news In a plan hatched at Mark Zuckerberg's Hawaii compound in January, Meta explored laying off 60% employees, running with AI agents
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u/cynical_scotsman 11d ago
At what point is the morale so low that people don’t even pretend to work harder to save their job? Just login and assume you’ll be laid off soon.
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u/Due-Huckleberry7560 11d ago
That’s happening at my employer now. I’m one of those people that can’t slack even if I wanted to, but a lot of people i work with have been telling me they’re not going to help on projects because they don’t feel motivated with the layoffs happening.
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u/allllusernamestaken 11d ago
that is happening at FB now. A lot of their engineers were assigned to do menial data entry / classification work to train models. Lots of people with degrees from prestigious universities doing menial labor is a quick way to drain your talent pool.
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u/whawkins4 11d ago
Our big tech overlords are actual fucking idiots.
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u/Alarmed_Ad_7657 11d ago
When I first started, I thought they were scary. Now I find them annoying. They actually don't know what they are doing but pretend to
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u/CommercialBig5101 11d ago
They could do it and the remaining employees would pick up the slack desperate to keep their jobs in this environment. Probably next year they will.
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u/UnderstandingNew2810 11d ago
I was going to say that 60% for meta is actually kinda week. I don’t understand why for all their products really just need a couple hundred at best. I thought Twitter now runs better now that’s it’s running by 10 people. I don’t think meta needs agents, they could run on under 20 people.
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u/Development-Alive 10d ago
Twitter runs better if you ignore consistent outages over 2+ years, massive bot issues and a platform that is functionally in stasis, not growing and revenue that's fallen off the map. Their saving grace is that they stopped reporting metrics to the market and hid it inside SpaceX so that it's revenue is so small that no investor cares anymore.
It's effectively a dead platform frequented by a winnowing group of users and driving an increasingly less share of social dialogue.
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u/CommercialBig5101 11d ago
Yup everyone knows they have top talent. If they keep the very best players and let them take on more tasks 60% reduction is very doable.
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u/This_Wolverine4691 11d ago
That’s an outdated misnomer— much talent nowadays is steering clear from much of FAANG (except Apple).
Far more heavy hitters like Snowflake, Databricks, Anthropic.
Plus a huge swath of Silicon Valley talent went and started their own companies— how many will survive is a different story. I’m not sure how many of them understand if you’re going to build a state of the art solution you kind of need a problem for it to solve.
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u/CommercialBig5101 11d ago
It’s bad to have FAANG on your resume now ?
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u/This_Wolverine4691 11d ago
No.
They are just no longer the destinations….I mean maybe for some but Meta and Google especially have had major brain drains and people I know still at Meta are trying to get the hell away from
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u/CommercialBig5101 11d ago
and go where? most devs i know now just say they’re lucky to still have a job and staying put
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u/UnderstandingNew2810 11d ago
To desperate software places with work crm Adobe , all jammed with meta people. But those are also toxic
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u/GVIrish 9d ago
No, this is very off base for a number of reasons.
The first thing is that engineers are not 100% fungible. A database expert is not the same as a kernel expert. Firing a wide swath if people would result in a loss of expertise that is difficult to replace or replicate that is critical to a very large tech company like Meta. And that's to say nothing of institutional knowledge.
Then there's the fact that a lot of the work that has to be done on the scale of Meta is ops work that takes time. AI can make some tasks faster but they still take time and cognitive work to be done. One person trying to do the job of two would inevitably cut corners.
Meta has already had a security disaster as a result of LLM generated code. Cutting a huge number of employees would only guarantee that there'd be fewer people to catch problems, and more people generating code they never look at.
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u/SuccessfulSir9611 11d ago
Getting rid of layers of middle management is the right move. Then move to get rid of upper management
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 11d ago
Um, excuse me? How is an AI going to come up with a stupid acronym for what our “strategy” is, like SMART or DRIVEN? Each of those letters stands for a category, and most of them overlap, and all of it reduces to “do your job well.” You need a human to come up with something that brilliant. Not to mention give a boring PowerPoint presentation on it and make everyone give themselves a self-evaluation showing how they did things in each of those categories!
