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It's #3 - it's always #3.

All of these tech companies (with perhaps the notable exception of Apple) massively overhired during the pandemic, and that overhiring was on top of a decade+ of the ZIRP era. So there are 2 main drivers of these layoffs:

1. Correcting pandemic overhiring

2. In the ~2010-2022 timeframe, tech companies poured all this money into speculative bets that never went anywhere, at least from a profit perspective (think Amazon's Alexa devices division, Google Stadia, and perhaps most famously the Metaverse itself). All those diversions are now toast, and they employed a ton of people. The only speculative bet that is now "allowed" is AI, which is one reason why I giggle whenever I hear people trying to defend their companies or projects by adding "AI" somewhere in the name.

So perhaps my second point is similar to your #2, but I think the important difference is that the end of the ZIRP era would have caused companies to kill these inherently unprofitable projects even if AI never came on the scene.

1 is certainly happening in agency delivery work.

Most language translations and asset creations for CMSs are now AI driven.

In big corps delivery teams were already being reduced by relying in LEGO building with SaaS, iPaaS and serverless/microservices (aka MACH architecture), now with agents, the integrations teams get further reduced into writing the tools/skills modules instead.

Meta basically "pivoted."

The core business is still meta ads, but Zuck had decided they needed big investment into a new business for future-proofing, growth or whatnot.

That business was initially the meta stuff. Now it is Ai. That's a pivot.

Why is #1 hypothetical?

If 1 employee can do the work of 3 now but Meta's TAM can't grow 300%, then they can cut some employees.

In other words, worker productivity might be higher than what the ad business can grow into, so Meta can safely cut cost and still hit their growth targets.

Edit: I should be clear that I think #1 has been achieved for software development.

4. When the whole thing implodes, because at that point you need to keep the balance sheet as green as possible.

They're not really in trouble, they're still printing money. And I didn't know why they would need an excuse besides "this will help us print slightly more money" which everybody already knows.

My gut feel was that you can't be right, but it looks like you are: cutting 8000 employees * $500k/year total cost to company (rough but useful ballpark figure) is "only" $4B.

Cross-checking against actual expenditure, Meta spent $118B total last year, with the second largest component of total spending being stock comp at $42B, of which vast slabs went to the top leadership that's presumably also not getting fired.

It’s slightly more nuanced than layoffs = capex. You’re right, they don’t. That said, they do create free cash flow, which the market uses as one important input into the value of a given stock. Moving FCF positively when capex spending is moving it the other way is the real financial accounting move that is happening here.

salaries are opex, data centers are capex, you can't compare them in the same timeframe.

4B over 5 years is 20B, which is significant.

I think any company that is seen to reduce capex right now is going to be the Bear Sterns of this cycle

Doing slightly less than 150b looks bad to investors. Or at least it looks small.

Imagine the productivity gains if they just spent $150B on booze and cake for employees!

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.

It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.

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.

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

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!”

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.

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...

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...

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

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

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

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.

Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.

Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.

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.

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.

Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.

The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?

It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.

“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”

> A certain large company

Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.

...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.

They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:

There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

So what does it mean, concretely? What repercussions will he personally suffer?

Is he going to pay the severances out of pocket? Is he going to personally help those employees get back on their feet? Is he going to make sure their families are ok? Is he stepping down?

What does it look like besides cheap talk from a cheap and clueless leader?

The guy is just another mediocrity who tripped into a huge pile of money and now it’s everyone’s problem while he acts as a giant baby.

Things have changed. I worked with a very senior and professional recruiter at FB during that time. While things didn't work out then, someone else reached maybe a year and a half ago for a fairly similar role -- massive difference, strictly a disposable drone style process and barely a conversation. I chose to not even start the process.

A sample size of one but many anecdotes together can make a trend.

2020/2021 might as well be ancient history in tech terms. Your experience does not reflect the current status quo at all.

I had an interview in 2024 and my interviewer was CLEARLY doing other stuff during the interview. So a very different experience.

My experience as well, both at Google and Meta. Very positive and well-organized. I also got feedback from the recruiter on each interviews.

You had interviews scheduled longer than 45 minutes?

If it was the exuberant period of overhiring from around that time, then you're talking about a different company who interviewed you back then

I’ve never worked at big tech but the usual interview process I’ve seen is one initial phone call to check both sides are on the same page and it’s worth scheduling an interview. Then a technical interview, sometimes a take home task, then a non technical interview with management. There’s no reason you need longer than that.

What does a pilot or doctor or cop do in terms of interviews, take homes etc.?

inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.

Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "central banks got inflation so wrong the last time"? You mean Covid or 2008?

Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?

Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time!

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Would you rather them never hire them in the first place?

