Comment by hintymad

I posted another comment about this, but I think that "overhiring" is actually the true answer, but it actually encompasses 2 separate phenomena:

1. Companies overhired during the pandemic because they thought we'd all want to be online only forever or something. I agree with you that a lot of that "hangover" has already been wrung out of the system.

2. The other issue, though, is that the ZIRP era lasted over a decade and ended in 2022. Companies pushed a ton of money into speculative projects that never went anywhere. Even when they were successful in terms of usage data, a lot of them never made any money (think Amazon's Alexa devices division - tons of people use Alexa, but they use it for like the same 5 or 6 basic tasks, as hardly anyone is doing lots of shopping over a voice interface, which is how Amazon thought they'd make money). The ZIRP era is over, so not only do these companies need to unwind these structural misallocations, but unless it's AI or AI-adjacent, there is 0 appetite for this kind of "let's just throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks" mentality.

Heck, Meta spent many billions on the Metaverse, and that went nowhere. Yes, they've had previous rounds of layoffs, but I don't think it's that surprising that it's taken multiple years for them to unwind that bet.

Firing 10% every year is just good old Jack Welsh-style workforce intimidation.

its not a 'concerted campaign'. meta laid off 4300 in 2025, but by the end of the year was actaully ~4800 higher than before. If that is not 'over hiring', i dont know what is. The headcount went from 74K in dec2024 to 78K in dec2025, even WITH the layoffs.

There is no "workforce reduction". its just "we need new faces around here". Hire-to-fire.

It could easily be several more, if they are 50% bigger than they need to be, and they're firing 10% at a time.

In the year 2040, they’ll still be using the same excuse. “BigTech lays off another 10,000 from all the overhiring done 20 years ago during COVID!”

They overhired, made a mess with people who are not very passionate. Then they fired but they fired all kinds, including some very good ones. Then they are still stuck in that loop and thinking AI is a solution to that

Well, one could start by looking at how their total employee counts have changed between now and the beginning of the pandemic.

I’d be surprised if the multiple rounds of layoffs has left them with fewer total employees than January 2020.

Name one product that Meta created over the last 10 years that mattered - beyond adtech. They can fire everyone in every team and just retain ads (tech and sales) - and some minimal setup for instagram and whatsapp and facebook and their revenue will not take a dent. So, yes, they overhired.

It is no doubt a campaign or at least a meme. It seems basically impossible for everyone to have overhired, for the simple reason that qualified workers do not appear and disappear from nowhere. There is a population of qualified workers in the software sector, and only new grads and retirement can move the needle significantly. So, if someone overhired then someone else must have done without, all things considered. The only ways out of the pool are basically retirement, career change, and death.

I know there are complications with this argument. For example, unemployment could double by basically doubling the average time to find a job. That kind of thing could support an overhiring thesis if the unemployment rate in tech got very low. To really test the "everybody overhired" thesis, I think you need to do a full accounting of early careers people, unemployed, retired, etc. I'm not gonna attempt that...

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.

Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).

Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.

Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.

If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...

Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...

Meta has 4 identical products, most of which have reached feature complete. They do few things, and make absurd amounts of money from it.

Google, MSFT and Apple do a lot more and most of their products have large feature backlogs.

Different scenarios

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

I would expect a company that makes some web pages to have less than half the people than:

- a company that makes the leading search engine, the leading browser, one of the two major mobile OSes, one of the major desktop OSes, some of the best ai hardware, and is in the running to win the ai race

- a company that makes the leading mobile and desktop OSes and the leading desktop and os hardware, one of the top consumer cloud offerings, a major online media store, and a popular consumer electronics retail store

Google and Microsoft have significantly more products. That's even just counting their consumer products, their cloud providers are a whole other kettle of fish.

"half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft"

That sounds like 2-10x too many. Think about what Google, Apple & Microsoft do compared to Meta.

You're comparing Apples to Oranges (with Apple).

about half (80k) of the equivalent fulltime employees at Apple are involved in the store footprint, so they're retail staff in one of their main sales channels.

And as other's have pointed out, Apple has a far wider range of products and services than Meta, and produce far more hardware products, including their own cutting-edge SOC's. Meta, meanwhile, get Broadcom to largely produce their "custom ASIC's", not just fab, but deeply involved in design, tape out, and validation.

> If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Part of “Big Tech” hiring isn't just to have an important thing for everyone to do but also to keep competitors from having access to those people.

> They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Meta is the youngest company of that group. Apple and Microsoft have been around for over twice as long.

