Meta slashes staff stock awards as group embarks on AI spending drive
61 comments
·February 23, 2025MagicMoonlight
At this point we need to accept that zuck has no talent. He simply stole someone’s amazing idea and got lucky. Every single idea he has come up with since has been a tragic failure.
nostromo
> The group reduced its annual distribution of stock options by about 10 per cent for most of its staff
I thought the reduction would be much bigger given the headline.
mrayycombi
The AI drive was so successful they were able to slash staff, cut stock awards for remaining staff, and find money left over for executive bonuses. AI is truly amazing.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-introduces-200-exec-bonus-sc...
gmerc
[AI CHRO](https://ai-chro.org) strikes again. I got an instant Fire Next Half rating on the assessment portal.
lordofgibbons
Meta recruiters keep reaching to wanting me to run the gauntlet - that is their interview process.
Every time they email me, I'm tempted to ask why would I join Meta where I'll have to pour all of my energy and emotions 50-60hrs per week only to be laid off... for absolutely no reason. And Meta/Zuck have recently been going around saying the "layoffs are based on performance". So being laid off from Meta makes you a toxic candidate for any potential new role. Who would want to hire a slacker who was fired from Meta??
> The company had raised its quarterly dividend by 5 per cent last week to just over 52 cents, in another boost for investors.
Meta doesn't HAVE TO make this 10% employee pay cut for its infra buildout. Zuck is just trying to "establish dominance" in the age old battle of Capital vs Labor.
Edit:
This might seem conspiratorial, but we know practically all tech CEOs are in multiple group chats with each other. They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries. It's not like they haven't been caught doing this in the past.
blinded
I got to the end, got positive feedback and wording that said they wanted to move forward. Then the recruiter I was working with was let go in the 2023 layoffs. I tried reaching out but got nothing back. Pretty soured over the whole thing.
seanmcdirmid
Meta has always been hit or miss on recruitment. I don’t see much value in engaging with their recruiters at all given how flaky they are, it might be better to just go with an internal recommendation.
rtpg
do internal recommendations not end up in the same pipeline (+/- one step)? Or is it that with internal recommendations you at least have someone on the inside following up?
MarcelOlsz
That's brutal. I had a recruiter get both dates wrong for both stages of an interview process at a company I really wanted to join.
dcow
Not that I don’t believe you, but how does that even happen?! And if it was truly recruiter error, wouldn’t any reasonable hiring manager get it sorted and reschedule?
op00to
I go so far as to immediately say no to any candidates who have Meta in their history. Every meta person I’ve interviewed has been an asshole in one way or another, and not a fit for my team.
jameskraus
Meta, like many big tech companies, has some fantastic engineers, some lousy ones, and some in between. At this point I don’t pay too much attention to where someone worked previously, and try to get to know candidates individually. They’re all just different people, like you and me!
jedberg
Generally a bad practice to automatically say no based on a single entry on a resume, no matter what that entry is. If Meta was their first and only job, maybe you could justify that view.
But for example, I've had a few exceptional coworkers from Netflix go to Meta. In part because they got to work on exactly what they wanted with nearly unlimited resources, and in part because they got paid fat bank to do it.
Doesn't make them bad people. Would gladly work with them again at any time.
muglug
Not in my experience.
I've helped hire/onboard a couple of really great former Meta engineers, and currently collaborate with a bunch of great engineers at Meta.
anon84873628
So what else are you prejudiced about?
threatofrain
Shouldn't every layoff have some element of performance? If you're asked to downsize your team, why wouldn't you think about your lowest performer first? Now that doesn't mean the CEO should be shitting on his employees in public like Elon does, but CEO discretion doesn't change the natural incentive to keep your best people.
bsjxh7
They are all on auto pilot. And they dont know how to disengage it. Its really scary being around these people.
Source: worked for 2 years on exec staff of large corp CEO. Had to leave cuz its really out of control heading no where. The main goal is survival. Thats it.
wolfcola
they’ve been caught doing it before, but now there isn’t a federal government who will prosecute them.
blululu
Probably true going forward. Though the previous administration had two years to investigate the quarter million job losses that happened under its watch. It does not look like either party is particularly interested in acting on this issue.
DeathArrow
>So, I do have to wonder how much of the recent tech layoffs and pay cuts have been a coordinated action amongst tech CEOs to drive down salaries.
Aren't cartels against the law?
mrayycombi
Exactly. Slash staff, tweak job titles and descriptions, hire them back at lower wages and/or as contractors.
Go Zuck.
delusional
> They clearly so say if you listen to podcasts like "All In".
This is super tangential to this post, but All In is a wild podcast. While one guy is re-discovering the purpose and mechanism of taxes, some other guy is claiming that it's good actually that the entire government now has to justify itself, to him, from first principles. All to a cheering crowd of fans who think these guys are obviously the smartest guys alive.
It's an insane look into a completely stupid world.
whoknowsidont
You've pretty much hit the crux of the entire problem in this one comment.
Some decidedly very dumb people who have a lot of confidence and a very large sum of money are basically controlling the zeitgeist both politically and culturally and it is not looking pretty.
It was frustrating before, then scary, now I think a lot of us are thinking about more material actions we can take to stop this non-sense.
pram
A friend of mine went through the whole Meta layoff grinder last year. Guy is a Caltech PhD, literally any company would be lucky to have his brain available. It's surreal to me.
The narrative about there not being enough "talent" available in the US is such a hilarious, brazen lie. I'm disgusted at the entire industry. SWEs are negative on Amazon, Meta, etc but IMO nowhere near close to hating them enough.
johnnyanmac
They'll say whatever they need to to make the number go up, as if they didn't calculate all of this beforehand and then let people go when they saw the economy go down. Ignore the narrative.
Companies just want an excuse to save money without making wall street panic, as well as the usual cost cutting measures they've done for decades. They feel they captured the market so they aren't spending money keeping people away from competitors (and ofc startup funding is much worse too. No one to rise up). These layoffs are not a reflection of anyone's abilities as engineers.
moron4hire
Given that these CEOs are all colluding in some form all the time, do you think it's still possible to start a company as an outsider and make it a big thing without getting eaten up by them, or is that just dead in the water?
evbogue
Could be a sign that the company is failing
ulfw
Most despicable of companies. Keeps laying off people and destroying lifelihoods in the process, cutting stock awards for others but executives get their bonuses increased by a cool 160%
smaili
"We'll be paying you less so you can help us replace you"
johnnyanmac
indeed. But I guess people will ride the wave in automating their career away as long as they get theirs. I can only imagine how Gen Alpha is going to experience this workforce.
klodolph
I always thought of automating my career away as, you know, a success story. Your solutions and knowledge become code, which lets the next generation build on top.
johnnyanmac
I initially would agree. Automate the tedious stuff and then you or the next generation builds more tech on that. That's how it worked for some 3-4 generations in tech.
The unfortunate part here is that there may not be a next generation with the way the incentive structures are setup. If there is, I highly, highly doubt any of Gen Alpha will enjoy the compensation that SWE's in the 00's and 10's did. We're aiming to be the next EE's in terms of career trajectory. And we certainly don't have the safety nets needed for a post-jobs world as of now.
null
https://archive.is/OFC3C