People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.
It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
They literally went on a hiring binge from 2020-2021, so... in my opinion, yes. Sure there's bleak outlook, but you have no idea how many people I know from different companies who jumped ship from some 2nd-3rd tier co to work for the big five or Zoom-like start up during COVID.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
>>35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience.
Indian here and can confirm.
This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India.
Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars.
Software on the other does demand training on bleeding edge tech almost every few months. We also tend to put lot of smart work[mathematically inclined work] than doctors.
> Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors.
My uncle is one of the leading lung specialists in the country. When Covid happened, his expertise was crucial in setting up the processes and best practices for dealing with everything from patient isolation to treatment protocols.
It was because of hundreds of doctors like him that literally millions of lived were saved.
do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
>>do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
All due respects to your uncle and his life's work. But I was there during peak COVID in hospitals all round. My dad was a post operative patient. Doctors had totally vanished from the scene. They had quite literally dumped all the work on junior nurses, not even the senior ones. I even got abused by one doctor for just asking how my dad was doing, and this on a call, not even a face to face appointment.
Right after this mess, where nurses didn't have a remote clue how to deal with complicated cases and we were making it up on guess work, because the 'experts' were too high sitting on their Ivory towers to even be bothered when patients were dropping dead like flies. What followed next was the worst sort of testing and consultation bills. I have seen people cry outside the gates and sitting on chairs. Much to the heartlessness and carelessness of these people.
There's a reason why so many people just don't out right respect or appreciate doctors in India. Most doctors have a very exaggerated sense of self worth and capabilities. They think they are gods and must treated as such because they think their academic training is long and expensive. For this very reason they think they have a right to indulge in price gouging. They also harbour deep resentment towards professions like engineering where there is more intellectual heavylifting work involved than their own profession will ever arrive at.
In all most doctors are just angry with their own choices for opting into medicine, they resent people richer than them. They resent professions better than them. Its a concentration point for sadist people, who go to any extent to humiliate others and indulge in price gouging.
Do you think your uncle’s expertise is worth more than the developers in Taiwan who set up the contract tracing system that prevented tens of millions of people from getting COVID?
After moving to US they still resent software people. It's not just money. They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people[due to their degree requiring long and expensive academic training] compared to engineers in general. Which isn't true.
And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel insecure that there are bigger things which they could have been a part of, and feel they kind of (bad)-lucked into studying medicine[which happens to be a expensive academic course to finish, and also take more time].
I once showed a relative who is also a doctor using logic programming to solve puzzles like Sudoku etc. He kind of expressed disappointment he was stuck in a profession that doesn't allow this sort of everyday involvement in solving problems, or building things. The money part just adds to their resentment.
I reckon a part of this is the relatively relaxed learning curve to coding (not software engineering). As someone who taught himself how to code last year, I can tell you that it wasn’t particularly challenging to put together a product that the average lay person would call “software/app”. So much of the work has been abstracted away by actual engineers.
I can imagine how someone who doesn’t understand the complexity involved in scaling software or managing millions of users would think of coding as “easy money”.
Its certainly much easier to make money quickly - you can go from a complete newbie to a fairly well paid frontend dev in under 2 years. A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
If the deal is making money there are better ways than even coding, you better off working a job in Gulf, or learning something like stock trading well. Coding just happens to be placeholder for a range of jobs that pay well currently.
>>A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
MBBS is just a basic diploma. In the first 50% academic time of MBBS they just teach you how a healthy body works, because often the biggest confusion in treating a patient is to know what's is normal and what is a disease. This is followed by a assorted set of courses which touch upon basic disease-cure scenarios. And some small introduction to chemicals and their side effects on biology.
These people basically spend something like 7 years just to get here. MD is a different deal in India. Because the academics aren't really all that great and its just a detailed introduction into some organ speciality for just 2 years. Most people even here just go by established clinical practices in hospitals(a.k.a cya work)
In all the actual training is just 3 years. Its not an engineers fault that their profession is just trivia, and if-else scenarios for the most most part. This is where the resentment part comes in. Most engineers, or atleast the serious ones which make good salaries have gone too far both intellectually and in productivity in those 10 years.
