> “This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.

The music has stopped and is now leaving people playing the musical chairs game without a chair (job) to sit on as the companies are literally taking away the chairs.

Reminds me of 2008, and 2000 but this time the 'new jobs' are not there and the game is global and affects every knowledge worker and it doesn't matter if you're "senior", "junior" or "staff" or whatever.

Nothing lasts forever. Better build something instead of expecting employers for free lunch and daycare-like benefits.

I think meta should have done what musk did and ripped the bandage off.

> the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs

Look, I want everyone to be happy, but if you’re working at the addiction factory, I mean, let’s not kid ourselves about how much Meta cares about people.

Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.

Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?

Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Covid-era over-hiring was never going to end well. If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that with the AI tools used to AI-wash the dismissals, it’s easier than ever to bone up on economics and why it’s a bad idea to hire people without a clear view of the economic margins along which the employee will be profitable for the firm.

Meta isn’t going away anytime soon, but it’s on a slow and gradual decline into irrelevance. Ironically Zuckerberg has now broadly become the has-been geriatric business type he raged against so hard when Facebook began.

Companies in this stage default to exactly what Meta is doing, pound their employees with pointless initiatives and programs that just grind people to the bone and ultimately go nowhere.

One benefit: People are no longer trying to pretend that Meta is some beneficent orgainsation

> So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.

If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.

But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.

A few thoughts on the layoffs:

1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.

2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.

3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.

4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make

This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?

5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.

None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"

My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.

Recording employee's screens in order for an AI to determine whether you can replaced is some of the most dystopian stuff I've heard all year.