Meta's Layoff Paradox: Fire Workers, Demand More AI

[00:00:00]Look, the beatings are going to continue until morale improves. Imagine your company fires a bunch of people and they're like, it's because AI is replacing jobs. And then after those folks are pushed out the door, which is jarring enough, the CEO of your company says, "We're going to go ahead and do a hackathon now where we work on projects to build more AI." The whole vibe of it is the CEO going, "Why is nobody having fun? I specifically requested that we have fun this week." Uh the reason this blew up is the same reason everything's been blowing up in tech lately. The workers know it's BS. Even if you can't prove it, you feel it. Hackathons are usually work disguised as fun. It's like fat Susan in HR throwing a pizza party when you just had layoffs. Everybody knows it stinks. At least in this situation, not all the time. If layoffs aren't going on and everything's going well at the company, the hackathon can feel like a good time. It can feel like fun. It can feel like time to cut loose, work with your buddies on something that you actually give a darn about. But when you just lay off a solid chunk of the company and you say, "Let's do a hackathon." First off, it's tone deaf because it's like it's not going to boost morale more than fat Susan from HR's [ __ ] pizza party. You're asking questions like, "Is this optional? Is my performance or involvement in the hackathon going to go in my next performance review? Am I training the AI system that replaces me? And most importantly, for my brothers and sisters in tech that are not neurotypical, is am I required to look like I am having fun at work now? Do I have to put on my fun mask and come to work every day and say, "I'm really having a good time doing this hackathon." That is why people kept using the phrase mandatory fun. It usually comes from HR. You got to show up you got to attend this party, fat Susan's pizza party, or you got to go out for drinks after work to celebrate somebody's birthday, dick sucks birthday, who's the VP of who gives a [ __ ] and you got to be seen there. At corporate America companies, when they get this size, they love to make things technically optional and socially compulsory, which is hell for people that are on the spectrum. It's hell for everybody. I think we need to get a group of secret radicals together. And actually, I'm going to do this before the video goes up. I'm going to do it's going to be in there. It's going to be in my product page. I'm going to make a morale patch. You can go buy that morale patch.

[00:02:44]And it is going to have a cubicle on it.

[00:02:48]And that cubicle is our last sign of dignity if you go into the office. I don't. I'm a remote worker. I'm going to be remote forever. If I'm not remote, I'm going to be unemployed. I'm I'm not going back into an office. There will be no return journey, Mr. Frodo. I'm I'm here. I got my compound. I'm I'm working from here or not working from here, but I'm going to be here. But if you got to go into an office, our last symbol of dignity as workers in the office was the cubicle. It's now a revolutionary icon in this battle. And me even saying that, that just shows you how [ __ ] degraded things have become. The office has become a humiliation ritual. Meta did hot desking before this for a lot of their offices.

[00:03:33]Hot desking, if you're unfamiliar with this special kind of hell, I saw this when I was a director of engineering at American Express. I You don't have an assigned desk. You just come in and you just grab a desk and sit down every day.

[00:03:48]Imagine, even the directors don't have an assigned desk. And this is a nightmare for everybody, especially for people on the spectrum, because an open office already sucks. It already sucks.

[00:04:00]The whole reason that we have open offices is because people in leadership don't trust their employees. They want to be able to look over and visually see what What is Bob have on his screen? Oh, he's reading Hacker News? Dock his pay.

[00:04:14]That's going in your performance review, buddy. So, open offices are already a scam. It's a humiliation ritual. It's a sign that they do not trust you, that they had to do away with the cubicle walls and the modicum of privacy that they graciously your lords and kings graciously gave you when you conceded to go into an office. And then the executives thought, "How can we make it worse on our employees?"

[00:04:40]The model of remote work has been proven during COVID that it works, and we're going to humiliate them by saying, "You know, remote work's a possibility, but we're not going to afford that. You got to come into the office. Uh we're going to take your cubicles away cuz we don't trust you, so we can see what's going on on your monitors. And now, you don't even get the dignity of your own desk.

[00:04:57]So, you can't We don't want you distracted by having a photo of your wife and kids on the desk or any kind of personal artifacts that may distract you from the reason you're here, which is to make me money to buy a 15th yacht. I need another yacht this year, okay?

