Meta just fired 600 people after spending $20 billion on AI talent. So are these people the most valuable on the market or the least valuable? Because it has to be one or the other. Meta proved they're willing to spend. They bought entire companies. Paid top dollar for talent. Then cut 600 roles. If Meta looked at you and said "we don't need you"—what does that signal? Either these are people Meta genuinely didn't value, in which case the market just got flooded with talent that a $1 trillion company passed over.. Or Meta made a bad call, and 600 people who know how to build at scale just became available. You can't spend $20 billion on AI acquisitions and then claim the 600 people you cut weren't part of the plan. So which is it? Are these the people every startup should be calling right now? Or are these the people Meta specifically didn't want? The signal matters because if you're hiring, you need to know whether you're getting the people Meta couldn't afford to keep or the people Meta couldn't afford to lose.
I worked for one huge company's global service division that kept migrating their services to cheaper labor markets once they found better quality professionals in those areas. It went from the US to Brazil then Philippines. This constant movement came mixed with several goals, but the main goals were: migrate labor to cheaper markets and be agressive on performance management. Lots of my fired colleagues always understood that if they were cut, they didn't make the performance threshold out of our line of visibility so a bit of accountability always help. To add a bit of food for thoughts in your great analysis, I want to mention a recent decision by a court in Brazil, that decided if any strata management adopted image recognition security systems, they would have to pay extra fees to previous human operators, not because it opposed adoption of automation, but to give those people some time to find relocation. Is this going to become a trend? Let's see. For the AI wave, colleagues need to understand that agile and scrum are deprecating methodologies while waterfall methodology works better with AI, but in my honest opinion, it is much easier to fire them while they adapt than expect a quick shift in their thought paradigm.
You don’t need 600 people in an AI department. You need the best ones and to build AI agents and systems that build with you. Human + AI = unlimited possibilities.
They didn’t cut the new top end hires, the cut the old squad.
One good AI thinker is worth 10,000 mediocre thinkers.
Mind blowing.🚀
Why does it have to be one or the other? They've shown time and again to lean more towards reactivity than strategic commitment... maybe they just realized they over hired.