Meta plans thousands more layoffs as soon as this week
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So I logged in and changed my password and deleted my account again. Facebook tells you that it will take 30 days to delete your account. This is obviously user hostile bullshit.
Meanwhile somehow the scammer is still posting weight loss stuff on my account. Feel like I've jumped through enough hoops so I'll just let that person pollute Facebook more. Their problem now.
And I won't call them Meta, what a joke. Everyone should quit, get ahead of the layoffs, useless company. Your work there makes the world a worse place. You can do better.
Even downloading your own pictures is very difficult with the actual image hidden in some weird link in a maze of javascript. And the original one can never be downloaded - only a crummy scaled down version. It is a one-way trap.
Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.
That's a bit simplistic. There is plenty of well paid meaningful or at least less destructive work than working for FB.
dissinfo? just unusubscribe or don't follow that account? do you really want facebook censoring everything you can see or don't see based on political correctness? or some other filter?
and how is it "selling user data". I've always found this to be wholly inaccurate. it's targetted advertisement. do you really prefer untargetted advertising?
I'm no facebook fanboy. personally i don't use it much. i've read articles on the matter but they never make any sense. Is there an article somewhere that explains all the vitriol towards facebook, because i really don't get it.
For a few reasons: they copy/steal or acquire all their new ideas, have diluted most of the real human element of their social network products into “promoted” content or “recommended” reel spam - leading to an “Instagram culture” of flexing and showing off to gain an audience.
But I do agree with you that “misinformation” and user data issues are blown out of proportion.
Here’s another one: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
Another: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/facebooks-...
Re: “no worse than Apple”: Apple implemented features to make my phone give me less notifications by default when I am driving, at work, or close to going to bed. These features are helpfully turned on by default. Contrast this with Facebook’s design philosophy of increasing the amount of time a user spends staring at their phone at all costs.
Apple’s tracking prevention has put such a huge hole in Facebook’s panopticon-like internet-wide surveillance scheme that it is almost certainly one of the causes of these layoffs. You ask “who wants untargeted ads,” and it turns out, when you give users a choice, the answer is “most people, actually.”
There is no rational basis for saying that Facebook is “no worse than Apple.” Facebook is an actively malign force in society, worldwide, and we would all be better off if they shut down completely.
On the other hand for facebook. I can just ignore it completely for months on end and easily block all my notifications or emails from it. or block them one by one if I choose. if i dont like the feed, then I just don't spend time on it. nothing about facebook isn't easily circumvented whereas apple has a death grip on you, as long as you need to use it's products.
> do people dont give a f* about their impact to the world?
It is very hard to connect dots to Rohingya genocide when your job is to tune machine learning models to increase the engagement with feed. And if one starts going that rabbit hole, again, one will never be able to find a good well-paying job.
Disappointed but not surprised.
I kept my accounts because I feared they'd become sock puppets. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Now I'm just squatting on my own IRL user name. No content, no profiles.
This is everything I wanted to say about FB. Always wondered why so many talented folks (with PhDs) choose to work there.
Can you please name 5 of those alternatives which pay as well as Facebook and yet are a better corp for the world?
"Pay well" might mean less than Meta but still at a comfortable level, subjectively.
Edit: I cannot reply to barbazoo so will edit here - you still haven't provided me 5 names who "pay well".
"Pay well" but maybe not quite as well as Meta, and for our purposes I am excluding other FAANGs (except Waymo, sort of I guess):
- Roblox
- Robinhood
- Databricks
- Bytedance
- Box
- Stripe
- Two Sigma
- Lyft
- Uber
- Instacart
- Cruise
- Doordash
- Waymo
- Airbnb
Companies which imo have a more positive impact on the world than Meta:
- Waymo/Cruise (autonomous driving)
- LinkedIn - close call, but a more professional social network with the intent of matching employers with employees and taking most of their profits from the advertising of those jobs without influencing global politics
- Stripe - value comes from payments processing for companies big and small which is a valuable product in its own right
- Lyft/Uber - close call again, but I think the disruption of the taxi industry and the additional options for transportation have really revolutionized how many people get around day-to-day.
Well, in that entire list, following are the companies who don't make the world shittier: LinkedIn / Stripe / Databricks / Box / Cruise. (I will omit Waymo because its parent is Alphabet, which fails shittiness criteria).
