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Meta is one company that I morally wouldn’t work for UNLESS they paid me 3x what I make now. One of my old managers just jumped to meta and is going to be making 2.8x what I make. I could suffer it for 2-4 years to buy and pay off a house…
Yet somehow, Facebook still managed to transfer an eye watering $50bn to capitalists in 2025 through dividends and buybacks. That is the equivalent of $633,639/employee. Tech workers need to unionize!
It's kind of sad in hindsight. I remember around 8-10 years ago or so a conversation about unionization amongst programmers came up and almost universally the response was "lol why would I ever unionize? Just hop companies."
Welp.
It was always stupid do dismiss unions.
The software engineering was in a stupid bubble just waiting to be popped.
But no one cared, since they got paid so much.
AI was the bubble bursting.
So far it's not looking like it is.
The AI is too expensive, and technical debt it generates will cause the AI bubble some strain, and if that goes, software development will be stronger for a while. At least on the senior level.
Tech workers are labor aristocracy, so collaboration with capitalists is rampant. Even here on Lemmy, in the tech comms you will find a higher than average rate of capitalist apologism.
But as the market adjusts they will be exploited just like the rest of workforce. This was already the case with some sectors, like videogames, which were more exploited than others. When there is a hefty supply of workers and a stable 5% unemployed, ready to accept any conditions, those $200k+ incomes will be a distant memory.
they are also pay very high enough to not unionize,
More programmers for tech co-ops and open-source projects.
I mean sure, it won't cover these people's mortgages or probably even healthcare. That sucks, it really does. But let's starve big tech of the expertise that they so obviously disdain, and contribute our time and energy to building better alternatives.
Banafa says he urges his students to use AI.
“Don’t be left behind. I mean, if you see any kind of new tools in AI, any new projects by the big name, by OpenAI or Google, go and learn it. Get certifications, take classes that would make you in the front of the line when it comes to hiring,” he said.
You can smell the misguided desperation from the person quoted through the screen.
They're laying off 10% of the workforce and simultaneously rewarding employees who waste as many AI resources as possible, including the one employee who burned $1.4 million in tokens in one month.
It's a contest in tech right now who can signal the hardest that they're "AI-first," and Zuck continues to show his lack of imagination and independent thought by lighting 10% of the company on fire to make the most smoke in a valley already choking on its own smoldering fumes.
Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn't stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It's like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who've burnt more calories have probably done more work but it's not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I'm going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I'm not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.
I have acquaintances at Meta and they literally waste tokens on bullshit tasks. They have like 10 agents running simultaneously doing some elaborate task that takes a long time. You can't tell me this is more productive or efficient than doing actual work. Even if half of these tasks are somewhat useful and related to your project.
Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.
Lay off 100% and be done with it. Fuck Zuck and his employee stooges.
I don't understand how Facebook has so many employees. What do they do, what does their standard day look like.
If I don't show up to my job there's loads of tasks that wouldn't get done but Facebook is a website, it can't honestly need so many employees especially when they never really change anything.
I don’t mean this in a way that suggests Facebook is culturally important and good in any fashion, but Facebook does a LOT of different things and in fact is a multitude of websites and features in a trench coat. Whether they are bloated with employees or not, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to have a metric ton of employees. Also it’s not just Facebook, it’s Meta as a company so there are plenty of people working there who have nothing to do with the website.
Meetings and meetings about how to enshittificate more (example: premium subscription for WhatsApp is now already in A/B testing phase) and find a way to skirt laws and regulations
Shouldn't have gone all in on the Metaverse, eh, Fuckerburg?
Don't worry, they've definitely hitched their horse on the right Next Big Thing this time!
He didn't and doesn't care.
is there a big seven lay off tracking website ?
because i'm pretty sure they have laid off 123% in the last 13 months
There was this site making the rounds a few years ago and it still seems updated: https://layoffs.fyi/
Not including the cuts mentioned here, it looks like meta has reduced the number of employees by about 20% so far compared to last years highest count.
The other have seemingly kept hiring so their staff cuts have not shown in official numbers as far as I can tell. source
i have "being laid off" PTSD or something because every time i see a headline like this i say FUCK
Incoming record earnings and board remunerations!
Couldn't they just fire zuck, since he's made himself redundant? I bet that's a hell of a lot greater decrease in expenditure than 10% of the staff...
No AI could replicate zuckerberg's robotic nature.
He's majority shareholder or has some trick to never be dethroned.
Only 10%? earnings must be increasing faster than ever.
Their AI must be shit if they can only lay off 10%.
A good AI would let you lay off at least 50%
Of course it is:
