i have “being laid off” PTSD or something because every time i see a headline like this i say FUCK
More programmers for tech co-ops and open-source projects.
I mean sure, it won’t cover these people’s mortgages or probably even healthcare. That sucks, it really does. But let’s starve big tech of the expertise that they so obviously disdain, and contribute our time and energy to building better alternatives.
Yet somehow, Facebook still managed to transfer an eye watering $50bn to capitalists in 2025 through dividends and buybacks. That is the equivalent of $633,639/employee. Tech workers need to unionize!
Lay off 100% and be done with it. Fuck Zuck and his employee stooges.
I don’t understand how Facebook has so many employees. What do they do, what does their standard day look like.
If I don’t show up to my job there’s loads of tasks that wouldn’t get done but Facebook is a website, it can’t honestly need so many employees especially when they never really change anything.
I don’t mean this in a way that suggests Facebook is culturally important and good in any fashion, but Facebook does a LOT of different things and in fact is a multitude of websites and features in a trench coat. Whether they are bloated with employees or not, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to have a metric ton of employees. Also it’s not just Facebook, it’s Meta as a company so there are plenty of people working there who have nothing to do with the website.
They change the flavors in the frozen yogurt kombucha machine.
facebook is one of the backbones of the internet. that’s why.
Right that’s why I mean that what does the average Facebook employee do when they get in in the morning?
the same as any other employee at any other tech or other company. mostly emails and meetings. a few hours of actual work.
Banafa says he urges his students to use AI.
“Don’t be left behind. I mean, if you see any kind of new tools in AI, any new projects by the big name, by OpenAI or Google, go and learn it. Get certifications, take classes that would make you in the front of the line when it comes to hiring,” he said.
You can smell the misguided desperation from the person quoted through the screen.
They’re laying off 10% of the workforce and simultaneously rewarding employees who waste as many AI resources as possible, including the one employee who burned $1.4 million in tokens in one month.
It’s a contest in tech right now who can signal the hardest that they’re “AI-first,” and Zuck continues to show his lack of imagination and independent thought by lighting 10% of the company on fire to make the most smoke in a valley already choking on its own smoldering fumes.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can’t tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Yes, second-hand experience is the same, it’s a race to find the most efficient way to light money on fire.
I suppose Zuckerberg is too busy being an alien to check his own math on AI. Like the rest of the tech broligarchs, he just assumes he is right, and any pushback is just evidence that he’s “disrupting” which also reassures him he’s right.
I really don’t get this quantity-first approach. If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans. Then bet on the N most promising applications, spin them off as separate companies with premium access to your most advanced AI models and vertically integrate them into their workflows.
This would actually, sustainably achieve a foothold into these industries, disrupt and transform them long term.
Yeah, exactly. And to explain why that bottom-up value-build didn’t happen, I need to go on a tangent about information-overload hypercapitalism.
Before ChatGPT first made waves, there was an initial round of actual “visionaries” who saw AI potential and seeded it. Once there was a demonstrated cool tech demo, the hype cycle started as normal, but unlike in prior years, the story was too big to be contained by any rational limit, and every wall street and silicon valley bro had been primed with years of watching Musk, Jobs, Gates, Balmer, and Zuckerberg, and there are probably literally millions of them with aspiring billionaire god complexes. They sold themselves and each other on this being a technology that could do everything, and realized that by intensifying others’ wild plans, they would give credibility to their own.
This feedback loop became self-reinforcing, until hyperscalers were creating trillion-dollar plans that objectively were and are insane, but everyone just kind of agreed were not insane out of self-interest. That simultaneously cut off the possibility of bottom-up innovation, because now everyone’s yacht and LA mansion and third vacation island home depended on the tech doing everything short of change your baby’s diaper.
VC bought and funded the hype for a long time, but the “show me you can make money window” started shrinking from the usual years to months to weeks, and now AI startups aren’t even getting in on it anymore and even OpenAI is discontinuing products to save compute. Now, major companies are desperate to prove their hundreds of billions of dollars in spending was worth anything at all.
