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Meta laying off more than 11,000 employees: Read Zuckerberg’s letter announcing the cuts

edited November 2022 in Other Investing
Interesting a number of tech companies are laying off workers now. Could be recession harbingers. Also, interesting:
Shares of Meta were up about 7.7% Wednesday morning.
Perhaps it's finally time to put to bed the notion that the health of the economy is dependent on the health of the stock market and vice versa. Wall Street often likes layoffs: https://cnbc.com/2022/11/09/meta-to-lay-off-more-than-11000-thousand-employees.html
Here's a list of other tech companies either freezing hiring or laying people off: https://cnn.com/2022/11/07/investing/premarket-stocks-trading
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Comments

  • I hope these FB employees will find other meaningful jobs elsewhere with their skill sets. Twitter situation is even worse.
  • I find it interesting that the layoffs are all, like, 13-14%.
  • Meta, Twitter, Stripe et al. make sense. I don't get Amazon doing deep cuts - they seem to be quite diversified. Can anyone with industry knowledge provide bit more context?
  • From the little that I've seen so far on Amazon it seems to be a general cut affecting many different areas of operation- from Alexa to retail. Here is a a short excerpt from a New York Times report:
    In recent months, Amazon has also closed or pared back a smattering of initiatives, including Amazon Care, its service providing primary and urgent health care that failed to find enough customers; Scout, the cooler-size home delivery robot, that employed 400 people, according to Bloomberg; and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that sold sewing supplies for three decades.

    From April through September, it reduced head count by almost 80,000 people, primarily shrinking its hourly staff through high attrition.

    Amazon froze hiring in several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing division, for the next few months.

    Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as at risk for cuts. The company has sold hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. But Amazon has said the products are often low margin and other potential revenue sources such as voice shopping have not caught on.
  • Thanks for the info on Amazon @Old_Joe and @Shostakovich. Come to think of it, I must be one of those causing a drag on revenues because, despite Alexa's entreaties to the contrary, I have yet to place an order by voice. Maybe I'm a loner; I don't talk to Siri, either. My wife, however, is able to get Alexa to play an oldies but goodies radio station while she's cooking.
  • I ended a Prime membership in part because packages are delivered ahead of estimates anyway (and I'm just not that impatient) which suggests to me lots of deliverers making fewer deliveries. Still, I live in a condo and already the daily Amazon drop-off looks like we're heavy into the holiday season.
  • @sfnative- yes, we experienced that also. Because we are almost always up at Guerneville from Friday through Monday we chose Tuesday as our delivery day, but Amazon frequently delivered on Monday instead. We changed to Wednesday, and for whatever reason they seem to be very good about doing that.
  • @BenWP, buy your wife a Yamaha receiver with a connection to the internet for favorite radio stations, napster, pandora, spotify, etc. There may be other receivers that do similar. But the Yamaha is fine for us. Your spouse could probably tell Siri to change the channels for her.

    We use the Alexa that was given to us as a kitchen timer.
  • sfnative said:

    I ended a Prime membership in part because packages are delivered ahead of estimates anyway (and I'm just not that impatient) which suggests to me lots of deliverers making fewer deliveries. Still, I live in a condo and already the daily Amazon drop-off looks like we're heavy into the holiday season.

    WIth at least 18 warehouses within my city (as of 1½ years ago), I get free delivery as fast as Prime, including on Sundays.

    Package clutter is a common problem these days for multi-unit buildings. It can even become a safety issue and a fire hazard. Solving the problem isn't easy and may not be cheap to do.

    In my building it's a year round problem, only worse around holidays. Our condo board has been "investigating" solutions for nearly three years and AFAIK has stopped trying for now. (I finally quit the board out of frustration.)

    Kudos to OJ for planning well. Often people seem to go out of town and let their packages pile up for days or even longer.

    I don't get Amazon doing deep cuts - they seem to be quite diversified

    Notable in the Amazon announcement is that while Amazon is cutting development ("technology"), it isn't (yet) cutting warehouse or delivery staff. At least so far Amazon doesn't appear to expect its sales or our package clutter to diminish.
    the souring global economy has put pressure on [Amazon] to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or underdelivering for years.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/technology/amazon-layoffs.html
  • Where I live the Amazon delivery has become uncertain. Orders are "out for delivery" on the promised day and, by the end of the day, they are listed as delayed. When the USPS tracking is pulled up at the USPS site, it appears that the delivery report was in error and that someone (Amazon?) delayed passing off the package to USPS. At this point my "Prime delivery" is a throw of the dice. Last week a package was delayed and rescheduled for the next two days. I awoke to find the package had been left at my door after dark and was there for anyone to grab all night. No Alexa report of delivery until after I had found the package. (It was about 5AM that I found it, so I do believe it was left the night before.)
  • @WABC: thanks for the suggestion. We received two Echo Dots, not the latest versions, as gifts. I figured out how to use one on our lower level as an intercom. My wife can summon me by saying, “Alexa, drop in on all units,” while she’s listening to music.
  • Sven said:

    I hope these FB employees will find other meaningful jobs elsewhere with their skill sets. Twitter situation is even worse.

    image

    One writer's perspective:
    The over-expansion at Big Tech has been bad not just for the companies’ shareholders (Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet are down by 43%, 67%, and 32%, respectively, this year), but for the U.S. economy in general, sucking up talent that could have been deployed more productively.

