They’ve done this before with their metaverse stuff. You hire a bunch, don’t see progress, let go of people in projects you want to shut down and then hire people in projects you want to try out.
Why not just move people around you may ask?
Possibly: different skill requirements
More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around
Most definitely: the people being let go were hired when stock price was lower, making their compensation much higher. Getting new people in at high stock price allows company to save money
> More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around
Also, planning reorgs is a ton of work when you never bothered to learn what anyone does and have no real vision for what they should be doing.
If your paycheck goes up no matter what, why not just fire a bunch of them, shamelessly rehire the ones who turned out to be essential (luckily the job market isn't great), declare victory regardless of outcome, and you get to skip all that hard work?
Nevermind long term impacts, you'll probably be gone and a VP at goog or oracle by then!
Can you rehire that quickly though? I know where I live the government won't allow you to rehire people you just fired. Because the severance benefits have lower tax requirements and if you could do that you could do it every year as a form of tax evasion.
VR + AI could actually be kinda fun (I’m sure folks are working on this stuff already!). Solve the problems of not enough VR content and VR content creation tools kind of sucking by having AI fill in the gaps.
But it is just a little toy, Facebook is looking for their next billion dollar idea; that’s not it.
VR + AI synergies is why meta released their model open source Im guessing. The other big tech companies largely have LLMs as substitutes to their products(google being worried about people using chatgpt instead of traditional search) but for meta their products have incredible synergy with AI.
Why not just move people around you may ask?
Possibly: different skill requirements
More likely: people in charge change, and they usually want “their people” around
Most definitely: the people being let go were hired when stock price was lower, making their compensation much higher. Getting new people in at high stock price allows company to save money