Which means, the rational, normal bottom-up approach you outlined can’t work anymore. There’s no time, and too much money on the line.
If you wanted to actually transform the world with tech in a way it’s not just superficial, you’d create task forces that sit together with specialist in each field of medical, construction, logistics, finance etc. give them 2 years to build prototypes and action plans.
I suspect they tried that, but specialists expect to be paid for their time, and expect their work to benefit the planet. Both seem to be hard stop deal breakers for the modern tech bro.
Yeah the thing that pro-ai zealots don’t get is that if they’re right and AI is the future, then being left behind is ultimately not up to you. The point of AI is to leave workers behind. Embracing it doesn’t do anything to save you, it just accelerates the end of your own job.
Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn’t stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It’s like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who’ve burnt more calories have probably done more work but it’s not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I’m going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I’m not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.
Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.
Incoming record earnings and board remunerations!
is there a big seven lay off tracking website ?
because i’m pretty sure they have laid off 123% in the last 13 months
There was this site making the rounds a few years ago and it still seems updated: https://layoffs.fyi/
That’s the stuff. Thank you.
Not including the cuts mentioned here, it looks like meta has reduced the number of employees by about 20% so far compared to last years highest count.
The other have seemingly kept hiring so their staff cuts have not shown in official numbers as far as I can tell. source
Couldn’t they just fire zuck, since he’s made himself redundant? I bet that’s a hell of a lot greater decrease in expenditure than 10% of the staff…
He’s majority shareholder or has some trick to never be dethroned.
No AI could replicate zuckerberg’s robotic nature.
Don’t know if they can. If I’m recalling correctly he holds enough Class B shares to retain supermajority voting power.
I mean I’m sorry but I am not going to cry of you work at Meta.
I’ve been there, (not exactly but in a similar situation) it’s just something to stick on your resume. People get massively over excited if they hear you worked at one of the big tech companies. The automatically assume that everyone who works there is a super genius. This even works for Microsoft employees.
This happens because recruiters never know anything about the industry that they’re recruiting for, so they’re just looking for easy hints and “worked at Meta” is a good, if not particularly necessarily accurate, hint that this person knows what they’re talking about.
Shouldn’t have gone all in on the Metaverse, eh, Fuckerburg?
Don’t worry, they’ve definitely hitched their horse on the right Next Big Thing this time!
He didn’t and doesn’t care.
zuckerborg thought he could download the thoughts of humans into his robot body, but he doesnt have the technology to do so.
Zuckerberg: If I burn all our fossil fuels and lay off thousands more employees, then finally AI will teach me what humans call love.
Only 10%? earnings must be increasing faster than ever.
Of course it is:
Their AI must be shit if they can only lay off 10%.
A good AI would let you lay off at least 50%
Yes. 10% is a rookie CEO number.
Zuck needs to AI harder. If they’re so sure they don’t need expert help, why not prove it?
What is the actual issue with these layoffs? Why do they always get spammed around and everyone gets mad. Big companies churn employees whats the problem? Do we need to celebrate when they hire 10% back in the next month.
In America, your life is very much dependent on your job. Your healthcare is intrinsically tied to it, we have little to no safety nets protecting you when you lose it, and yet it’s a country with little to no employee protection laws. We’re in the middle of a recession and there aren’t enough jobs for everyone. They will not be hiring 10% back next month. At best these employees with their good credentials will got other jobs in the tech sector pushing out 10,000 other tech workers. People will go hungry, people will not be able to get medicine they need to survive.
It used to be that layoffs were something companies did as an emergency last resort. Now people’s livelihoods are cast aside as casually as you would pick a new color to paint the office walls.
I hope someone asks you that next time you lose your job. It’s only 8,000 people who’s lives have been turned upsidedown, you have the emotional capacity of a CEO.
These people work at Meta, they can get another job. These arent low mobility workers.
I hope someone points that out to you next time you lose your job. Your lack of empathy is gross
you have the emotional capacity of a CEO.
If they have to hire back 10% next month, their foolishness will be even more newsworthy.