It does seem like a lot of people would prefer this, they way they react to every layoff announcement.

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.

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.

That does tend to be the more experienced management decision among firms who survived through the dot-com bubble.

found the ceo

With that kind of mindset… man, so sorry for you

> 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.

Correction, the layoffs will be followed by massive re-hiring overseas in 6 to 18 months.

The domestic jobs aren't coming back.

Not buying it personally, I think this is the start of a slow unwinding.

AI won't replace everybody overnight, but it'll make 10% layoffs year after year a real possibility.

Either people are simply made redundant because bots in the hand of a bot wrangler can do much of their work, or people are relatively less efficient than their peers because they refuse to adapt to a world where AI is a force multiplier.

but why rehire at all? if AI is even half as competent as they say it is, then they don't need all those employees. Afterall, some of the latest models are passing the GDPW benchmark with flying colors. wouldn't it make sense to just keep laying off more and more and replacing it all with AI?

I think there's a big disconnect between how competent the AI crowd says it is vs reality.

Do people in the US enjoy that kind of bullshit? I'm not saying we have to go back to the days when people worked for a company all their life. But this constant chaos, fear and looking at job offers can't be good for morale.

It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.

Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?

Given facebook/Zuckerberg’s history it’s tough to give them the benefit of the doubt. From day one it’s been ruthless, harmful ambitions and business practices. It is a bad company that does bad things.

They also burn capital at insane rates on projects nobody wants then fire everybody involved (see: the metaverse, the very reason they rebranded to that dumb name)

meta has laid off 34,800 people in just the large scale rounds we know about in the past 5 years.

they're growing at high teens % a year and have record profits and a centi-billionaire has complete control. whats going on there is gross, even compared to the finance world of yearly culling of the bottom few % its gross.

There are a few US companies that crossed beyond the carelessness of us work culture to flat out hostile and metas one of them.

I agree. A lot of people have an unspoken assumption that there are unlimited amounts of positive EV investments for any given company to make. This also underpins the extremely common idea that dividends and buybacks are always happening at a direct cost to growth and R&D.

Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook has been slowing down for a while. Everything else is neutral, a net loss, or not very significant.

They are maximizing profits this quarter at the expense of profits every future quarter.

That's not at all the point of a company's existence. That's what a few companies do, for a short time, if they think they have no place to go but down.

That said, IMO they are right...

This makes a good point. A lot of people think that big tech has a duty to provide jobs to smart, ambitious people.

They assume that we live in some kind of socialist system. They feel like it's a kind of deal; they accept all the regulations, monopolies bureaucratic bullshit and, in return, the corporate monopolies pay them to keep quiet and stay out of politics.

I understand the sentiment but what's horrible about this mindset is that these people think it's OK to support corrupt political power to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone who doesn't work for a big corporate monopoly. They think that all the smart people work for big tech and everyone else is trash... And they set the criteria for entry into the big tech monopoly club (I.e. screenings and interviews). But the irony is that they're trash! Their pseudo-socialist view of the word is crooked.

The reason I support UBI is because I don't see a meaningful difference between ambitious people and random people. Every generation from boomers onwards are spoiled brats. Mostly monetizing and gatekeeping the ingenuity and labor of past generations by playing dumb social games. The whole system doesn't make sense. As meritocracy declines, the rewards increase and false narratives fill the gaps... They'll have you believe that the person who painted Facebook HQ's walls contributed more to society than the guy who actually invented the paint...

Laying off 10% of your workforce at a company this size means someone high up has been making some pretty significant mistakes.

So the answer is, when an executive is held accountable for disrupting this many people's lives. When they claw back bonuses they have probably received for hitting or setting those previous hiring targets.

If the richest people in the world are chronically unhappy then that indicates that excess wealth does not bring happiness.

It's unreal what the Quest headsets can do. Go look up "questnav." Robots on holonomic drivetrains moving at 20 ft/s while strafing and spinning, maintaining perfect pose tracking using nothing but a Quest 3S strapped into a 3D printed bracket. And with basically zero latency. Oh, programmed by high schoolers btw. It's astonishing.

... the just around the corner syndrome. And when new quite capable model comes, prices triple in 6 months like with chatgpt 5.5 now and they are still losing on it. Soon, hiring that junior will be cheaper than monthly subscription. I am struggling to imagine ie some big bank willing to invest just for this say 50 millions a month.

Then within few years, when the amount of bugs in quickly produced software skyrockets and it will be extremely hard to debug that code by hand, market will change again. These llms will find their solid place but not at current projection/investment wishful thinking. And definitely not for software that is continuously developed, changed and fixed for decades (which is default for most corporate apps, be them internal or vendor ones).

