Posted by Vaslo 20 hours ago
whilst they get efficiencies and may improve margins, the long term damage of culture and having 'yes men' will damage their business far more than a few quarters of tighter growth and margins.
This was the big one I remember:
https://layoffs.fyi/2020/05/18/uber-lays-off-3000-more-emplo...
I predict that tech companies will hire back a lot of this lost headcount over time. Although AI will keep getting better, so there's more downward pressure coming. Facebook, Amazon, and Google have had flat headcount since 2022, and this layoff will reduce FB's size back to 2021 levels.
It would be nice if someone with another big pile of money could put some of these ex-employees to work so us mid-level schlubs don't have to compete with former FOAMers (new initialism for the hyperscalers of layoffs) for 'regular' tech jobs, but it appears there are no new ideas or markets to capture.
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.
After the AI race and the large IPOs of 2026, this will be the case. The hiring pipeline will be a lot slower than 2021 and will be more controlled.
That may be what Meta is already doing. I’m afraid we are going to see something like that at play in tech for the coming few years until we get to an equilibrium. Sad and it might work.