The vast majority of doctors in India work in their own private clinics earning little money, treating small time fevers and stomach aches because that is the maximum you can do with that kind of training. You will be shocked just how far behind they are generally in the knowledge. Most will struggle to give you basic fitness and nutrition advice.
> They tend to imagine themselves as more intellectually capable people
Are they aware of, or perpetuate the stereotype of the CS/IT student who memorizes braindumps to pass certification exams or post simple homework questions online or on StackOverflow, asking others to do the work for them?
As an aside, I work with a lot of engineers/PhD researcher types who think they are the smartest, nothing could ever be their fault, their systems etc are fine and it must be something simple that some other idiot messed up...
Those are not the type of engineers they resent either.
They resent literally the top engineers. Because they think they did better in entrance exams. Only geniuses are supposed to be doctors, and they also paid more fees and spent more time studying. So why aren't they making more money than those engineers?
The funny part is that most of the dumbass crypto initiatives are largely in profit (mostly by dumping their tokens on retail investors) while the hyped unicorn startups can’t make a dime in profit.
On that issue I've never seen a LinkedIn message from a Tiktok recruiter, or heard messages about mass hiring. Anyone know if they operating on a much lower staff count?
Isn't it made in China? (edit: I know very little about social networks outside of twitter and finding security holes everywhere in FB back in the day because their engineering was pretty poor).
> There are about 1,000 engineers currently working for TikTok outside of China, nearly half of them based in Mountain View, California.
> “To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.
Because the timing is too early they are having to venture into mismatched products to support the endeavour, but when you stop to look at the longer timeline it is quite clear how it fits very well.
Similarly, it is safe to say that Netflix always knew it wanted to be a streaming service but had to mail DVDs until the timing was right in order to get there. Facebook is going through their metaphorical DVD mailing phase. Just another day in the life of business.
I'm not entirely convinced they can get to where they eventually want to go, but that's another story for another day.
Both the other commenters make good points. Meta is uniquely positioned to build the first metaverse. It may not be the only metaverse and it may not come out on top in the end but it will likely prove a lot of the technology and patterns that will continue to be used. That’s why I don’t think they’re mismatched, you might be right about them being too early. They’ll have to build a lot of it themselves and try to stay competitive in the market at the same time. Difficult, but other companies have done this. They’re off to a good start as well since their hardware currently dominates the market.
Not to disagree at all with the broader point you're making but their last quarterly release says their headcount is like 83k. That roughly agrees with the original article which says 15% is 12k.
This exactly. Rather than falling for the headlines which many have done, the pandemic has shifted roles from the office to remote at $100K+ salaries and cheap money allowing this to be possible; but very unsustainably.
Now you have thousands of VC inflated startups and tech companies (including FAANMG) starting to do layoffs due to the market going the other direction. The majority of FAANMG companies including Meta will still be around regardless of the headlines where as the tens of thousands unprofitable VC-funded startups will realize that they need to be profitable 'now' to be able to survive for another decade or get another round of funding.
The tech 'hiring binge' of 2020 was going to go the other way soon enough. Even unsuprisingly.
In effect this is the end of covid season layoff. Peloton wasn't the only company who made investment mistakes during covid, just very visible. Many big companies greatly over hired during the same period. Now they need to correct course.
I’d be hesitant to call this an investment mistake. It was a gamble that covid would permanently change tech consumption habits and that would create new opportunities for big tech. So they hired people for those new unforeseen opportunities. maybe some of them didn’t pan out. Maybe others did but no longer need as many employees. Either way, hiring a bunch of people just to lay them off was clearly at least an option if not the main plan.
Laying off 15% of your staff is huge. If it's driven by a hire-and-fire approach, then that's even worse, because that shows Meta can't manage their way out of a paper bag.
[0] Facebook had a recruiting crisis in 2021: https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...
[1] Facebook aimed to hire 10K Europeans for metaverse in 2021: https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-plans-hire-10000...
People underestimate just how much COVID and the rapid work-from-home shift distorted the economy. Everyone suddenly became cloud-first overnight and needed man power to make it happen.