[00:05:11]Everything is a [ __ ] negotiation with these people, with these exacts, with these giga corporations. And so, in their gracious benevolence, it matter, they've decided do not despair. We may have just nerfed a bunch of your colleagues for unknown and mysterious reasons to appease the AI gods, but but it's not all bad. We're going to give you a desk. We're going to You can just You can bring in like one photo, not two photos. You could bring in one photo. Two too many, you know, we're going to have regulations about what you can keep on your desk, but we'll let you have your own desk, worker. So, they spent years removing normal workplace stability and dignity, and now they're giving it back in pieces as a bonus.

[00:05:56]But, Meta, make no mistake, is circling the drain. I've been at companies when there are vicious layoffs, and they're always bad. It always messes up morale. But, when they are done for a clear reason, you know, we missed our quarterly targets by a wide margin, and we just didn't have money to keep people on. It sucks. It's horrible.

[00:06:20]People tend to heal from that after some amount of time.

[00:06:25]After some amount of time. I'm not saying it's a great thing to have happen, but it's a it's a business. You have to make money to pay the people, and if you don't make enough money to pay the people, then you have to cut some people. It's really unfortunate.

[00:06:37]But, in Meta's case, they're having record quarters. They're surging ahead, so we're told from the earnings and the stock price. Uh who knows what the real story is there, but that's the narrative, right? Is that everything's A-OK here. We're just cutting to cut, you know. We're cutting because AI is replacing workers somehow, which no study really backs that that's actually happening. And we're just cutting to cut. That nerfs morale. It kills it. It absolutely kills it because all of the employees left over are not only wondering if they're next as you do after a layoff, they're wondering how they find out if they're next because the people that were eliminated were eliminated for no clear reason. So, it feels like sort of random lotto system that if they draw your number, you're just out of a job tomorrow, and you can't feel comfortable with that feeling going on.

[00:07:23]If you can't feel comfortable, you can't focus on your work. And if you can't focus on your work, you can't build good products for the company. So, Meta will start to They've already been in this downward spiral spiral for some time, but I'm looking at them like I would have looked at, you know, Nokia or Motorola towards the end of the Well, around 2008 when the iPhone came out.

[00:07:44]Now we're talking mandatory fun and let me regale you with a tale of some mandatory fun that I used to get into.

[00:07:52]So, when I was a wee wee lad beginning my software engineering career working at Living Spaces Furniture.

[00:08:00]Okay, I think it's a national company now. Who who knows? I actually do like their furniture. They they've quite nice couches. They didn't pay for an ad spot.

[00:08:07]But I do do actually like Living Spaces quite a bit. So I was working for Living Spaces Furniture, right? And it's like you know, it's a joke. It's a the tech department is a joke there. It's like people don't know how to code. It's like totally favoritism system from the CEO down. It's like so-and-so knew so-and-so knew so-and-so and hired so-and-so. I mean, it is a it's a joke. It's a joke software engineering department at Living Spaces Furniture.

[00:08:34]And I'm working there as a dev. I'm trying to find my way up and you can't write code for 8 hours a day. Nobody can.

[00:08:43]So you take a little break and they had a game room with arcade cabinets and they had Donkey Kong. And so I would play Donkey Kong for like 20 30 minutes in the afternoon every day with my friend.

[00:08:53]We'd go in there. We'd play Donkey Kong.

[00:08:54]We'd trade out when we lost lives. Ton ton of fun. Ton of fun.

[00:08:58]And in a performance review, my boss took me aside, my manager, and said I needed to stop playing Donkey Kong. I needed to stop playing in the arcade cabinets again, 20 to 30 minutes in the afternoon. Bit of a lengthy break, but so be it. Now, you need to cut down on your time, but you need to stop playing it. If people see you playing it, he said, they will know that you are not a serious employee. And that was the vibe of the whole place. It was just theater.

