Comment by abxyz

Comment by abxyz 3 days ago

10 replies

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.

prasadjoglekar 3 days ago

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.

  • apwell23 3 days ago

    > 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.

    • prasadjoglekar 3 days ago

      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.

ml-anon 3 days ago

"abundance of talent" is not something I'd ascribe to Scale.

  • torginus 3 days ago

    Yeah, Scale was Amazon's Mechanical Turk for the AI era.

JKCalhoun 3 days ago

Better strategy of course is to quietly freeze hiring. Perhaps that is not an option for a publicly traded company though.

  • dylan604 3 days ago

    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

    • colinsane 3 days ago

      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".

    • varjag 3 days ago

      With an employer the size of Meta people would get the clue fairly quick - with inevitable public backlash.

yifanl 3 days ago

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.