Sorry that it makes you uncomfortable to realize that slavers built this nation and enforced their will on the majority of the country by creating a government where elites control the country through minority rule. I bet you think the 3/5's compromise was just good governance too right? That's pragmatic centrism we desperately need in modern times!
If it makes you feel better I'll also include this in the help text of my next neovim plugin.
> Layoffs are a very normal thing for businesses to do.
Didn't used to be, except in extreme circumstances. Was seen as a really bad sign.
To the extent there's "science" on this, it's a lot less clear than you might think that a policy of reaching eagerly for the layoff-button is long-term beneficial to companies, i.e. there's a good chance it's a cultural fad, you do it because "that's what's expected" and perhaps investors get skittish if you don't, for the circular reason that... that's what's expected.
People generally complain about the interview process being bloated while also not giving a good signal - is it then not better to hire people for a while, see if they perform and then letting them go again? Though perhaps in Meta's case they hire a lot while also having cumbersome interviews, I don't know. I just feel like there are perhaps some benefit in being quick to hire and fire.
What people dislike is the boom-bust cycle inherent to all levels of a market economy. During some years, these companies suck people up like a vacuum -- that can be bad if you're on the inside and all of a sudden the culture goes out the window, or if you're expected to onboard 3-4 people at the same time, or you end up with a reorg every quarter. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, companies shut down (non-backfill) hiring entirely and layoff huge percentages of the company, with no guarantee that you'll be safe just because you're doing a good job.
Human lives do not work like this. If you're getting married, if you have an unexpected hospital expense, if you want to buy a house -- these are not things that "market cycles" will plan around, but you have to.
Being quick to hire or fire is not the problem. Massive overhiring and massive layoffs are.
I don’t think the previous poster is saying all layoffs are “cowardly”, but pointing out that these ones are.
I think they have a point. Facebook is making money. Tech is in a very dynamic phase, right now. This is a moment of huge opportunity for them, and one that won’t necessarily be as large in the future.
To be contracting right now, rather than making a play, seems like a lack of leadership.
yeah, these big layoffs don't add up to me right now.
if you're making money and you feel that these are good employees, why not take them off the core products and ship them to some other ambituous R&D proejct?
making core products leaner is probably a good, but surely there's some other big moonshot you'd like to take?
I'd say that a 10% culling of their workforce when they should be going all in on is not "very normal".
I don't think that those 10% of their workforce were keeping them back, to the contrary, now a big part of the remaining 90% will start wondering (if they hadn't already done so) when they'll be next, that is instead of focusing their minds on this AI-race thing.
Agreed. What happens when every company lays off 10, 20, 40% of their staff? AI Agents don't pay taxes and dont participate in a meaningful amount of the consumer economy.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
If it's not sustainable? Yes. They shouldn't have hired them in the first place then. Such a major round of firing (the second one in only a few months) shows a completely failing leadership.
I'm glad in Europe companies are much more conservative with hiring and firing. Because it's much harder to let employees go and there's strings attached.
Don't forget when you fire an employee you're giving them a lot of stress about their livelihood, you're externalising a lot to society. Internalise the profits, externalise the problems. Typical.
I'm so glad I don't live in the US and that things don't work like that here.
There's also a reason why there are no innovative companies in Europe. If you make it hard to fire someone you make it hard to hire someone.
Companies won't spin up risky projects if they can't spin them down. This is why Europe continues to fall behind the US and China.
Accepting the mediocrity is abdicating the leadership of the world to China. If you like that, good for you. But I doubt the low-growth, low-innovation world of Europe will make the next iPhone, AI, or chip.
Oh, and Europe can only do this stuff because of the USA military, by the way.
That obtained the cutting edge technology by buying an American company that had been founded to productize technology developed at an American defense laboratory based on a Japanese researcher’s work
You are forgetting 20 years and billions of dollars developing, in collaboration with research institutes like IMEC and funding from chipmakers like Intel, Samsung, and TSMC.
