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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Let's set aside that it's Meta for a moment. Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy. Think Chrysler in the 70's pre Iacocca. They face troubles that leadership is incapable of handling. Companies like that get sold and broken out for parts. Or, some have major shakeups with leadership and come back as something else.

Meta, of course, is different. Leadership made a few mistakes, sure, but they're more than ready to cope with changes to social media in the face of tools like ChatGPT available to everyone. Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers. And you can be sure they're innovating behind the scenes. Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.

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I have yet to meet a good leader, coming out of Meta. I worked with several, and all of them share the. same trait - ignore the problem, till it disappears.

They're great to "work" for, but they're horrible at building a team to do work.

I, personally, attribute this to the coasting that Facebook/Meta has been doing for the last 5-7 years. Big product used to provide enough money to literally "rest and vest" for leaders. Leaders that hire people to do complete pointless work, and still have no negative impqact on the company. Now it's all catching up.

This is not the first or the last time we see this kind of situation. ATT, IBM, Microsoft - all have been there, where the money coming in from hit products covered all the ills.

> I have yet to meet a good leader, coming out of Meta. I worked with several, and all of them share the. same trait - ignore the problem, till it disappears.

That's because the good ones don't leave.

More generally, I think that the last few years have been way too easy for FB/Meta (since 2015) and that's why there's so much bloat.

I get why they want to flatten things, but I think they've left it very late and I'm not sure it's gonna work out for them.

> Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years.

That's a lot of wishful thinking for an enormous enterprise loaded up with red tape, regulatory entities breathing down their necks, a whole-company strategy going exactly nowhere, and now a bad reputation in this field for repeated layoffs.

> Facebook and Instagram will continue to provide excellent paths for advertisers to target consumers.

This assumes Facebook and Instagram remain the communication and user content hubs they are. But this is not a given, any company asleep at the wheel (remember myspace) risks losing leadership, then users and then money needed to recover. And recent FB escapades suggest that it indeed has a sleeping driver. My 2c.

Their business relies on the whims of fickle consumers not changing, which seems to happen frequently.

Facebook hasn't been cool for a decade+ and usage has dropped a lot in the last few years[1], so all of their eggs are going into baskets that either a) face similar competitive battles (insta v tik tok et al) or b) are gambles (metaverse), other ventures.

Social media, and perhaps the internet at large, seems like it's shaping up to be a lot more ephemeral in nature than we were led to believe when the unicorns were growing up. Not sure how these companies navigate that other than via conglomerate/acquisition style growth.

[1] https://blog.chartbeat.com/2021/06/24/facebook-decline-regio...

Meta, of course, is different.

Is it, really? All the "tech innovation" and "too big to fail" talk was said about Chrysler, too.

Lots of people look at Meta through HN-tinted glasses. It's still just a company, like any other.

For the whole second paragraph citations are sorely needed. This reads like something you would read on a nervous META stockholder forum.

I agree with you but I'd imagine new tech like chatgpt won't interject in a user's interactions with facebook and instagram as it does with google where I ask my AI for something vs. search for it in google.

How will chatgpt make money if it doesn’t?

Subscriptions? Potentially the language model can give different answers and the highest bidder is the one that rises to prominence? Who knows... OpenAI was originally supposed to be a non-profit. The language model is essentially the sum total of the content of the internet which humanity up til now has contributed to so not sure we should be charged.

"Surely we'll see powerful new products and innovations in the coming months and years."

When was the last time FB/Meta released something that qualifies? As opposed to acquiring a company?

It's a one-trick pony, like Google.

> Any company with multiple rounds of layoffs is unhealthy

Isn't this too black and white of a statement? We just got out of a massive money printing/demand spike that was COVID

It's generally agreed upon as business 101 "scale up to capture growth opportunities"

Businesses did that.

Now it's scale down time. Businesses are doing that.

What part of that is unhealthy?

The multiple part is the most important part of the statement you're quoting. The general idea is to cut deeply once so that it never needs to happen again.

I think a huge portion of the balance between "hire / grow head count" and "layoff / shrink head count" is linked to the Federal Funds Rate and whether corporations are ready to get rid of X (where X is the number of people they need to adjust head count wise to account for the Federal Funds Rate going from 0.25% -> 5.25% in 12 months)

Maybe they don't believe the Fed and are hopeful for a pivot?

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