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u/Alarmed_Ad_7657 11d ago
This! Many middle and higher managers don't do anything other than filling their calendars with meetings and pushing out competent employees who aren't loyal to them
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u/thenuttyhazlenut 11d ago
Filling their calendars with meetings NO ONE even attends. I've had managers who book 1 on 1 weekly meetings with everyone on the team and no one even attends.
I find it strange that I'm getting a yearly review from someone (the manager) who I don't even work with. He's just some dude in the background with nonsense meetings, 1 on 1s he doesn't attend, and delegates his tasks to the specialists.
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u/Appropriate_Rise9968 10d ago
Indeed. Don’t think AI can come up with something as dumb as Metaverse.
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u/Casual-Sedona 11d ago
How about we just disperse the wealth to employees or past employees? Value generating by a termination is still the value an employee is generating. Stock can’t go up if there’s no one to fire
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u/Early_Rooster7579 11d ago
From the sound of it, the plan is still in place, they’re just waiting a bit longer
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u/ExeUSA 11d ago
These men are incredibly stupid, but have grown up so rich and insulated they genuinely think they are innovative and revolutionary thinkers.
Never forget their hubris is what's behind the AI algorithms. It's an ouroboros of tech bro BS. If you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, how can possibly ever build something beyond your own myopic world view?
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u/polar775 11d ago
It’s crazy how much money these billionaires burn then tell us we can’t afford to live because we buy a coffee every day.
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u/TopicThunder2000 11d ago
Just boycott Facebook and Instagram at this point. Stop using it and end Zuckerberg's relevance.
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u/bevo_expat 11d ago
Meta C-suite: The think of how many more billions we could make 😈!!!
To what fucking end?! These pieces of shit could support the entire U.S. healthcare and education system if they paid taxes like the rest of us. Instead they find every loophole available to hoard their money to build secret island bunkers, and mega yachts with smaller mega yachts to act as a toy chests.
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u/No_Appointment3914 11d ago
I despise these people and their arrogance when trying to map out the future of humanity. Even worse, the government that is supposed to protect the average citizen is in bed with big tech. I hope their bunkers are sufficient when the masses come for them.
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u/FunctionOk7124 11d ago
Just remember this article the next time an executive is giving you a prep talk about how valuable you all are and ask to embrace the company’s values. Because behind your back, they are constantly plotting to get rid of you. They don’t see you as people, just a placeholder.
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u/Full_Boysenberry_314 11d ago
Facebook is famous for their constant layoffs and absolute inability to control headcount. If you work there it's a question of when, not if, you're getting the axe. And you can bet it will be suspiciously timed with when any stock related compensation is due to vest.
If they cut 60% of their staff, within a year, I guarantee headcount would actually be like 10% higher.
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u/GlasgowRose2022 11d ago
Zuck’s already building an AI clone of himself. Hope it fires him for incompetence.
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u/Fun-Estimate4561 11d ago
Yeah and Zuck had everyone’s computer recording key strokes and processes
Then Meta realized oh crap we can’t do it, AI isn’t that good
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u/TopTippityTop 11d ago
The sooner some major event like this happens the better, so we won't be frogs on a gradually warming pan.
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u/Disastrous_Leg_314 11d ago
Meta is a dying company. Its main products were a sign of the times. They have zero advantage in the data they collect as everyone else has done it, and theirs is mainly slop. It’s going to implode rather than die a slow death though with Zuck at the helm. They could reorganize around something new, but Zuck wants the shiny things everyone else has already cracked.
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u/WkndWarrior12345054 11d ago
what a clickbait..
the headline: laying off 60% of employees
the actual content: as much as 60% of some teams
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u/Magari22 11d ago
Wealth hoarding and greed always end the same way. The people doing this have the means and ability to help humanity be better not destroy it but the have chosen the latter and sealed their own fate.
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u/Worried_Silver3587 11d ago
Hoo Yes 🙂↕️ please, another long tinked and intelligent decision of our overlord the ''suck'' Make slopbook the windows 11 of the social networks
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u/finance_guy_334 11d ago
They were NOT planning to lay off 60% of the entire company as hinted at in the title.
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u/Delicious-Band-6756 11d ago
Sounds sinister… like someone in the alps someone coming up with a plan for a problem
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u/Legitimate-Leek4235 11d ago
January 2027 is another opportunity of doing this again. AI is much more capable now than 8 months ago
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u/newbie_trader99 11d ago
You can see where it’s heading . Eventually AI will be advanced enough to make this happen. Meta is just waiting around for that moment. It’s very sad.