But it doesn’t fit your ideological narrative of how innovation functions so…
I am not the person you originally replied to. I have no ideological motivation here. I am merely pointing out ASML did not invent EUV, nor did they fund its initial development or the first decade or so of its productization. ASML employs plenty of scientists and engineers who did important work getting EUV to market, but your characterization implied that ASML single-handedly introduced a step-function increase in semiconductor fabrication technology from their labs in the Netherlands, and that is a misleading impression to give. It’s belied by the fact that ASML can’t even choose their own customers without approval from the U.S. government.
I believe that it's a bit more complicated than that especially if we look at the contributions of IMEC.
But irregardless I can hand you the point that you are making and then say that yours is a very tight standard that would not pass most of what passes for innovation in Silicon Valley.
The point I'm trying to make for the initial poster is that they are confusing "technological innovation" for money making. And yes you don't have a money printing machine in the EU, but you have A LOT of technological innovation that eventually goes to market through SV.
I think it’s to their credit that they don’t have one and instead got cern.
A bunch of shitty crud apps made by mediocre rent seekers that got rich on tax avoidance, gov money + research, and low interest rates vs actual ground breaking research that benefits humanity. Silicon Valley is probably the worst thing that happened to humanity between the 2008 crash and Covid. People have been figuring it out but not after they have already given these scammers permission to inspect their wallets.
Wow. Can't tell if this is a parody or just very, very uninformed. Either way, good day. Hope you understand, one day, how technology has helped millions of people in many different ways.
I'm tired of this American exceptionalism. Success is not only about money. It's about making a positive impact on the world for everyone. This is where the big tech companies deeply fail.
America poisons the world with pollution (eg pulling out of Paris Agreement), misinformation, promoting discord as 'engagement', unnecessary military engagements and screwing up the rest of the world.
And really, abdicating 'leadership' was already done by America by voting for Trump.
Billions and billions of people willingly use these products. Are you saying they use them because they are bad for them and they don't like them and don't value them?
No they use them because they are addictive, intentionally. But they reinforce negative emotional content because it is more engaging. This is what causes all the polarisation in society, what gave us Brexit and Trump. See for example the book Careless People, it describes how Facebook set up a huge consulting operation with the Trump campaign to get him into office.
But they are bad for society, it's not for no reason that a lot of countries are trying to ban them for the younger generations now, similar to smoking.
Exiting low performers is one thing, but using layoffs as tool to put pressure on your workforce to extract more labor and keep them busy is a toxic culture.
its not “normal” when companies have 10s of Billion in net profit per quarter
Axing low/negative ROI product lines, sure. But recently these cuts have been across-the-board and in product lines that are net profitable and have strong technical product roadmaps. Moreover they are firing longer tenured (expensive) engineers
I understand they’re managing a transition to a capital intensive strategy but the whole era reeks of stock price focused financial engineering and these large companies flexing oligopoly power in the face of their customers and the labor that builds their technology.
It would be better because it would create a more diverse work space where multiple employers complete for employees, instead of one company playing musical chairs with people
A few companies get almost all investments. They start a lot of projects fast and close the ones that don’t work
If companies stuck to fewer projects, money would be invested in other companies focusing on specific products, you get a lot of companies and not the market concentration you got today (which is responsible according to few economists to a lot of the us labor market dysfunctions it is currently experiencing)
Reducing your workforce always means you either made a strategic mistake, your bottom line is hurting, your growth is stagnating or you hired McKinsey (lol) not a good sign for company health and always bad for morale.
The strategic mistake is that they don’t have any other good ideas to deploy these folks toward. A company of this size and financial condition in technology with exceptional leadership should not be out of good ideas.
Well Apple seems to be able to largely avoid these staffing whiplash problems…
I mainly call them problems because hugely scaling your org up and down on a whim is extremely inefficient when your recruiting and onboarding costs are high. Surely it’s more wise to repurpose the people you already have unless you have no time horizon on appropriate new areas of R&D.
"Some bets didn't work so let's destroy lives and cause needless suicides. It wasn't my fault, I was only following orders." - Random Meta VP of Customer Misery.
