Meta laid off 8,000 employees including high-performing engineers as AI tools doubled productivity for remaining staff and resources shifted to data center construction

Chips on shoulders put….

... and for folks claiming this was all a result of covid hiring, I think we're way beyond that now.

@Jason The layoffs before the dotcom crash were like this. At first fuckedcompany dot com had a handful and then the servers melted.

I'm looking forward to picking up an Aeron chair for $20 and rack of GPU for 5k. 😂

@Jason nah main reason is they hired way too many people during covid and post covid

@petergyang that might have been the 20,000 previous ones, but these ones for sure are on AI

@Jason Sorry Jason, you don’t know ball. People close to Meta know they hired thousands of people to literally, well, sit on the sidelines in case any work showed up later

@Jason I am asking myself did AI make this decission?

@cybercowboyy @Jason @petergyang Look at the growth rate from 2016 till COVID, if COVID had never happened the total number of employees wouldn’t be far off to where it’s at now

@cybercowboyy @Jason @petergyang That chart doesn’t tell that story.

@49cashmere @Jason @petergyang Why is that?

@Jason Are we sure these were Engineers let go and not HR & Admin?

@Jason Doing what?? and the Meta or Google or OpenAI or Anthropic will just replicate them!!

@Jason People who select towards a company like Meta and those who are trying to make companies are not really that overlapping.

At this stage, meta is more synonymous with compensation maxers who want to retire early

@Jason the irony of replacing a 3am human committer with an agent that hallucinating broken endpoints at 4am while the remaining infra team slowly burns out

@Jason Why do we still need so many immigrants if AI is going to displace them in the near future?

Why can't we have a 10-20 year moratorium on all immigration right now?

@Jason we already have all the apps we neee. nothing else to build in code but superniches.

@Jason And Intuit layoffs will help with accounting and taxes for all these new startups.

@Jason The canary in the coal mine is domain registrations going up. Aftermarket activity as well.

People are starting businesses and using AI tools to see their alpha versions come to life.

Some of this will lead to real business

@Jason Give it a few months, any engineers let go will be brought back as contractors earning 50% more.

@Jason Jason being former Meta employee who left voluntarily, I know folks who were building coz they saw this coming. I can connect u to them