Punchy FTW

From what I can tell, its more about cashflow - basically companies need to spend most of their revenue or be taxed on it - and you can buy only so many servers.

Now capital can flow towards AI - I'm sure the reason why engineers at Boeing or GM don't make the same money as software devs do is that their industries are otherwise capital intensive, among other things.

The scariest thing is that people with this amount of responsibility was caught by surprise.

in theory yes, but all the money is going into AI or AI-adjacent startups that no one would actually build a product that solves problems if it doesn't incorporate AI in it.

The richer a country becomes the more expensive everything gets.

The average house price in my country is now 400k eurodollars. And banks keep giving out loans.

As the article touches on, it's not just about what happened in 2020, but why it hasn't rebounded. It's been long enough we can't use 2020 as an excuse.

That’s just what people with money tell the people without money to stop them from rioting. We have research that suggests that money indeed does buy happiness.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

There are exceptions of course. Some people are just predisposed to being unhappy no matter the circumstances, but generally speaking more money directly correlates to increased life contentment.

And it only takes an ounce more wisdom to recall this phrase: "Money can't buy happiness, but it helps."

Maybe not, but poverty definitely causes unhappiness

Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.

Not if you pop in to the HN thread for that article, funnily enough.

It sure as shit buys relief from lots of sources of stress (even little ones like "having, non-optionally, to track how many dollars of goods are in your shopping cart at the grocery store" or "having to check how much money's in the account before you start pumping gas") and credible safety from various very-real threats (e.g. homelessness, not being able to afford important medical treatment). Like, it's extremely good at that.

It buys actual non-hypothetical liberty, as in greater choice to do what you like with your time and your self. It relieves one from unpleasant but necessary tasks (by paying someone else to do them).

Maybe but this happiness chart seems to reflect economic recessions (including some unofficial ones)

The thing is that Americans don’t have much money. A few billion and millionaires skew the numbers horribly.

The average American ain’t doing very well by OECD standards… literally bottom of the ladder.

And little money buys even less. What’s your point?

Not really the standard line anymore. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-money-buy-h...

My theory is that Zuck has profound imposter syndrome due to the public knowledge that his joke of a side project in college went uber-viral and he has had to play CEO dress-up ever since. He has been desperate to prove that he actually has deep technological insight with his big bets on wearables and the metaverse and AI, but the truth is that his entire dynasty is built on people's need to snoop on pictures of their crushes and their exes. I think the company has actually done some impressive things with staying alive via acquisition as facebook has rotted, but he wants to be known as a tech genius, not an M&A suit.

> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties, probably with the aim of bringing them ‘closer’?

Sort of.

Wikipedia @ 2:

> Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".

Britannica:

> Despite its brief tenure, 450 people (who voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004.

> They pretty much put it on the label; it’s not called personality book.

Wikipedia @ 3:

> A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities.

Wikipedia @ 2:

> Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."

[1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Facebook

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book

I think the “face book” was used prior to the name of the company for what you would call a college student directory. Like a yearbook.

> Wasn’t the original intention behind facebook to accumulate a directory of hotties

Maybe so, but have you seen Zuck's wife? I'm pretty sure he could find someone hotter to date if he cared to. There must be armies of gold-diggers after him. And yet he seems happy with his imo rather plain looking wife. Well done them both!

This really should be a basic concept every human needs to understand. Public communication in 99% of cases is fabricated to please the masses, but usually hides a lot of the actual intentions of the communicating party. Whether it be advertisers, politicians, CEOs, certain news channels and whatnot. You can not trust public speeches without digging for some info yourself.

What did you think of G+? I never understood it, but what would you have done now differently than Google with G+ (using your hindsight and battle scars)?

You may need to sit down for this, but when Yahoo launched, TCL was 6 years old, Perl was 7, and Erlang was 8. Today, Go is 14, Swift is 12, and Rust is 11.

You could work in Erlang, PHP, and C++ at Meta ;)

I'm still partial to Tcl from years in EDA - sign me up..

Just use lisp.

Haskell!

Hey, erlang is brilliant

Given that the definition of "AGI" is meaningless, my definition of "AGI" is what it is been used for right now, rather than what any of these CEOs are promising:

It means layoffs with AI, with the smokescreen of "abundance".

I disagree. While their core products have stayed similar, they keep getting better at ads after Apple's privacy changes in 2021 hurt their efficiency. And Instagram has changed quite a bit, with reels growing to half of total IG usage. (Of course these are dystopian products but I'm just trying to be objective here).

To me a company at FB's scale is inevitably going to be optimizing around the margins. I mean you could argue any of Google, Amazon, FB, have had basically the same cash cows for 10+ years now.