I'm not sure why any company, as large as these, gives two hoots about stories like these. Published one day for clicks, forgotten the next. Absolutely zero reputation damage.
I think having some top talent moving to non Silicon Valley companies is a good thing. Computer science and engineering is a driver for our economy and I like the idea of making companies and our infrastructure as strong and as robust as we can.
As much as I appreciate different cultures in different countries around the world and I wish all people peace and a comfortable life spurred by global trade, I would like to see all countries have more robustness and resilience in the face of occasional supply chain problems, world level political strife, etc.
It’s interesting the difference in trajectory between Facebook and Google right now and the impact of being founder led.
Zuckerberg made a weird bet on metaverse… but also drove a real change in staffing levels unlike Google who has sat absolutely still at the worst time.
Short term, Facebook engineers are more worried about their jobs. Long term, it’s gotta be worse for Google who is resisting change while talking up a buzzword storm.
Not sure it really makes a difference. I guess it’s part of the business cycle to over-hire and over-fire, rinse, and repeat. But I think if a CEO’s best accomplishment is laying off a bunch of workers, that’s a pretty poor endorsement.
Neither company has meaningfully changed or reinvented their product in the last decade. Still they’re making money hand over fist. In many ways these companies succeed despite their leadership’s best intentions, rather than because of them.
> In an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post, Meta’s head of human resources, Lori Goler, wrote Tuesday evening that the company will begin notifying employees on its technical teams whose jobs are being cut.
> Divisions that will face cuts include teams working on Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and the virtual-reality division Reality Labs among others, according to Goler. She advised some employees to not go into the office if it wasn’t critical for their role, according to the memo.
> ...
> The company is expected to lay off what probably will be thousands of highly skilled employees — such as engineers and other technical staffers — who help build the company’s products, according to people familiar with the matter. The cuts are a rare moment of vulnerability for engineers at Meta who have long enjoyed job security, high salaries, autonomy and freedom to work on their desired projects, amid stiff competition for talent in Silicon Valley.
> Divisions that will face cuts include teams working on Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and the virtual reality division Reality Labs among others
>I am laughing up my sleeve here and wondering if they will have any takers.
Considering the number of huge finance firms who use Twitter for sentiment analysis, they will absolutely have takers, since it's still cheaper than paying someone to write a scraper.
E.g. one idea would be to make some kind of browser extension that scrapes tweets when the user loads a page from Twitter.
You could make it free by offering users some kind of feature in exchange (post tweets later or some kind of analytics or something). You could make it cheaper than paying for the Twitter API by paying users to install the extension (e.g. you could give out 4,200 $10 Amazon gift cards a month for the price of the Twitter API).
You could also use one of those networks that let you use people's home IP's if it's IP rate-limited.
Less ethically, you could try to pay an owner of an already-popular browser extension to bundle in a Twitter scraper. I don't know what that costs, but at $42k/month for the real API, you could probably pay a pretty penny and have it still be cheaper.