[00:09:25]It's theater, right? It's it's not the actual work you get done. It's how you are seen getting the work done. And that's exactly where Meta is trending right now. When Zuckerberg is asking, "Why aren't these people having fun? Why is the vibe dead in here?" I think of the Eric Andre gif where he turns around and shoots Hannibal and then the episode is who killed Hannibal. That's when the fun stops being for the workers and it becomes set dressing. It becomes set dressing for the recruiting videos, for the new employee tours, for the annual reports, for LinkedIn posts, but the workers know like I knew when I was at Living Spaces the culture is dead. There is no culture. It's a culture of performance, not tech technical excellence. And when you seed the culture of technical excellence to performance, you cease to be a competitive company in tech. This is one of those strange Chinese finger trap type things is if you are trying to manufacture fun at work, it's never fun.

[00:10:20]It's the opposite of fun. You're trending in the wrong direction. But companies that are just naturally functioning very well, of which I've been grateful enough to be a member of mostly companies that just happen to be functioning very well, it's just fun. It's fun. Nobody had to make it fun. It's It's just fun. Why am I always [ __ ] posting on X when somebody says San Francisco is a great place to move and work in tech?

[00:10:43]Why am I doing that? Why am I posting these snarky horrible things on people's posts? They're like, "I just I just moved to San Francisco. I'm going to get some Philz Coffee and look, it's the Golden Gate Bridge and I'm working 80 hours a week at Anthropic and I'm going to change the world." It's because San Francisco and Silicon Valley has become the thing that they hated and the people that are tied up in that machine cannot see it. You can only see it if you're outside of that world, which I most certainly am. Big tech used to be the [ __ ] You could make so much money in big tech. Everyone there was cracked.

[00:11:17]Most people were autistic, so you fit right in if you were neurodivergent.

[00:11:22]There's very few places in the world you can do that now. You could show up without shoes and flip-flops every day.

[00:11:28]They had nap pods. They had ping pong tables and people didn't abuse it. There were no uh attractive women posting on Instagram or TikTok a day in the life at Google where I do Pilates all day. It was nerds. So, sometimes they would just veg out and game for 8 hours, but then they turn around the next day and write a video compression algorithm that earned the company $5 billion over the next decade.

[00:11:53]That's what was awesome about West Coast big tech and it is dead in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. If you can't see it and you're living out there, it's because you're living out there. I promise you. Move away, get away from that scene for a couple of years, detoxify yourself, look back at it and you will see exactly what I'm talking about because everybody outside of that space knows that I'm right. If you're watching this and you're in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, you're working in that world, working in that big tech startup scene out there, it is fake. It's fake. It's painted cakes.

[00:12:27]They do not satisfy hunger and you just can't see it. I promise you, you need to get out of there. It's going to be the best thing you can do for your creativity and for yourself. If there is one company that represents that fall from hacker culture grace that that area used to represent, it's Meta. Meta's problem is not that employees forgot to have fun. I promise you those people can still have fun if they take like 2 months off of work due to the accumulated stress. It's that the employees understand the real deal now, the one that was hidden from them that is now mask off in plain sight. You can't fix trust with a hackathon. You cannot win your workers back by giving them an assigned desk. You cannot boost morale with swag. You cannot force enthusiasm. You cannot force fun. And workers know when they are being squeezed instead of respected. The reason this story is spreading so rapidly and so many people are into it, which is one of the reasons I had to cover it, I'm into it, is because it's not just about meta. People don't really care too much about the desk dynamics or where you're seated at the meta offices.

[00:13:34]They care because this is the pattern that's happening to all large companies at this point and a lot of small companies, too. The working class is being taken advantage of. We have an executive and ruling class that are orders of magnitude more wealthy than we will ever be, that don't have to work for a living, that are on their 16th yacht, and instead of sharing a piece of the pie when the company is doing well, they do layoffs. They ask you to work harder. They ask you to build systems that will replace you because they don't want to see you. They don't want to be around you. They think you're stinking, reeking meat bags of permanent underclass and lepers and they don't want to be around you. They want to be on their yacht. They want to be with the Epstein class. They do not want to interface with you. They want you gone as fast as possible so they can just tell an AI what to do and they don't have to interact with the grimy, permanent underclass of which you and I are certainly a member of. The layoffs will continue until morale improves.