Box stock is flat since 2015. Databricks / Stripe are private so no liquidity. So only LinkedIn qualifies for "slightly less pay but not shittier world". Though I agree that there is an option if someone wants.
Just that it paid similarly.
That's mostly why, I think. In the end, I still said no, but it was much harder with the number in front of me.
a) things were much worse than realised. Maybe but it would have to be a big shock coming because Meta's general performance has held up OK, certainly nothing that would warrant this.
b) HR reasons? some sort of requirement that prevented them doing it all at once? Someone said that this time around they were doing masses of performance reviews. So perhaps the first wave were arbitrary cuts but they couldn't do the second without actual evidence of poor performance backing it?
c) change of plans? Mark wants to go all in AI instead of Metaverse and this means grand restructuring of his whole workforce? You'd think that would be very evident from which teams get laid off (we'll see).
It is exactly Mark’s plan. He called 2023 “the year of efficiency”, meaning that he wants to flatten the whole organization and get closer to startup velocity (and cost). He communicated this theme during performance reviews, as suggested by the article.
https://www.facebook.com/100006735798590/posts/i-resigned-fr...
These people all have 2+ years of build, tooling, dev experience in this newly emerging field. They did valuable work, it just did not hit market.
Anyone else in this space will be happy to snag them up.
And Meta, Amazon, Salesforce etc are only shedding excess pandemic hires. If you look at a graph of hires over a decade, the pandemic shows a huge blip up, and these layoffs correct that.
Wouldnt the stock price drop with people selling the stock. That didn't happen with meta with interest rate hikes.
The interest rate connection is that investors buy the company stock (driving the price up beyond what's reasonable given the underlying business health), because the alternative fix rate instruments offer negative return.
I think you're arguing against yourself.
Why do you think there was a huge blip up during the pandemic? Because their revenue was increasing at a faster rate, so they hired to sustain the increase in revenue and they believed the growth rate will continue. Why was revenue increasing at a faster rate? Two reasons. First, zero interest rates meant that people had more money to spend than before. Second, staying at home meant that people didn't have much else to spend their money on except tech/internet.
[1] I'm still not going to call it "Meta" any more than I am going to call "Star Wars" "Star Wars IV: New Hope".
Sure, why not?
I guess if you are working on greenfields tech - one should avoid the big tech co. You have no real ownership of the innovaton and nobody is going to come along and buy you out if it goes well.
Or am I just old and not naive and start doing the same thing they do I got my first check + prorated sign on bonus when I was hired at BigTech almost 3 years ago?
The whole comment section becomes a cesspool whenever Meta/Mark or Elon is discussed
I think they could have made more money if they built games into facebook. At probably a fraction of the cost really.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-t...
There is: they've spent a fortune of their money on building it.
Not at all! Done right, we could have ended up in a sci-fi future strapped to our VR headsets all day long. But the real life, physical technology is just not here yet (maybe it's impossible and never will be), the software they invented for their lacking headsets is disgustingly bad (Horizon Worlds) and there is no nameworthy content.
I assume his advisors and tech leads all pulled the wool over his eyes and sold him their lofty dreams as tangible reality.
I do hate that Zuck ruined the word meta for everyone.
He just had really, really good marketing, and products that landed at just the right time.
When I read this phrase, the spaceship from Wall-E comes to mind. But in reality, it would probably look a little bit more dystopian than what Pixar imagined...
I still think VR might be a hard sell for most people. As dumb as large groups of people may be, it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media. It's tricking out that it's not always a great thing, and there is legit buy-in from huge chunks of the Left and Right to restrict what social media does.
I by no means wanted to exclude myself from the groups I so derogatively named. Hacker News is pure infotainment to me. The quality is above reddit though, but that's not a high bar.
> it's clear that people are ditching FB and slowly backing away from a lot of social media
Are they? To me it looks like TikTok addiction and stupidity is continuously peaking.
In this case, it was also easy to say it was a dumb idea contemporaneously.
Without doing something like this, I don't think it will go far.
In general, I think, that Facebook (and rest of faang/ms/etc in similar proportions) now are building plans what/whom they need to cut off if they want to operate with 50k/35k/25k/15k total headcount.