No but purposely forcing economic hardship on people when you're one of the most profitable entities on earth will always be a shitty thing. I'm sorry but treating workers like replaceable cogs is disgusting behavior and I'm not shocked that big tech routinely turns to anti-worker devices to enforce control.
Attacking? Nowhere did I attack anybody. Explaining what a layoff is not "attacking". If you are offended by market economics I suggest you get thicker skin.
You are normalising layoffs in companies that are not losing money. If you are a regular employee, this kind of behaviour affects you, but hereyou are saying “it’s alright folks, it’s just business “. Sure thing these kind of layoffs are not illegal, but there must be something else in life than raw corporate behaviour when it comes to work, don’t you think?
The other scenario is that Meta doesn’t layoff people. The big fishes will make less money, but won’t affect their lives in the minimum. What about that? That’s not illegal either, but ofc, “that’s not how businesses work!”. So brainwashed. We are the frogs, they are boiling us and you don’t care
Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people. The broader profitability of the entire company is entirely irrelevant. Should employee x subsidize employee y? That's nonsense.
Should a company keep someone on payroll and have them do nothing until profit reaches 0?
First of all if a company is profitable and has a number of employees and has no idea how to use them that’s a failure of leadership. The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
Secondarily layoffs don’t happen the way you say: they are across the board and when you are talking of 10% of a company there is no real way of targeting the inefficient people. More than anything is fiscal engineering: you need x amount, you fire people and then you rehire 75% offering less equity and at lower levels imposing more work on the remaining employees
> The board should look for an executive team that knows how to use what it has.
I was thinking the exact same thing. This makes them look pathetic.
Meta is very selective in their hiring process. If they can't figure out how to use these incredibly talented and driven people, then that's a failure of leadership. How do they not have an enormous backlog of promising and interesting ideas to pursue?
They've got the cash, they've got the people, they just don't have any imagination or ambition. Better management would see the current situation is an opportunity, not a problem.
I think this is essential to the disagreement in this little part of the discussion.
Ending a product line and laying off the people who worked on that product line aligns more to your "profitable work for a set of people" phrasing. But a great deal of tech sector layoffs happen as a blanket action, not targeted at specific products, teams, or roles. Business units are directed to find X% to cut. When the business is making money, these blanket actions can feel pretty unfair to the affected employees. The decision to lay off any specific individual could be completely disconnected from the value that individual provides to the business.
Should employee X subsidize employee Y? Yes! Ideally, companies should structure themselves in a way where that's not even a question; it would be weird to say my coworkers are "subsidizing" me when they keep working while I'm out sick or taking a vacation. You can't keep a money-losing org running forever, but your job should not be dependent on whether your utility right this second crosses some threshold.
> Layoffs mean a company doesn't have productive, profitable work for a set of people.
That's only one of many things layoffs can mean. In this case, Meta seems to be laying people off so that it can make a bigger bet on its AI programs (which I assume are deeply unprofitable right now) at the expense of other lines of business.
> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?
Isn't the obvious answer yes for everyone that sells their labor?
If I gave you the choice between being an employee in an economy where it is more difficult to land a job, but you could be sure that job would last, or an economy where it is easier to find a job, but it was completely insecure, I think most would choose the former. No? Worring about finding work while looking, or worrying about it all the time? Seems obvious.
I guess the issue with the first one would be actually getting the job. If jobs were that valuable, I'd expect other factors not necessarily related to job performance to be reasons in getting a job, especially knowing (or being related to) the right person.
> These workers have a better gig that 99% of Americans
Given that the cited 10% includes the folks who have to drive 2 hours each way to cook/clean in the campus kitchens... not sure that they do. Meta isn't all software engineers, by a long shot
The free market only works when you have sufficient competition. The phone market is absolutely not trivial to enter, so your first sentence is plain and simply false.
Also, given that iphones almost already pass the requirements, where is the harm to innovation?
There are hundreds of phone choices made by 10+ manufacturers. What lack of competition are you referencing? You can still buy a flip phone if you want.
