Comment by roxolotl
Comment by roxolotl 3 days ago
Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
Comment by roxolotl 3 days ago
Maybe this time investors will realize how incompetent these leaders are? How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
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.
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.
Maybe they are poisoning the well to slow their competitors? Get the funding you need secured for the data centers and the hiring, hire everyone you need and then put out signals that there is another AI winter.
Zuckerberg's leadership style feels very reactionary and arrogant, defined by flailing around for the new fad and new hyped thing, scrapping everything that when the current obsession doesn't work out and then sticking head in the sand about abandoned projects and ignoring subsequent whiplash.
Remember when he pivoted the entire company to the meta-verse and it was all about avatars with no legs? And how proud they trumpeted when the avatars were "now with legs!!" but still looked so pathetic to everyone not in his bubble. Then for a while it was all about Meta glasses and he was spamming those goofy cringe glasses no one wants in all his instagram posts- seriously if you check out his insta he wears them constantly.
Then this spring/summer it was all about AI and stealing rockstar ai coders from competitors and pouring endless money into flirty chatbots for lonely seniors. Now we have some bad press from that and realizing that isn't the panacea we thought it was so we're in the the phase where this is languishing so in about 6 months we'll abandon this and roll out a new obsession that will be endlessly hyped.
Anything to distract from actually giving good stewardship and fixing the neglect and stagnation of Meta's fundamental products like facebook and insta. Wish they would just focus on increasing user functionality and enjoyment and trying to resolve the privacy issues, disinformation, ethical failures, social harm and political polarization caused by his continued poor management.
> Zuckerberg's leadership style feels very reactionary and arrogant, defined by flailing around for the new fad and new hyped thing, scrapping everything that when the current obsession doesn't work out and then sticking head in the sand about abandoned projects and ignoring subsequent whiplash.
Maybe he's like this because the first few times he tried it, it worked.
Insta threatening the empire? Buy Insta, no one really complains.
Snapchat threatening Insta? Knock off their feature and put it in Insta. Snap almost died.
The first couple times Zuckerberg threw elbows he got what he wanted and no one stopped him. That probably influenced his current mindset, maybe he thinks he's God and all tech industry trends revolve around his company.
IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill. There’s probably a proper term for this.
I think that meta is bad for the world and that zuck has made a lot of huge mistakes but calling him a one hit wonder doesn't sit right with me.
Facebook made the transition to mobile faster than other competitors and successfully kept G+ from becoming competition.
The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Zuck hired Sheryl Sandburg and successfully turned a website with a ton of users into an ad-revenue machine. Plenty of other companies struggled to convert large user bases into dollars.
This obviously wasn't all based on him. He had other people around him working on this stuff and it isn't right to attribute all company success to the CEO. The metaverse play was obviously a legendary bust. But "he just got lucky" feels more like Myspace Tom than Zuckerberg in my mind.
No one else is adding the context of where things were at the time in tech...
> The instagram purchase felt insane at the time ($1b to share photos) but facebook was able to convert it into a moneymaking juggernaut in time for the flattened growth of their flagship application.
Facebook's API was incredibly open and accessible at the time and Instagram was overtaking users' news feeds. Zuckerberg wasn't happy that an external entity was growing so fast and onboarding users so easily that it was driving more content to news feeds than built-in tools. Buying Instagram was a defensive move, especially since the API became quite closed-off since then.
Your other points are largely valid, though. Another comment called the WhatsApp purchase "inspired", but I feel that also lacks context. Facebook bought a mobile VPN service used predominantly by younger smartphone users, Onavo(?), and realized the amount of traffic WhatsApp generated by analyzing the logs. Given the insight and growth they were monitoring, they likely anticipated that WhatsApp could usurp them if it added social features. Once again, a defensive purchase.
Buying competitors is not insane or a weird business practice. He was probably advised to do so by the competent people under him
And what did he do to keep G+ from becoming a valid competitor? It killed itself. I signed up but there was no network effect and it kind of sucked. Google had a way of shutting down all their product attempts too
I hate pretty much everything about Facebook but Zuckerberg has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company. The market clearly has confidence in his leadership ability, he effectively has had sole executive control of Facebook since it started and it's done very well for like 20 years now.
>has been wildly successful as CEO of a publicly traded company.
That has a lot to do with the fact that it's a business centric company. His acumen has been in user growth, monetization of ads, acquisitions and so on. He's very similar to Altman.