I see no evidence of that. The recent announcements are at best a re-org, or worse a cleanup of three+ reorgs where FAIR and others were subsumed into RL-R.
It is clear that The Meta leadership doesn't really understand what they are doing. The first cut I suggest was designed to send a message to investors that meta is "serious" about something. I assume that this second cut is because not enough people left of their own accord.
However none of this is actually a change in strategy. Where are the product changes? where is the announcement of key priorities for the different Apps? are they going to start putting users first? or just add more shit into each app until something sticks?
The key problem Meta has is that they only have one effective leader: zuck. Everyone else appears to be underwhelming.
Boz: arrogance personified. None of the misteps in the last 4 years are ever his fault. It was market forces that meant that raybans failed, rather than releasing them before they were finished. the quest pro didn't sell, not boz's fault. The market wasnt ready for a capable device with absolutely no software support for the new features. Want to join your friend in a VR game? sure! just perform 15 clicks and wait 7 minutes. No not those clicks, no you need to press the hidden sub menu silly! Oh, no, remember you need to have an OS update first. 10 minute update tax!
Mosseri: Pivoting Instagram to video, because tiktok. just push push push. Oh wait our cash cow users are pissed off, ok, roll back. "there was no way to forsee this problem" despite everyone telling them it was a horrid user experience.
Blue app: Lets just push random shit into your stream, don't worry we'll roll out the user controls next half. Don't like the content? tough my metric is to get more shit in your feed, if you don't like it, its not my job to fix it, thats someone elses.
Fb: I've been out of it and the reality is millennials and gen z won't be joining it. They know that.
Their only bet is to lobby congress to ban tiktok.
Mostly it feeds me soft porn, and my friends have kind of posted the same things over and over, which has become kind of boring. Food pics, workout pics, whatever.
It's gotten to the point where I'm just actually bored with the platform in general, not necessarily the content.
Facebook, I just have zero interest in going anywhere near it, it's so, so, so boring.
At least TikTok is giving me things I search for.
I have +5 years without fb so that's that.
Twitter serves its purpose for (news, articles, etc...).
I have noticed that if I don't use Instagram for a few days I end up with generic, lowest-common-denominator videos. Scantily clad females, bar fights, car accidents, etc.
But if I start seeking out and watching the stuff I actually like, the feed updates itself within a day or two and I get content that I actually want to watch.
If I actually want to "watch" something, I open Youtube, seems to me like the content on there is 10x better.
Each to their own.
It was fun for a while but yeah, not really sure it’s worth my time, or that it ever really was.
Good point, the only way for 'Meta' shares to go up and for investors to have some confidence in 'Meta' is by Tiktok being banned in US (and other western countries like EU, Canada etc).
Automatically, the advertising money which was to go to Tiktok will go to Instagram (via Reels).
"Too simple of an app"
The end goal isnt protecting US citizens. It's weaponizing information to use against perceived threats, both foreign and domestic.
If I were Snapchat I would be making moves to jump at this opportunity. I feel they're positioned the best to take that market share out of all of the current competitors, for the simple fact they've kept their core UI & model virtually unchanged.
I don't use Tiktok or have a strong opinion on it specifically, but I really disagree with the notion that we should reflexively ban things because China banned something similar first.
Sure but never copying China because "China bad" is also a bad policy. Sometimes, bullies only understand "tit for tat" language.
I wonder if companies like Meta will finally start caring deeply about performance of their products, and will switch to software paradigms which preserve performance (see for example latest Casey Muratori talk on slowness of Clean Code, and also his "40 million lines of code" talk). I mean, the forced updates of software, and how long they take, is a major complain of users of many modern entertainment devices (the VR googles, game consoles etc.). They long updates are of course caused by "the stack" being a pile of uber-overcomplicated shit, which was quick and convenient to develop, but now is harming the product.
And 'updating' that is my favorite playstation game! It seems to be what I do every time I turn it on every few months.
Its not even as contrived as that. In meta, you don't get points for incremental improvements that make life easier for users. You get points for making a new widget that improves a single metric. That metric will most likely be something sub-team related, with little to no impact on the over all team or even product.
As in it isn't done collapsing yet?
Now Facebook is the old AOL.