Meta also has the narrowest scope of those companies.

Really it's kind of amazing that Meta has so many employees relative to those other companies given how much narrower their business is. Puts the overhiring into perspective.

Microsoft, Apple and Google have much more diverse revenue streams. Meta only makes money from Ads. Only. It's crazy.

Not Apple, but if you see Apple join the layoff party, then you know things are really bad, however Google and Microsoft like Meta seem to go through this every five or six years.

Not familiar with Microsoft. But it's definitely amazing that Google managed to grow itself to one of the most bureaucratic companies in the past 15 years. And yeah, it's bloated as hell.

I would argue that Meta had already overhired by the beginning of 2021, and the hiring spree was continuing.

Microsoft expects less from their engineers, and it shows in the large pay differential from Meta.

Both Google and Microsoft are bigger, and with more products than Meta.

But both Google and Microsoft also massively overhired around the same timeframe as Meta, and are still digging themselves out of the mess of their own making. And making their teams pay for such stupidity.

Most of these companies kicked off the over-hiring in 2020 during the COVID boom they experienced. It was done by end of 2021.

The usual story is that revenue/employee at Facebook is crazy high.

Think about the scope of Apple's business (Hardware, Processors, Operating Systems, Software competitors for every app category, Physical Retail, Global Ecommerce, Global distribution networks, App stores, Payments, Credit cards, Banking, Music streaming, Film/TV studio, etc).

Now compare it to Meta, a company where the vast majority of revenue is essentially a few mobile apps with an advertising network. No operating systems, no processor design, and a few hardware boondoggles only 1/10000th the scale of Apple's, etc.

Now realize that, if you subtract out Apple's retail employees, they have roughly similar headcount to Meta.

Now tell me again that Apple is in a "worse" position than Meta on efficiency.

Microsoft and Google have a vastly broader array of products and systems compared to Meta.

Meta has substantially less revenue and less diversification than Apple or Google.

>Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021.

So? They likely already had too many in 2021.

>They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft.

Technology (hw/sw) wise, they also have 1/10 the internal tech and public product breadth and scope of Google or Apple and Microsoft. Maybe 1/50 even. They do like 4-5 social media and chat apps (that they hardly ever update anymore), and some crappy VR stuff nobody cares for.

choosing 2021 is itself a really odd cutoff date to choose. The really bizarre hiring happened between 2016 and 2021 https://i.redd.it/c94hnp9kvzy91.png

They had 17k employees in 2016 and 80k in 2022. And given that a lot of the big tech companies looked like this albeit not quite so extreme I think it's right to say they might all have a glut of employees.

I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.

I worked at Meta and they're spot on.

I interviewed a Meta Senior SWE in 2023. Guy couldn't write the most basic Python loop. Attempts were made. I didn't expect a list comprehension. This was just a warmup exercise fizz-buzz level so everyone can feel confident and talk. Everyone just smashes it. I could have done it as a teenager. Had to call it off after 15 min of trying. It was too much. But he took it on the chin. "Yep, thanks, sorry I didn't get too far. Bad day, maybe" or something like that. Most confident guy I've ever talked to. I was impressed by that - to totally bomb and be cool about it. Good for him.

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical.

People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing specifically. And if they were high enough on the org chart to be responsible for something real, they weren't ever hands on and just played politics all day in meetings.

Everyone will claim otherwise of course, but its all layers and layers of diffusion of responsibility.

The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature (eg. "add a 5th confusing toolbar to Gmail to market Google's 7th video call tool"), take months to build it and run it up the organizational gauntlet for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.

For many people at these orgs this is what an entire year of "work" can look like, for which they will be paid roughly $400k.

I believe you, but that doesn't mean the comment you're responding to is wrong. Large layoffs are like trying to doing surgery with a butcher knife while wearing an eye patch and a pair of mittens.

Since companies usually don't want to telegraph the layoffs too far in advance, they try and keep the people in the know as small as possible. That means the people making the decisions on who stays and who goes are often multiple levels removed from a lot of the people affected.

I'm really sorry to hear that you got let go and I hope you are able to find a new role soon.

There's no need to ask about anything confidential. Meta published a lot about their internal tech stacks, and they use plenty of open-source stuff. ZippyDB, Interview candidate can also talk about generic stuff, and I can drill on the theory or common practice.

Not popular? Who asks someone to break their confidential agreements in front of them, and why would you hire someone who would do that so easily?

Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?

Oh no, poor shareholders, they must have blindsided. When did Mark gain majority voting power?