pays well, but that sort of comp is reserved for very senior folks.
Where do I get this cool exciting and meaningful science job paying $200k?
This is my experience too. I actually briefly took the cool exciting climate change related science job and then realized that I couldn’t actually support my family’s lifestyle on $160k so I left and went back to surveillance capitalism. I do feel guilt about that decision, but I like to imagine I’ll be able to go back to working on interesting and ethical things after my kids are out of the house.
For big products with many years of history behind them, yeah, that's true. For v. 1.0 or skunkworks projects, it's still mostly true but occasionally, some crazy-ass stuff can happen. (Cue the "what has seen cannot be unseen" meme pic.)
Yeah. This is part of why I wasn't excited to work at G after my first time there. It was very boring
My famous interview question: "How do you copy a file to another computer?", I was told I need to tone down. It filters out too many entry/mid level candidates.
You’re painting with a pretty broad brush there.
“…for which they were paid roughly $400k.”
If I had to guess, the main reason you don’t hire big tech employees is because you can’t afford to. Everything else is extremely subjective depending on what area said engineer worked.
it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.
some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.
I wonder if the facebook redesign also sucked a lot of manual labor and it is now mostly done so they don't need so many people anymore to maintain that product.
many of the people that will be laid off are doing very real work. i certainly was!
I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.
Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.
I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.
Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.
I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.
This is exactly right and I've got to wonder what the AI conversation would be like in the alternate timeline where tech didn't massively overhire in the wake of Covid.
Presumably meta will always need engineers. Why fire staff who have meta experience and inevitably have to hire more engineers probably in some weeks or days? Engineers who will need onboarding and might not turn out too.
Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.
There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.
Not popular? Who asks someone to break their confidential agreements in front of them, and why would you hire someone who would do that so easily?
Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?
I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.
I see. Always stuggled with this. I think design interview on hypotheticals is better. Or have you used X with follow up questions about X? Probably OK to say we used kubetnetes. But not OK to describe inner workings of a custom controller that speeds up their workloads even if candidate wrote the code.
"couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks"
Well, if that's the case, it's time to hold leadership accountable, because they recklessly spent company money on hiring people who did not create value for the shareholders.
Mark Zuckerberg ultimately approved that hiring initiative, right? He's the CEO; either he approved it or he approved of the hiring of the person that handled it and likely delegated the task to that person.
Mark needs to be shown the door.
Oh wait.
Mark's on the board.
And he has majority voting power.
... I'm starting to think there might be difficulty in holding him accountable.
Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?