The problems start when you try to venture into hard technological topics, like the Metaverse fiasco, where you have to have a sober and engineering oriented understanding of the practical limits of technology, like Carmack who left Meta pretty frustrated. You can't just bullshit infinitely when the tech and not the sales matter.
Contrast it with Gates who had a serious programming background, he never promised even a fraction of the cringe worthy stuff you hear from some CEOs nowadays because he would have known it's nonsense. Or take Apple, infinitely more sane on the AI topic because it isn't just a "more users, more growth, stonks go up" company.
He's really not. Facebook is an extremely well run organization. There's a lot to dislike about working there, and there's a lot to dislike about what they do, but you cannot deny they have been unbelievably successful at it. He really is good at his job, and part of that has been making bold bets and aggressively cutting unsuccessful bets.
Facebook can be well run without that being due to Zuck.
There are literally books that make this argument from insider perspectives (which doesn't mean it's true, but it is possible, and does happen regularly).
A basketball team can be great even if their coach sucks.
You can't attribute everything to the person at the top.
That is true but in Meta’s case, it is tightly managed by him. I remember a decade ago a friend was a mid-level manager and would have exec reviews to Zuck, who could absorb information very quickly and redirect feedback to align with his product strategy.
He is a very hands CEO, not one who is relying on experts to run things for him.
In contrast, I’ve heard that Elon has a very good senior management team and they sort of know how to show him shiny things that he can say he’s very hands on about while they focus on what they need to do.
He created the company, if it is well run it was thanks to him hiring the right people. Regardless how you slice it he is a big reason it didn't fail, most companies like that fails when they scale up and hire a lot of people but facebook didn't, hiring the right people is not luck.
I can’t tell if you’re being tongue in cheek or not, so I’ll respond as if you mean this.
It’s easy to cherry pick a few bets that flopped for every mega tech company: Amazon has them, Google has them, remember Windows Phone? etc.
I see the failures as a feature, not a bug - the guy is one of the only founder CEOs to have ever built a $2T company (trillion with a T). I imagine part of that is being willing to make big bets.
And it also seems like no individual product failure has endangered their company’s footing at all.
While I’m not a Meta or Zuck fan myself, using a relatively small product flop as an indication a $2T tech mega corp isn’t well run seems… either myopic or disingenuous.
Absolutely, not everything they do will succeed but that's okay too, right? At this point their core products are used by 1 in 2 humans on earth. They need to get people to have more kids to expand their user base. They're gonna throw shit at the wall and not everything will stick, and they'll ship stuff that's not quite done, but they do have to keep trying; I can't bring myself to call that "failure."
WhatsApp is certainly worth less today than what they paid for it plus the extra funding it has required over time. Let alone producing anything close to ROI. Has lost them more money than the metaverse stuff.
Insta was a huge hit for sure but since then Meta Capital allocation has been a disaster including a lot of badly timed buybacks
> IMHO Mark Zuckerberg is a textbook case of someone who got lucky once by basically being in the right place at the right time, but who attributes his success to his skill.
It is no secret that the person who turned Facebook into a money-printing machine is/was Sheryl Sandberg.
Thus, the evidence is clear that Mark Zuckerberg had the right idea at the right time (the question is whether this was because of his skills or because he got lucky), but turning his good idea(s) into a successful business was done by other people (lead by Sheryl Sandberg).
And isn’t the job of a good CEO to put the right people in the right seats? So if he found a superstar COO that took the company into the stratosphere and made them all gazillionaires…
Wouldn’t that indicate, at least a little bit, a great management move by Zuck?
And he didn't even come up with the idea, he stole it all. And then he stole the work from the people he started it with...
You're probably going to get comments like "Social networking existed before. You can't steal it". Well, on top of derailing someone else's execution of said non-stole idea (or something) which makes you a jerk, in the case of those he 'stole'/stole from, for starters maybe it was existing code (I don't know if that was ever proven), but maybe it was also the Winklevosses idea of using .edu email addresses, and possibly other concepts
Do I think he stole it? Dunno. (Though Aaron Greenspan did log his houseSYSTEM server requests, which seems pretty damning) But given what he's done since (Whatsapp, copying every Snapchat feature)? I'd say the likelihood is non-zero
The term you're looking for is "billionaire". The amount of serendipity in these guys' lives is truly baffling, and only becomes more apparent the more you dig. It makes sense when you realize their fame is all survivorship bias. Afer all, there must be someone at the tail end of the bell curve.
