They never learned, donāt fix what wasnāt broken.
Meta is heavily investing in the metaverse, which generally refers to a yet-to-be developed digital world that can be accessed by virtual reality and augmented reality headsets. This hefty bet has cost Meta $9.4 billion so far in 2022, and the company anticipates that losses āwill grow significantly year-over-year.ā
I never understood Zuckās obsession with the Metaverse.
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He saw The Matrix one too many times.
In all fairness, FB has been losing active users for a while. I got off that platform years ago. I am not sure how much of their revenue comes from WhatsApp, but those advertising dollars have been dwindling. They created a device, the Meta Portal (https://www.meta.com/portal/), hoping that folks would drink the Zuck Kool-aid. I do not know a single person who owns one.
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This week I learned that the entire US tech sector is 2% of the labor force.
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Meta had limited options, they had to do something to maintain growth since public companies canāt just stop growing. As you note, their existing products were basically maxed out re growth. Metaverse seems like a bad call but they had to do something.
As for number of employees, I wonder how many of those are overseas and how many are support staff versus highly paid people in America. Meta is a huge operation, they need a significant regulatory staff in Brussels plus most major Non-EU Capitals. They need people who can speak the language of each major country they operate in. Sure they are a tech company but they are still a huge multinational organization. At some point it becomes difficult to avoid this sort of employment bloat.
How many employees do you really need to make sure people can send cat videos and spicy memes to each other?
Technology doesnāt just work. It requires constant monitoring, fixes etcā¦ That is why Alphabet has 140k employees.
That said, I am curious of the breakdown of those 87k employees. How many are tech side and how many are support/legal/regulatory/HR etcā¦
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Maybe restaurants can now hire more people. 
With unemployment at record lowsā¦ there probably needs to be some level setting.
The question is, how does this affect WFH?
During The Great Resignation, there were many complaints about finding quality people so maybe hiring practices were relaxed just to get bodies in positions and now that revenues/expenses has tightened up, this is showing up on the productivity costs (or could it be the WFH people?).
I know some people who got Elonād off of Twitterā¦ but they donāt seem to be panicking about finding their next gig (and they are not tech people).
Near where I live, a huge office campus project is going up and I wonder who is going to fill those spaces.
I really think that smart, quality talent will prefer some from of WFH (as will the lazy groupā¦ but good management should be able to root that out).
For every company that contracts out locally or off-shoreā¦ why do they think they canāt give their own EEs the same āremoteā working environment?
+1. To add to your comment, how many of these employees came from the acquisition of Whatsapp, TikTok, and Oculus.
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TikTok still on its own right? Tried to Wiki/Google and I couldnāt find anything about any acquisition.
Instead of TikTok, I meant to say Instagram. My bad.
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From the interwebs, top 5 companies owned by Meta: Top 5 Companies Owned by Facebook (Meta).
They are owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company
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Yeahā¦ but I just remember some hoopla where US was forcing them to sell to Microsoft and it never happened.
Some reading told me that ByteDance moved all their data servers to US-based Oracle to ease the security concerns of the Chinese government having access to all of our cat videos.
Itās crazy how tech/social media movesā¦ GeoCities/MySpace/Facebook/Instagramā¦ Vine/TikTokā¦ YouTube to Googleā¦ Twitter to Elonā¦ etc etc.
Canāt even keep track of who owns who now.
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Just finishing an interesting podcast on that
Iām also rewatching Silicon Valley, which is in many ways contemporary still but also a snapshot in time.
Iāve been around it since BBSes/MUDs/Gopher/WAIS, any of the companies that reach a reasonable user base or revenue are swallowed by the business cycle. The only constant seems to be: if you arenāt paying, you are the product ā and someone is monetizing your usage.
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Happy not to be. I have almost a zero social media footprintā¦ not even on LinkedInā¦ which probably limits my professional opportunities but Iām happy where Iām at and I can WFH full time (rerail!).
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I recently wondered why Youtube didnāt do what TikTok does, it seemed natural. And yesterday saw some commercials about Google Shorts (?). More power to cats videos.
Tiktok is just Bytedance doing the largest social focus group in history. Individualized polling/entertainment, the political and social fallout is huge.
The layoffs in finance continue.
- Citigroup Investment Banking
- Barclays Investment Banking
- PCF group fails to secure funding and quits the UK banking market (UK vehicle + commercial loans, niche but notable).
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