Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

Sadly, the only people who would be surprised reading a statement like this would be anyone who is not ex-fb/meta

Maybe I’m not understanding, but why is that wild? Is it just the fact that those people lost jobs? If it were a justification for a re-org I wouldn’t find it objectionable at all

It damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive. This is why tenure was invented.

Perhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".

We’re not talking about an overworked nurse. Same Facebook-AI-researcher-pay is likely an eye watering amount of money

^ American crab mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

But that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?

> We’re not talking about an overworked nurse.

We're talking about overworked AI engineers and researchers who've been berated for management failures and told they need to do 5x more (before today). The money isn't just handed out for slacking, it's in exchange for an eye-watering amount of work, and now more is expected of them.

You watch too much game of thrones.

Still, regardless of the eye-watering amount of money, there's still a maximum amount of useful work you can get out of someone. Demand too much, and you actually lower their total productivity.

(For me, I found the limit was somewhere around 70 hrs/week - beyond that, the mistakes I made negated any progress I made. This also left me pretty burnt out after about a year, so the sustainable long-term hourly work rate is lower)

Most of them are expected to find another job within Meta

Still not feeling any sympathy. These people are actively working to make society worse.

To me, it's the opposite. I think the words used are not exactly well-thought-through, but what they seem to want to be saying is they want less bureaucratic overhead, smaller teams responsible for bigger projects and impact.

And wanting that is not automatically a bad thing. The fallacy of linearly scaling man-hour-output applies in both directions, otherwise it's illogical. We can't make fun of claims that 100 people can produce a product 10 times as fast as 10 people, but then turn around and automatically assume that layoffs lead to overburdened employees if the scope doesn't change, because now they'll have to do 10 times as much work.

Now they can, often in practice. But for that claim to hold more evidence is needed about the specifics of who is laid off and what projects have been culled, which we certainly don't seem to have here.

Layoffs are everywhere. Millions of employees have had to do more without any change in compensation. My own team has decreased from six to two, but I am not seeing any increased pay for being more load bearing.

I will always pour one out for the fellow wage slave (more for the people who suddenly lost a job), but I am admittedly a bit less sympathetic to those with in demand skills receiving top tier compensation. More for the teachers, nurses, DOGEd FDA employees, whatever who was only ever taking in a more modest wage, but is continually expected to do more with less.

Management cutting headcount and making the drones work harder is not a unique story to Facebook.

Where did you get that people are expected to do 5x more? That just seems made up.

And do not forget that people have autonomy. They can choose to go elsewhere if they no longer think they’re getting compensated fairly for what they are putting in (and competing for with others in the labor market)