Comment by abxyz
2 days ago
The bubble narrative is coming from the outside. More likely is that the /acquisition/ of Scale has led to an abundance of talent that is being underutilised. If you give managers the option to hire, they will. Freezing hiring while reorganising is a sane strategy regardless of how well you are or are not doing.
This. TFA says this explicitly. Alexander Wang, the former Scale CEO is to approve any new hires.
They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps.
Now, I think AI investments are still a bubble, but that's not why FB is freezing hiring.
> They're taking stock of internal staff + new acquisitions and how to rationalize before further steps.
Like a toddler collecting random toys in a pile and then deciding what to do with them.
Perhaps. But more like, there's a new boss who wants to understand the biz before doing any action. I've done this personally at a much smaller scale of course.
"abundance of talent" is not something I'd ascribe to Scale.
Yeah, Scale was Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the AI era.
Better strategy of course is to quietly freeze hiring. Perhaps that is not an option for a publicly traded company though.
You could just keep having interviews yet never actually hire anyone based on the talent pool is wide but shallow. It results in the same as a freeze, but without the negative connotation to the company while shifting it to the workforce
wow there's really _zero_ sense of mutual respect in this industry isn't there. it's all just "let's make a buck by being total assholes to everyone around us".
With an employer the size of Meta people would get the clue fairly quick - with inevitable public backlash.
The bubble narrative has been ongoing for a while, but as I understand it, the extremely disappointing response to GPT-5 has spilled things over.