The term “metaverse” comes from Snow Crash, which is a dystopia. They would know this if they actually read.
Honestly, it's such an strange mix of the Chersteton's fence and scream testing that I can't begin to understand the rationale.
IIRC, the first set of layoffs largely affected the US a lot more than Europe - its a much more involved legal process generally to perform layoffs in cities like London vs their US offices and often can't be done as quickly.
Does an organization that has so much capital need to even care about organizational strength?
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/A421/production/...
Haven't touched their platforms for years. User base in the USA keeps declining.
They need to cut expenses.
Across the whole of 2022, it was $23B net profit on $117B revenue.
Not sure what you mean by “core business”. About 97% ($113B) of their revenue comes from advertising on Facebook, and half of that is in the US.
I'm not sure why who you were responding to assumed that if revenue dropped by 12%, profit would go to 0...
Wouldn't it be:
$117b revenue = $23b profit = 19.6% profit margin
If revenue went down 12%, margins would probably stay the same?
"Slumping stock price and unimaginative vision has left Microsoft marooned between a fading past and an uncertain future"
An unimaginative vision is a common result of mass lay-offs. The ones that stay behind do not dare to take risks and prefer to stick to the status quo. Only after Satya Nadella took over, did Microsoft start to recover.
It's one thing and bad enough if board members have sometimes dozens of posts... but Zuckerberg, Musk, Dorsey all show it's not a good idea when an actually active C-level exec has too many things on their table. And it's especially not good if they use company resources for their personal pet projects.
Good grief.
I guess if you are a CFO, or finance guy, sure.
But a "pet project" is conjoined with passion. And R&D, and testing the waters in other markets, is what causes true motivation.
People often complain that big corps can only innovate via acquisition. Yet, this comment is complaining that big corps are innovating by... startup methods!
For what does a startup do, other than live as the pet project of its founders?
We should encourage CEOs of large corps to go out on a limb, to R&D, to bring change to the market, to explore new growth streams.
At some point, they have to start being profitable, and this constraint is what forces them to be adaptable and listen to users.
Billionaire pet projects do not have this constraint, and as such can become endless money sinks.
There's a difference between legitimate R&D and pulling Tesla engineers to put out fires at Twitter. The latter is a blatant abuse of Tesla's resources and to be honest it's a miracle how Musk has not gotten under serious fire from at the very least the Tesla board or a lawsuit by shareholders.
Did you ever think, this may be why there is no issue?
I always used to say that it's easy to be nice in a growth company, and that appears to have been proven out by recent events.
Facebook is dragging it out and people are unhappy. Having seen this from the inside, when companies are going through a lengthy process of repeated layoffs, people get nervous and lose trust in management being on top of things (because they obviously aren't). At some point people just start leaving by themselves instead of awaiting the next round. Or worse, they mentally check out and patiently wait for the compensation that comes with their layoff. Either way, they stop being productive team members. This creates a toxic situation that is hard to recover from.
IMHO Facebook should be more decisive and rip off the band aid a bit faster. They have a staffing problem. Too many people that were added that aren't delivering whatever Facebook had in mind. They are spending billions on things that aren't working very well. And throwing more money at the problem has stopped working. It's just costing them more money to do the same things they were doing.
This was today: https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481
"Approved, you go ahead"
Just drains my energy and hope for the future.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417
I have worked in companies with a lot of dead wood in relatively senior roles. They may have done good work in the past, but they seem to stop doing much actual productive work and instead just kind of insert themselves into important projects and meetings and set about trying to make themselves sound indispensable. Yet they produce very little tangible output and their work can't be explained without vagueness and buzzwords. Leading efforts and driving changes and steering modernization and managing the paradigms, bringing stakeholders together, architecting solutions.
They're hard to get rid of for whatever reason. They've built little fifedoms, they have a reputation, they're very good at hobnobbing with middle management, or other dead wood.
Some orgs absolutely could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes to come in and have people justify their positions, and have the confidence and risk appetite to make some calls.
Now I don't know if Musk is telling the truth here, or anything about that ex-employee, his work or background. He might be a great worker who was well worth his salary in value created for Twitter. He could also be one of the other kinds, that failing orgs desperately need to rid themselves of. His twitter pitch is not highly confidence inspiring.