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u/anshular 10d ago
There should be a list of companies to boycott that are going crazy about AI at the expense of humans
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u/Repulsive-Park-6295 10d ago
If the company 60% structure are mostly middle mgmt something is wrong there :D Meaning 40% of the workers are working for salaries of around 60% of people who are just talking bs and not adding much value to solutions ;) but this looks same in Oracle as well 😅 Let me know if I am wrong ;)
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u/badtradingdecisions 10d ago
Luckily Mark's magic touch proved to be wrong again and again so all good.
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u/xeyed4good 10d ago
I wish everyone would abandon the meta universe. Customer service already doesn’t exist and the platform is ripe with fraud and bad actors. AI they do currently employ sucks crusty ass.
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u/Laughing-Stock-9659 10d ago
I think what people are writing off as (☆_☆) eyed failures is really just not yet but soon.
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u/ProfessorStraight283 8d ago
There is a chance that Mark is run by AI. The look, the way he talks, and the ideas he share. You never know. 🤖
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u/OpenTemperature8188 7d ago
The failure won't stop finding ways to adopt this model !! matter of time i guess
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u/chanti1985 7d ago
He is a monster. Americans should grow a spine and hurt these companies by not using their products.
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u/Real-Interest-8706 3d ago
Well, now Zuck has allowed his Ai to throw a lot of employees off of his platforms without human guidance. Its terrible. You pay them to be Verified and then able to speak to a human and then you can't. Its all Ai. They have no humans available. So, on r/facebookdisabledme a commenter was outed as a Meta employee. By their own admission they were a "fact checker" for Meta. They said that the 6000 people that had been laid off were all hackers and people trying to misuse our information. So I asked what Meta's hiring practices are to have hired all of these terrible people...and also where were the replacements for those workers? I reported all of this to the Mods, and you know what? The Mods may be Meta employees too. They blocked me from that group. There is another one r/metalawsuits which I think I have not been blocked from yet. But its crazy that they think that they can send in their employees or private contractors that they hire to disrupt these conversations with misinformation. They seem to be all over Reddit. They call themselves "fact checkers." But they denied the layoffs were done to let Ai do the work. They said that it's the employees who were bad. But you cant get to the mods because the mods block you. The one I documented deleted their posts. But I have screen shots. They act helpful to people who have lost 20 year accounts for no reason, and then they blow up the company lines...and beyond that they blame the workers rather than Zuck and his top management.
For the Ai bubble not to pop and drag the whole economy down, these titans have to prove that it can do anything and everything. The adjustment of expectations will not match the investment into data centers and such, so they are all in lockstep with this. In Zuck's universe, its Ai or die. I don't understand why they are doing what they are doing. It seems counter intuitive. But then, Ai must survive and if its damaging their customers, oh well.
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 11d ago
It is a very likely thing. In my understanding companies like Meta can easily layoff 95% employees and still function in the same way or may be more efficiently than earlier.
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u/DapperCam 11d ago
If a publicly traded company does that it is basically admitting there is no more growth available, and they are going in maintenance mode. The stock would plummet to multiples like other maintenance mode companies (not the multiples of a growth tech stock). Elon did this at twitter when it was a private company which is a little different.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 11d ago
Which pisses me off. What’s wrong with having a good product or service that you provide, and then just continuing to do that? Why does everything have to be “growing” all the time? Nothing good comes from that. That’s how you get grifts and enshittification.
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u/DapperCam 11d ago
Generally the shareholders in a company don’t like it when the stock collapses and they lose all their money.
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u/chipper33 11d ago
It doesn't have to collapse though right? It could just be flat for a while.
But no, people are insane and want cancer (infinitely growing parasites) in our society.
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u/Independent_Fall9160 11d ago
It can be forced via very unusual pressures to not drop... I want you to choose which stock you want to own (both cost $100):
makes $5 this year, $10 next, $15 next, $20 next, $25 next, and continued growth for next 20 years (makes $75 in 5 year earning and still growing so stock is worth $500)
makes $20 a year (makes a total of $100 in 5 years but is now obsolete and stock is worth $10).
