alt Hacker NewsZuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective
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The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what?
This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
Meta is in a weird place because Zuck is at this point very far removed from day to day company operations and its overall culture, but still wants to be the one calling all the shots. Plus just like Musk and others he has megalomania and wants to rule the world. And considering his hold of the company no one can really argue with him.
You can pretty much see his thought process in real time.
"Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me."
Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it.
"Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
"I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
Fire first, ask questions later.
Very shallow wrapper around the reuters piece (https://www.reuters.com/business/zuckerberg-says-ai-agent-de... ), I dont think author adds any tangible value
AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.
Maybe the best solution is not to fire good engineers and replace them with AI, but to remove the useless "vibe" managers who are basically the bottleneck for everything.
"I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil."
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
The bigger story here is that the AI agents were not effective. This is a huge admission and explains why Anthropic, OpenAI, and now Microsoft are creating giant teams of FDEs (forward deployed engineers). It ties in with Meta becoming a GPU cloud to sell "excess AI compute". xai and now meta renting excess AI compute and shovel-vendors are trying to keep the embers alive with free tokens in a last-ditch effort.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil.
I can.
Not impressed with the quote from Zuckerberg. I see it as a very shallow analysis. I think the stated goal of Agentic development is too amorphous to know what might work. I assume they thought there were too many voices in the development so they had layoffs only to find that wasn't the issue. Why would layoffs make work happen faster.
In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.
For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603).
What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."
Seems like a lot of CEOs overestimated the speed of AI, but also it is inevitable.
Lives were destroyed, families were in turmoil, but look at the bright side: it was a learning moment.
This is another piece of evidence against the "Zuckerberg Exceptionalism" theory. I've argued before that he is neither a great leader nor a particularly intelligent person outside some alleged Math talent. He was, at best, a competent entrepreneur and very hard worker who was in the right place at the right time.
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Duh.
That quote doesn't support the headline
Everyone I have seen in a corporate environment is using it to do their existing work faster. The rest of the organization has not yet evolved to take advantage of these new tools.
At some point, after repeated rounds of ineffective hire-and-fire cycles, it becomes impossible to avoid admitting that the problem is the management.
I'm kind of curious, whatever happened to Zuckerberg's AI clone? I haven't heard about it recently but it was one of the uh, more interesting AI stories.
All of these tech companies have fallen into the Wall Street trap and it will be their ultimate undoing. Meta probably more than most.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil.
Evil
> Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.
It's metaverse deja vu.
Layoffs will continue until morale improves.
Other than the original few years of Facebook has Zuck actually succeeded at anything new? Metaverse was a failure. Instagram and WhatsApp were both bought and Instagram's biggest feature is a straight rip from Snapchat. Occulus was bought. Facebook itself is completely dead among all my peers and even the local business stuff I used to do on it is dead now too. It feels like he just falls from one mistake into another but gets away with it due to the company being a behemoth + his unique control of the company keeping him unaccountable.
[dupe] More discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48767058
Has Zuckerberg ever deliberately invented a successful product using skill and taste?
His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.
Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.
Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.
They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)
React and zstd don't count, obviously.
> I can’t tell if Zuckerberg is dimwitted or just evil. The problem during the first era of the AI boom (circa 2023) was indeed that Meta was too slow to identify the metaverse flub.
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
> dimwitted or just evil
...Yes
Wang for ceo.
Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.
I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages.
I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...