Twitter allegedly shed about 80% of its staff since Musk took over. Which is frankly staggering that it is still able to operate with 4 in 5 people in the company gone. Maybe that is cutting too far down to the bone but there has been no immediate implosion or collapse. Things still have a long way to play out, but clearly he did not throw darts at a board and fire random people or all the most productive ones if it could get that far.
Personally, I couldn't classify that as 'operational' - but maybe I just have high standards and expectations
I haven't really looked at financials. It's never been what you'd call healthy though, sans SV-bubble. I have heard they lost a lot of revenue since Musk took over but I'd imagine there has been a collapse in opex too so it's difficult to judge that one way or the other.
As for trust, I think a lot has been gained as well due to more transparency about their involvement with government censorship programmes. Again hard to really chalk that up one way or the other.
I'm not saying Twitter has suddenly become the golden goose under Musk, or that no technical operational aspect of it suffered after laying off 80% of their staff though, so this doesn't really address my point. My point is Twitter must have had a vast amount of positions that were not providing value and its actually refreshing to see a CEO go in and ask people to explain what they do, take bold action, and take ownership of those decisions.
The meek, managed, MBA, CEO style is to release a canned statement saying how sorry they are and how horrible they feel, and delegate salary or head count reductions down the line which actually doesn't help much with the dead wood situation and can even entrench it because they're often in lower level executive positions themselves.
My company has recently been through a round of these job cuts and we fired good, productive, very long term experts and immediately had to move people in other places to fill their exact positions (badly, because they barely worked with that code before and have to learn it all). Why? Because they worked in different branches of the organization. They fall under different VPs, and the edict said that everybody had to trim X%. It had nothing to do with what work they did, targets had to be hit so they had to go.
I would have killed to be able to take it to the CEO and be asked to explain what those people did to justify why they should stay on. That's why I find Musk a breath of fresh air. Not because he posts infantile memes on twitter or is rude to employees -- I don't think that twitter convo was very tasteful, he could certainly stand to improve how he goes about things. I just think his approach to running companies has some merit.
I am today an active user of Twitter, and never have these issues anymore.
This is stunningly bizarre and such a bad look, the definition of a "shitshow".
But that is not what is happening here at all.
I'm not defending Elon, the whole thing has been a dumpster fire.
And he apologises for firing him after humiliating him in public!
So there’s that.
I'm certainly not going to argue that Meta is going about this in a good way at all, but it is hard to think of a worse example of doing it "well" than Twitter under Elon.
1. https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/status/1632843191773716481
edit:
> Musk has done at least three rounds of layoffs since his promise to stop doing them in November. [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/21/23609522/elon-musk-more-t...
I don't know when they made that decision but a recruiter contacted me from meta last week. I wonder how far do people go through the hiring pipeline before the "stop the engines" signal arrives. Hopefully not after the offer has been accepted.
It has happened. Also happened that people were laid off soon after starting to work.
When they say hiring freeze, it usually means they will stop hiring a generic cookie-cutter person or fresh graduates
Makes you wonder what Facebook has been doing with all those billions spent on VR when Sony is able to produce a better product with a fraction of the investment.
Sony = decades of experience on gaming hardware and games (and everything else)
Meta = decades of experience running a/b tests on a website and copying features to sell ads (and acquiring few mobile apps to run more a/b tests)
I have pretty extensive experience in the embedded Android space and have worked on products everyone here knows, Meta reached out to me very excitedly, and when I let the recruiter know I don't do Leetcode they assured me the coding phone screen was a merely a formality and I'd do great.
It took all my willpower not to leave the moment the interviewer dropped some generic LC merge sorted lists problem, though I don't think I did was that much better their eyes (poked at it for about all of 5 minutes, called it, and asked them some questions)
They actually tried to set me up with a second phone screen but I declined, even on the principle of it, I don't like working at places that filter by LC. In cutting edge stuff like wearables especially, I'm sure you'll find a ton of people with no time for jumping through LC circus. I'm sure I could take a few months and grind out those problems in my sleep (or rather I've been told that), but I'd rather work on interesting and novel things.
I’m not suggesting OP is dumb, but if someone is setting hiring criteria and thinks they need X skillset judged by Y, I think there’s a good chance they’re directionally correct.
