If Zuck cares a lot about making that line continue to go up he should consider following Elmo off a cliff and fire like 2/3’s of the company.
To the moon baby!
You know what sucks about the public company/stock market economy? Nobody likes to invest in long-term cool future products. It’s why we’re still waiting on flying cars, robot butlers, and food pills, I tell you. Billions in research <> “loss” but it’s considered that in our economic system.
Oh well, I’m enjoying working on super-cool forward-looking stuff and hoping nobody’s listening to @easytarget.
Even after shedding 21,000 jobs, Meta will still have a higher headcount than it did before the pandemic. In the boom times of 2020 and 2021, it hired more than 27,000 employees.
I struggle to tell the difference between the occupants of the C-suite in most corporations and lemmings.
The herd hired a bunch of heads during the pandemic and now they’ve all decided to fire a bunch.
This is the strategry of big brains in big bidness 4D chess I’m too stupid to appreciate.
Sometimes, I really don’t get the mindset of C-suite types and people who play the stock market. Companies seem to get really hyper-focused on employee overhead when their primary expenses are elsewhere. It kind of reminds me of someone who’s a “control freak” and needs to just do something/anything even if it’s not going to contribute to a beneficial outcome.
Don’t get me wrong; dead weight is dead weight, but most people are valuable resources who can be re-tasked so you don’t lose your investment in training, their institutional knowledge, and do as little destroying of morale as possible.
It’s seen as an easy incentive goal. It’s hard to increase revenue, but it’s easy to reduce expenses by dumping people. Of course there’s a perverse logic to it — why were you over staffed before? — but the constant demand that execs make of each other to reduce labor cost is an easy path to meeting objectives and ‘earning’ your incentives.
Not sure if sarcasm…
Yeah, that is pretty twisted. I guess that’s why I’ll never move beyond middle management, lol (may also have something to do with not being galaxy brain, but thankfully several execs have given the rest of us hope by showing they’re not, either).
I dunno, for my company, which is a small tech company, employee payroll is by far our biggest expense.
Valid point - it does depend upon the industry
It generally was in my career, too. Or at least it was the biggest seemingly-manageable expense. And you do have to manage it. I just saw way too many goal-setting sessions where the labor cost target was entirely arbitrary, and consistently on the agenda.
Not sarcasm. The stock market hates long-term bets. It’s all about immediate return, or short term exponential growth. No support for big bet long-term expensive r&d that could pay off hugely down the road.
Conversely, think of any normal company these days, then fire everyone hired since 2020? That’s a pretty big deal. At least if that’s what you’re saying. I still say that’s a big cut, even if that’s only 1 year of hiring. “Constant growth,” is very much a corporate mindset. If the Metaverse really is hitting things as hard as that graph @Wallapuctus posted, that’s bad.
I guess we’ll see how they get through this year after those two announcements. Maybe it’s trimming the fat, or maybe just a sign of things to come.
Unless it takes off, I will never understand the fascination with ‘metaverse’ crap. Hasn’t Second Life done that for ~ 20 years and it never really caught on?
It will never take off. Take off, eh.
Honestly, it seems inevitable that it will take off at some point and some company will be mega-huge because of it. The question is when and how, not if.
Cooo, loo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coo, coooo!
Big tech invests over a hundreds billion in R+D every year, and a substantial slice of this is medium or long term work.
Then where’s my flying car, dammit! All I’m getting for that investment is spyware.
You really, really don’t want flying cars.