The harm to innovation is not today, but in the future for some as-of-yet built product. That is.... what innovation is...
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
To highlight just how stupid this is, here it is from another angle:
"I have to work on site so everyone else must work on site"
What is the logical conclusion here? That the workforce should be equal in every sense? Come on
Poor in the US and around the world often don’t have access to the healthcare they need. If you get cancer, are you turning down chemotherapy so you don’t seem soft? Are you turning down your next raise because some teacher somewhere is getting underpaid?
If you want substantive rebuttals you should make a substantive argument first.
Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.
There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
You say entitlement, but the reality is you have sour grapes about people who can have a flexible work arrangement. Some people pick jobs that are not able to be flexible, that’s a choice. Pick better. People work to live, not live to work, they should not tolerate how they should have to work because some manager or c-level is lucky to be in their position of power.
The UK provides by law the ability to seek and obtain flexible working arrangements on day one of a job [1]. Certainly, the US is behind as it always is, but it will catch up eventually, if only because of structural demographics and total fertility rate declines across the developed world creating perpetual labor shortages in various verticals. We’re just arguing window of time.
YC isn’t a good example, they simply sell lottery tickets to founders and early investors as a confidence play. You say top companies, but that’s an opinion without evidence. According to what metric?
> As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals. This percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024, indicating that remote work has become a consistent component of the workforce.
> What this means: Remote work has stabilized at about one-fifth of the US workforce—this isn't a temporary trend but a permanent shift in how work gets done.
> Approximately 90% of companies plan to maintain or increase remote work options moving forward, indicating a lasting shift despite some return-to-office mandates.
> What this means: The vast majority of companies recognize remote work as a permanent feature—even those mandating office returns are keeping some flexibility.
What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?
Why can't they be? Chances are in 1989, most companies weren't set up to work well with computers either. 5 years later everyone had a desktop an email account.
A whole lot of outliers then. Top companies are in person? I only know a few people in FAANG but they all work remote. Maybe different for certain tasks like on site hpc work. They are in software engineering though.
YC in person doesn't mean anything to me. These bay area types often have a screw loose and do things like have people live on site maybe even in tents during sprints. Megalomaniac behavior, not a lesson to follow.
To expand upon a particular point; near as I understand WFH, or rather more broadly _not_ "RTO" (ie. endure office bound work) has a strong backbone of people wanting to maximise home/work life balance.
The point about rig work, FIFO mine work, nursing (again, FIFO) et al is these are jobs that are a priority choiice for many that are living that somewhat off-grid lives with a big home-life component dream .. and have been doing that for many decades now.
I'm over 60, have worked in a majority of countries across the globe (geophysical exploration field work), and have avoided offices like a plague for the entirity of my career - I enjoy 24/7 field work with weeks off at home to work projects there or to code / build for various projects from home.
We've even built up resource and energy intelligence services and sold them on to FinTech companies that way.
And met and talked to many people that way.
So, from some PoV's you chose the worst possible examples of jobs that supposedly tie people to an office grind.
What's actually really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements is RTO.
> "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
Nope! You totally missed the point. "You must accomodate me" is a demand, that you can place on your employer, when you have labor power, as an employee. The acceding is what we're talking about here. That is not cultural; it is a matter of market power.
> At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to.
What are you talking about? Did you read my post? Yes, I have to! Because of RTO!
Yes, these are some extreme beliefs in a grand, coordinated conspiracy.
As if a bunch of people in suits are sitting around a table in an evil villain’s lair shouting “we need more control over our workers” or needing to prop up commercial real estate prices.
> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.
Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
> What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
If you deliver all tasks in a timely manner, is productive and helpful in a team setting, contribute to discussions and initiatives beyond your immediate assignments... What exactly should I monitor? How many minutes per day your butt is in a seat? If you did a school run and woked a bit more after hours to compensate? If you had a headache and took a short nap after lunchtime?
Neoliberal? I bet you can't even define that what means other than "some thing I don't like and I have to signal my virtue by saying it".
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