I get it, I’ve bombed interviews I was excited about and rationalized it anywhere and everywhere. Once I started hiring folks, my opinions evolved significantly.
How else do you hire someone out of a pool of people that are all knowledgeable and likable? A bad hire, even if they’re super smart and just the wrong fit, is worse than not hiring anyone at all.
If you climb the management ladder, you’ll likely be graded on your org’s hiring outcomes. If 10 people all seemed qualified, I’m going to burn down the risk as much as possible. If I’m wrong 1 time for this, but it not obviously wrong 9 others, I’ll call it a win.
For context: this is coming from tiny startups to billion dollar companies and different things in between.
That's for after you get the job though. During the interview you'll need to be a bit smarter and more practiced with algorithms.
So I asked "is a naive implementation fine"? The answer was a quizzical "... well I guess we could start there? But we're probably going to need at least <insert Big O notation for time> and preferably get to <Big O notation for time and space>", so I wrote out a completely naive implementation and switched to questions.
-
But you're right, I can't program. Not memorizing elaborate cache-unfriendly vectorization-unfriendly algorithms has made me unhirable.
There was a reason they were excited to talk to me, and I thought it was an impressive career of programming to solve hard problems that started from writing assembly games for calculators in middle school... but who knows, maybe it was my charming smile?
Luckily my smile got me hired by a company that's paying me a FAANG salary but hasn't had to lay off thousands (knock on wood)
I hold myself to the standard of knowing enough the problem space before I interview people that I can open an editor and come up with domain specific problems that anyone who's doing what they claim they're doing daily can work through (crazy bar I know...)
> Outside of FAANGs I've routinely interacted with fairly senior engineers who just could not code, period, full stop
My first thought was "You must be joking if you think there are no L5s in FAANG who can't write code",but then I realized you actually think of writing code as literally being able to write statements in a given order... but that's such an insanely low bar that people regularly meet it by repeating problems over and over for a few months.
My bar for writing code at past a junior level is to be able to solve a problem with production grade code. LC almost precludes that between the time constraints and rigid solution set so people settle for "they wrote a guard statement against an empty list".
I just want to know that a new hire isn't going to ignore things like cache locality or not know what a memory mapped file is and try to load gigabytes of data into memory and parse the whole thing just to run their O(N) solution across 4kb of data.
And according to Levels.FYI I'm making more than the average person with a comparable title at Meta, maybe because the same things that made Meta excited made me attractive to other employers without the random cargo cult filters...
But hey, maybe I'm just trying to convince that recruiter who definitely wasn't laid off.
I think there are two strategic errors worth considering here:
- wireless vs. tethered. Was it really worth it going wireless or was there viability in being tethered?
- the hype around PSVR2 is around the Horizon game, which seems like a legitimately great, full-length game that's both a gameplay and technical achievement. What if Meta had spent their $$$ on funding and shipping titles like it? Beat Saber is the only title of note for them and it's getting very old.
One gets the feeling that Meta only begrudgingly services the gaming applications of Quest, even though it's the only application right now. This is understandable as the console market as a whole is far to small for Meta to be interested in long-term, but one can convincingly argue that the status quo doesn't serve them either: they have a product that doesn't have non-gaming PMF but also are visibly annoyed at being in the gaming market at all.
Their existing customers have no confidence in the platform and have reasonable expectations to be jettisoned the moment they become inconvenient, while the company has no line of sight to another market.
There's a lot of execution here that feels like it puts the cart before the horse. Of course you want a bigger-than-console-gaming market, but you have to excel in your space before you can convincingly lay claim to another. Finding viability (both product and financial) in your current market gives you freedom to pivot later.
The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent. You don't really see yourself and your product as a gaming product, so you pivot towards MR/productivity use cases... and now you're... pivoting back to gaming? What? Yeah, ok, the Quest Pro was definitely underbaked, but it suggests that the company has no confidence in its own strategy. If you believe in the MR/productivity path, double down and fix the problems with a follow-up. If you believe in VR gaming, then act like it!
Perhaps there is some future in industrial assistance but not clear if that translates to the next generation platform to subvert a teenage girl's self esteem.
They could never make a convincing MR/productivity headset because there is absolutely no consumer demand for an inferior experience.