    “We have a shortage of talent in Silicon Valley," [Altimeter Capital’s Mark] Gerstner said. "Meta and other large companies have made it very difficult for start-ups to hire.” Gerstner said he’s “confident that these employees will find replacement jobs and quickly be back to work on important inventions that will move us all forward.”

    The economic data, so far, appear to be proving him right. While the number of layoffs is clearly increasing, the number of people filing initial claims for jobless benefits has not risen markedly from a 60-year low.
    https://www.yahoo.com/now/weekly-comic-big-techs-day-022222952.html
  • If Twitter isn't down when there are only few hundreds of employees left now, down from few thousands (after another round mass resignations/layoffs yesterday, after 1-day email notice from Must to work hard/harder/hardest OR quit), some are saying may be computers can just run themselves (-:). Twitter HQ has been on lockdown mode from 5:00pm Thursday until Monday.
  • Twitter is no longer a public traded company and has been delisted from NY stock exchange as on Nov 8th. it is now privately held largely by Musk.
  • My reference to Twitter "down" meant as the website down/shut/unstable/outage, but it has been running OK so far EXCEPT that there seem to be more crypto-bots posting silly & unrelated comments (I have blocked dozens since just yesterday). So, that AI part isn't working. Several important Twitter posters have mentioned alternate sites to find them if Twitter down does go "down".
  • edited November 2022
    This may come as something of a surprise to some folks, but I've been able to navigate life just fine without Alexa, Siri, Twit, FB, or any other "social" waste of time.

    That's left me with lots of extra time to spend at MFO, where folks are friendly, the info is pretty damned reliable, and (so far, at least) no hacks or disinformation from China, Russia, Iran, or Trump.
  • edited November 2022
    I used to be exclusively at M*, and for years, resisted posting elsewhere. But various M* platform changes, and loss of contents with each move, forced me to change my web/social-media approach.

    Now, I am at several platforms. Each has its unique flavor and circle of people. Some stuff is duplicated but not much.

    Covid downtime in 2020 also gave me time to reconstruct lot of my lost content at M* that I put on the YBB Site (a refence site, NOT a discussion site) and now just refer to it rather than posting same/similar stuff repeatedly in response to Qs.

    BTW, some at Twitter are pointing out that Twitter may have saved us from WWIII, an overstatement that has some validity. Early mainstream media reports on the Russian missile strike in Poland and possible use of NATO Article 5 (when many world leaders were at G20 in Bali, Indonesia) were not based on facts. I saw at Twitter that several posters from Ukraine, Poland and elsewhere (including the US) posted conflicting info. My earliest posting on a related MFO thread was based on those reports (but there was no single link for them). Musk has tweeted (with obvious self interest) that the coverage of the recent missile event and FTX-Alameda collapse in the crypto universe have been more timely and better than in the mainstream media.
  • edited November 2022
    While I'm not particularly fond of social media platforms, I do think not being on one will ultimately be like not having a phone when it became popular, or Internet connectivity itself, or if you went back far enough, not reading novels because they were "bad for you" in the 18th and 19th centuries. Social media has reached, unfortunately from an older perspective, critical mass. I can just imagine in olden days people complaining about the "waste of time" and nonsense people talked about on the phone, and didn't we once talk that nonsense?
  • edited November 2022
    Well, I'll leave the judgement to others: Do you get the impression that I'm uninformed about what's going on in the world? Does my lack of connection to "social media" suggest significant information impairment on my part?

    As long as there are reliable sources reporting on the social media I see no need to personally waste my time there.
  • edited November 2022
    Agreed, but most people didn’t use the telephone either to learn about current events when it became popular. They used it to socialize with friends and family, much like today’s most popular social medium—Facebook.
  • I have a Facebook account but there isn't any information flying through it. I guess I don't know where this information highway is on Facebook. I suspect @Old_Joe also won't waste much time if he also doesn't find the information jumping out at him and he has to look for it and adopt its source somehow.
  • @Anna, Facebook, Twitter, etc use AI to learn from your clicks and from Likes/Follows for news sources/pages and people. Same with Google News - I can see that on identical PCs that my wife and I have and those are offered quite different Google News (based on our search histories).

    By the way, these discussion boards were the earliest social-media (version 0.0?). Kids are now growing up with smartphone and social-media. BTW, my granddaughter says that Facebook and Twitter are so yesterday.

    We didn't even keep our 1st cell phone - that went first to our daughter decades ago when she had just learned driving; it had only local coverage. WE borrowed her phone when we went for long or late drives. Things are different now with kids 3-5 watching YouTube and swiping screens - even before they can talk much.
  • Never really got the attraction of social media -- unless you consider YouTube social media. I had started to become fond of some channels on Twitter. I all this stuff does more harm than good, however.
  • "Facebook, Twitter, etc use AI to learn from your clicks and from Likes/Follows for news sources..."

    I have absolutely no interest in letting Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk "help" me to decide what my news sources might be. Talk about a "slippery slope"...
  • I’m in agreement with Old_Joe on FB. I am frequently shown stuff that my wife reads and it’s rarely anything I need or that I missed on the various electronic news outlets I read daily. She’s right in saying it is a useful medium for keeping track of relatives we rarely see. AAMOF, I am usually appalled at the pettiness, the trite news, the self-serving “look at me eating a gigantic sandwich” type of posts, and by the general self-absorption that passes for content. Somehow, I find it bad manners to stop in the middle of a meal to take and post a photo of the food so that my “friends” will be envious. Wouldst that old-fashioned manners (including modesty) hadn’t been thrown under the bus.
  • edited November 2022
    Amen!
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