Pareto principle?

Smells like specious reasoning. The tech talent pool is so large that no one company could make a dent in it no matter how fast or how much they hired. And what's the point in spending all that money to maybe slow down a competitor by what, a quarter? Weeks?

Never underestimate the stupidity of management. These people had nothing to do simply because management had no idea how to use them and wanted to grow products without a plan or proper hiring strategy.

Gotta catch ‘em all.

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What were they supposed to do? Try and keep the shitty WAH obsessed lazy people or try and keep people that actually have good output?

Such a normal, natural smile on his face.

I think a whole lot of this was empire-building. Every manager/director I've worked for wanted to hire as many people as possible, regardless of business requirements, in the (usually correct) belief that the more people under them, the bigger their budget and the faster they'd be promoted.

Just because one former Meta employee asserts something to be true all of a sudden everyone thinks it must be true. It makes absolutely zero business sense.

Better to spend a million and screw your competitors than to let them make a hundred bucks!

This is almost as crazy as the person in this sub who told me that the Big Tech firms were firing people in the hopes that their couple thousands of layoffs would cause unemployment to rise by enough to get the Fed to hold off on further rate hikes.

not to discredit the comment as it’s still a fraction of the population, but tech layoffs in just the few months of 2023 are almost 100k

Correct. All the layoffs in the entire tech sector amount to that much out of a total US labor force of ~166m.

So if the whole tech sector got together and agreed to fire workers in a mustache-twirling, 17-dimensional chess move to stop the Fed from raising rates, then they would have managed to raised unemployment by 0.06 percentage points.

yea your original comment is still valid, just wanted to make a little correction to the ‘couple thousand’ line :)

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They want all of the overall talent, they want all of the best talent.

> pre-employment drug tests

Unheard of in big tech.

Don’t tell my mom. Or she will bust through the door and rip up your Pokémon cards as punishment for arguing with your brothers and then deny she did it years later even though those cards meant a lot to you and even though I can afford to buy as many as I want now it’s not the same since the magic of being young died many years ago now that I have to work at a desk for the rest of my life making enough money so I don’t have to move back in with mom again.

Hoarded like Pokemon cards. With decent pay, a lot of perks and a free office space.

I'll be your Pokemon card any day!

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There are so many extremely unproductive offices which don't make business sense. IT isn't an exception and likely some or all big tech names will have extremely unproductive offices too. Maybe it's a phenomenon of organization size but who knows.

It's an attempt to cut costs because of rising interest rates. All big organisations have big waste. Plenty of room for improvement. Tech is no exception.

If you read the article you find out that these employees were diversity hires. Having them on staff makes Meta look like they have a more balanced workforce whether they are contributing or not.

Not a good look at all, Meta.

Right, I mean that would be the normal, non-conspiracy theory for what's going on

This employee in the article is alleging that meta was hiring people to hit diversity targets or lock up talent that they didnt actually have any work in mind for

So the alternative would have been to not hire them or give them actual work to do

The top talent pool *

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This must be all that efficiency that people tell me capitalism has.

And?

Hollywood does this with scripts and writers too.

They are paid. What's the issue?

They're probably a little confused as recent strong job numbers caused the market to slide a few weeks back because that meant rate hikes wouldn't stop.

So if you reverse that logic, if everyone started getting unemployed then the rate hikes would stop. Like I know it isn't that simple, but I can see where someone would come up with that idea.

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