Tethered to what? Sony has a much better answer to that question than Meta.
But this would mean investing heavily in tools and SDKs, 1P titles, and publishing deals, neither of which is a world that Meta is very familiar with, and - given the track record - doesn't seem very excited about.
The launch of Meta Quest Pro was abysmal (my comments here at the time [1]), but unfortunately things haven't improved much since then, other than the price reduction. I ended getting the Pro at the launch day, but returned after a few weeks, given the underwhelming experience. It was disappointing, because I wanted to love the device, but it just doesn't deliver.
I received the PSVR2 last week, but didn't have time to unbox yet. Really hoping it gives Meta a run for their money, and sets the bar high (despite being tethered).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166291&p=3#33170171
I really feel like what you need is omni-directional treadmills. I really like VR rhythm games, but for most other games beyond that feel like you really need some more natural way of moving around. The only exception to that would be things where you'd naturally be playing sitting (in a cockpit, in a car, etc).
> The launch of Meta Quest Pro was abysmal
As far as Meta being out of touch goes, the Quest Pro not shipping with a total light blocker seems pretty indicative. i.e. you need to spend 50USD on https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/quest-pro-full-light-... if you really want to properly game on it, on top of the $$$ you already need to fork out for the headset.
> I received the PSVR2 last week, but didn't have time to unbox yet. Really hoping it gives Meta a run for their money, and sets the bar high (despite being tethered).
If I compare the PC, Quest, and PS versions of a game like Beat Saber the PC version is moddable and a vastly better game for it with loads of custom contents, the Quest version is semi-moddable but cranky about it, and the PS version AFAIK isn't moddable. Even for games with official custom song support (e.g. Synth Riders), the PS version doesn't support any of those.
Even if technically superior in some ways I'd consider PSVR2 mostly an expensive paperweight unless they were to release PC drivers for it (which they won't). Only seemingly decent piece of exclusive content for it seems to be Horizon: Call of the Mountain, but that's only 10 hours or so.
Gaming platforms (and games) that require dedicated hardware are a very tough sell.
Gaming platforms (and games) that require a gaming rig that probably costs >$1k, that is really big (2m x 2m, from what I see) and that weighs 200kgs are close to impossible to sell, I'd imagine.
2m x 2m is probably an overestimate (https://omni.virtuix.com/ is selling the Omni One which seems to require 4ft x 4ft), but even then this is still much larger than existing gaming gear requires. That said, people do buy things like treadmills, exercise bikes, and ellipticals - but still I think it'd be extremely tough to make these mass-market.
They did, e.g. Resident Evil 4. However the highest-selling games on the store are Beat Saber (by a large margin), sports games and social games. That's what people want to play with the Quest. Going wireless/low-spec was absolutely the right decision and that has been proven by the sales figures.
Best thing is you don't have to compromise. Want high specs? Use Air Link with your PC, it works really well. Sensitive to latency? Plug in an extra long USB-C cable. Granted it's not quite as frictionless as the PSVR, but tethering is a deal breaker for me personally.
> The step away from Quest Pro feels incoherent.
Agreed. As far as I know the intention was always to make money in the MR/productivity space, with the Quest 1/2 being a sort of trial run (evidenced by all the 'experiments' and new functionality they added over time). Perhaps the Quest 1/2 are doing better than they expected and now they don't have a strong direction.
And given how terrible Sony has been with software, it was not surprising that they skipped the wireless option.
I'm not sure what your point is when the PS VR2's optics are not as good as Facebook's. The PS VR2 while OLED suffers from mura and brightness issues. The amount of mura is inconsistent and can be pretty bad on some headsets. Since the panels can not get bright enough Sony is leaving the displays on longer which trades off increased brightness for more motion blur. The display is also using a pentile subpixel arrangement which is not as good as compared to a RGB stripe one. The peak pixels per degree of the optics is less than all competing devices on the market and is releasing with Fresnel optics in 2023. The PS VR2 doesn't stand out as being bleeding edge to me, unless by bleeding edge you mean the technology isn't mature enough to be ready yet to meet consumer exceptions. It just looks to be marketed as a better and updated version of the PS VR headset. No other headset is competing in the segment of the market that is powered by consoles.
I haven't tried the vr2, but everybody I've seen that tried it said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
>said it was better than the index, and much better than the quest 2.
The Quest 2's optics are much better than the index, both in PPD and in that there is less god rays. There are likely more factors than the optics being considered. Or the OLED black levels are being over valued. How much a person likes the optics is pretty subjective so people are fine to prefer whatever they want.
Any kind of roomscale type of game or shared spaces type of game is going to be a nightmare being tethered.
Something like that will be impossible altogether
https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/11iht0l/do_...
Patents.
When AR/VR Renaissance happens in like 10 years, Facebook will be to it what nokia was to the smartphone wave. That's the best case scenario, the worst case scenario is they'll milk some patents with industrial applications.
Hardware isn't there yet for cheap, good looking standalone vr. Meta investing in that was a mistake. Instead of people being in awe when experiencing something like the PS5 VR, the "meta verse" (horizon worlds) became literally a meme because of the atrocious graphics.
There are better looking quest games than horizon worlds, but still.
It's not though. It's essentially an Oculus 1 with better resolution. Mobile untethered is the only real future for VR, and Meta is solving the hard problems there. Carmack knew this, and it's why he drove Quest to be fully self contained. Things like PSVR will only ever be niche toys for gamers.
Stock prices always go up and down.
I see that you're jealous...
Given how Meta has conducted itself in recent years - particularly its attempts to "pivot" - I don't see how anyone should be surprised by the multiple rounds of disgorgement it is putting itself through.
The more we can do to detach our employment status from our feelings about ourselves (and in particular our sense of intrinsic value), therefore - despite all the negative messaging that reigns down upon us in this regard - the better.
personally, i think you'd be better off making 1/3 as much in the mid-west but who wants to leave all their family and friends?
Zuck probably thinks more of the same will buy additional good will from Wall St.
There is Apple/Microsoft, then Google/Amazon, then a ways down is Meta.
How many here in this thread bought Meta at over $320 in November 2021?
I've started to pay a bit more attention and noticed that there do seem to be a fair number of major investors buying up more shares of a down company before layoffs are announced.
I like to imagine that what we're seeing is a healthy correction and move towards more profitable, sanely run companies. But I can never recall a time in recent years where Wall Street acted in a way I would call "refreshingly sane".
They know this and could've underhired as this was always a possibility but the game rewards having the pedal to the metal when it's going up, and that's what they will do next time again.
One other thing I feel I noticed (it's probably not the case but it's one of those things you are just paranoid about) is the stock price peaking around RSU award time. At least they now tend to happen quarterly instead of yearly.
I'm guessing they may have realized these people aren't worth that much.
1. Start with a hose that shoots out money.
2. Hire a shitload of engineers, really fast.
I'm not surprised that Meta is going through another round of layoffs. The amount of engineering effort that Meta has been spending each year is just off the charts. In that kind of environment, it's easy to lose track of whether you're doing something useful.
1. Make everybody hate your main products.
2. Focus all of your innovation in a direction nobody wants.
No amount of efficiency can fix that.
Not a hard rule, not what may be happening here, but a general rule.
Which is just to say that, when thinking about whether you should want to be part of a first or second round layoff, you may need to predict the future about whether the company is actually about to enter a downward spiral, before the company leadership predicts it. And, if you are able to do that reliably, you are probably already independently wealthy from making market bets along those lines (and not in a position to be laid off from a job in the first place).
But, if that happens, I've learned from the Twitter-related threads here that it's best to volunteer and take a nice severance, as those go down to almost nothing if you wait and get caught in the later rounds of layoffs.
> Some employees expressed worry about whether they’d receive their bonuses, which are set to be distributed this month, if they lose their jobs beforehand
I would have thought, if you get a bonus, you are a valued employee and safe from layoffs? So getting a bonus despite being fired should be out of the question?
makes little-to-no sense otherwise to lay off staff en mass as the economies open up, takes ages to re-hire. look at Aviation or Hospitality industries, how they struggled to rehire to keep-up with customer demand when lockdown ended.
These are low pay, low quality of life jobs, so not comparable to a job at a major software business where you will likely earn multiples of the median income.
That's when I woke up and my wife was telling me, "Honey, Honey, you're going to be late for work."
They might have another offer lined up!