It is at least a little suspicious that one week he's hiring like crazy, then next week, right after Sam Altman states that we are in an AI bubble, Zuckerberg turns around and now fears the bubble.
Maybe he's just gambling that Altman is right, saving his money for now and will be able to pick up AI researcher and developers at a massive discount next year. Meta doesn't have much of a presence in the space market right now, and they have other businesses, so waiting a year or two might not matter.
Ehh. You don’t get FB to where it is by being incompetent. Maybe he is not the right leader for today. Maybe. But you have to be right way, way more often than not to create a FB and get it to where it is. To operate from where it started to where it is just isn’t an accident or Dunning-Kruger.
Maybe this time the top posters on HN should stop criticizing one of the top performing founder CEOs of the last 20 years who built an insane business, made many calls that were called stupid at the time (WhatsApp), and many that were actually stupid decisions.
Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?
If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company. Oh and please revisit your comment in these timeframes
I think many people just really dislike Zuckerberg as a human being and Meta as a company. Social media has seriously damaged society in many ways.
It’s not perfectionism, it’s a desire to dunk on what you don’t like whenever the opportunity arises.
Sure, but society is full of fools. Plenty of people say social media is the primary way they get news. Social media platforms are super spreaders of lies and propaganda.
I don't think it's about perfect predictions. It's more about going all in on Metaverse and then on AI and backtracking on both. As a manager you need to use your resources wisely, even if they're as big as what Meta has at its disposal.
The other thing - Peter's principle is that people rise until they hit a level where they can't perform anymore. Zuck is up there as high as you can go, maybe no one is really ready to operate at that level? It seems both him and Elon made a lot of bad decisions lately. It doesn't erase their previous good decisions, but possibly some self-reflection is warranted?
> Like do people here really think making some bad decisions is incompetence?
> If you do, your perfectionism is probably something you need to think about.
> Or please reply to me with your exact perfect predictions of how AI will play out in the next 5, 10, 20 years and then tell us how you would run a trillion dollar company.
It's the effect of believing (and being sold) meritocracy, if you are making literal billions of dollars for your work then some will think it should be spotless.
Not saying I think that way but it's probably what a lot of people consider, being paid that much signals that your work should be absolutely exceptional, big failures just show they are also normal flawed people so perhaps they shouldn't be worth million times more than other normal flawed people.
He’s not “being paid that much”
He’s earned almost all his money through owning part of a company that millions of shareholders think is worth trillions, and does in fact generate a lot of profits.
A committee didn’t decide Zuckerberg is paid $30bn.
And id say his work is pretty exceptional. If it wasn’t then his company wouldn’t be growing. And he’d probably be pressured into resigning as CEO
Yes, I do know all of that semantics, thanks for stating the obvious.
Being rewarded for creating a privacy destroying advertising empire, exceptional work. Imagine a world where the incentives were a bit different, we might have seen other kind of work rewarded instead of social media and ads.
Well that’s the incompetent piece. Setting out to write giant historical employment contracts without a plan is not something competent people do. And seemingly it’s not that they over extended a bit either since reports claimed the time availability of the contracts was extremely limited; under 30min in some cases.
Yes.
Perhaps it was this: Lets hit the market fast, scoop up all the talent we can before anybody can react, then stop.
I don't think there is anybody that would expect they would 'continue' offering 250million packages. They would need to stop eventually. They just did it fast, all at once, and now stopped.
> How do you go from 250mil contracts to freezes in under a month?
Easy, you finished building up a team. You can only have so many cooks.
Some people actually accepted the contracts before the uno reverse llamabot could activate and block them
I'm still waiting for a single proof that there was any contract in the hundreds of millions that was signed.
Because you want the ability to low-ball prospective candidates sooner rather than later.
So he be also read the recent article on Sam Altman saying it was a bubble?
I really don't understand this massive flip flopping.
Do I have this timeline correct?
* January, announce massive $65B AI spend
* June, buy Scale AI for ~$15B, massive AI hiring spree, reportedly paying millions per year for low-level AI devs
* July, announce some of the biggest data centers ever that will cost billions and use all of Ohio's water (hyperbolic)
* Aug, freeze, it's a bubble!
Someone please tell me I've got it all wrong.
This looks like the Metaverse all over again!