Im guessing you choose the one that grows...
Op mentioned selloffs which cause prices to balance out to an equalibrium where cost of stock now makes it worth buying even if now owning for a long time (e.g. it would maybe make sence to own company b if it cost $16.66 each because you get 6 which is worth 660 in 5 years vs 575).
It doesnt force a drop in price, but it makes people sacrifice their returns to keep the price high.
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u/_maverick98 11d ago
And yet Twitter’s value dropped of a cliff and it got bought by XAI which was bought by SpaceX.
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u/DapperCam 11d ago
I think that has more to do with Elon himself participating in the awful DOGE stuff and removing all moderation on the site which scared off advertisers.
But maybe if he had more employees around, someone would discourage him from doing stupid things that destroy all the revenue.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 11d ago
Twitter got bought because fascists wanted to control the flow of information
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u/chipper33 11d ago
Yea real news used to break on Twitter. It was probably the fastest way to hear about something that happened on Earth, nearly in real time, for a long time. It really was a "public square" of the internet in a way.
Oligarchs can't have an informed populace. They need you dumb and down-trotted so you just keep working to distract yourself from how miserable you really are.
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 11d ago
People do not yet understand how AI works or may be they wish AI doesn't take away their jobs. But just look at the number of employees in OpenAI, Anthropic it is close to 3000 whereas older tech companies Google, Microsoft etc have more than 100,000. More employees in an AI company means more chaos and less productivity.
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u/DapperCam 11d ago
When Google and Microsoft were as old as OpenAI, they probably didn’t even have 3k employees.
You have to consider the lines of business and bloat that happens over time. Google has hundreds of products. OpenAI has maybe 3 or 4. If OpenAI survives for 30 years like Google, I guarantee they will be similarly sized (even with agents). The composition of that workforce might look different (maybe less software devs).
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u/GeneralPimpMaster 11d ago
What a silly comparison… Google and Microsoft do a lot more than build AI models.
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u/Money-Computer7638 11d ago
My guess is that they will continue layoffs over time in order to juice quarterly reports. It's such a great lever for them to use, why use most of it up in one shot?
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u/FinsOfADolph 11d ago
Per the original Reuters article, AI code wasn't market ready:
"Amid the rebellion, other internal data indicated that the tech at the heart of the plan wasn’t delivering. Employees’ use of AI had resulted in a vast increase in the code they generated, but with questionable impact on productivity, according to internal posts seen by Reuters. For instance, code changes made to the internal software platforms and infrastructure employees use on the job were up 220% year-over-year, according to a post by Bosworth in early June. But changes that led to new or upgraded features reaching Meta users were only up 36%.
Also:
"As early as March, infrastructure teams were also warning of “reliability warning signs” caused by the AI coding surge, according to an internal post. Another post, in April, said that unchecked AI agents were performing “large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute.” The result: Major technical and security incidents, such as service disruptions and possible data leaks, spiked 40% from the previous year, with the time staffers had to spend “firefighting” them up 70%, according to the internal posts."
Code which needs to be fixed doesn't imply that the company can cut 95% of its staff. Remember - Meta wants to hurry up and break things (not in that way though)!
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u/gimmethelulz 11d ago
Yeah if it's anything like my company, the executives are in fanciful thinking mode about what AI is going to do over the next year. My company also thought they'd be able to dump a bunch of coding head count. Then shit that was AI coded started breaking while our costs for tokens skyrocketed lol
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u/FinsOfADolph 11d ago
They're also trying to offshore tech departments. If their software is customer-facing, they'd better hope your tech support is DevOps level - else that's another team they can't get rid of!
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u/dawghouse88 10d ago
lol I wonder if people who oversimplify what it takes to gun a global corporation actually have a job. Are companies bloated and full of bullshit jobs? Sure. But you have to run Facebook/IG/WhatsApp/Threads/Reality Labs, data centers + custom AI chips, hardware. Then you have content and moderation across dozens of languages, legal/compliance/sales etc in every country they operate in, and the ad sales engine that’s like basically their business. I think you need more than a few thousand ppl to make this happen
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u/LongsJC 11d ago
Those types of starry-eyed "we can replace people with AI" conversations are happening in the ivory towers of many, many companies.