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BusinessBig Tech Layoffs Megathread - Techbros... we got too cocky...
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Since my previous thread kinda-sorta turned into a soft megathread, and the tech layoffs will continue until morale improves, I think it's better to group them all together.
FAGMAN interviews only work for specific places, otherwise HR-Tech-HM is fine. And if you're one of the interviewers, you simply reject any candidate whose name you cannot pronounce.
FAGMAN interviews only work for specific places, otherwise HR-Tech-HM is fine. And if you're one of the interviewers, you simply reject any candidate whose name you cannot pronounce.
Smaller companies are trying to be fagman for worse pay benefits and equal grind mind set. The east coast is full of this to the point good engineers are walking out mid process because why the fuck should they waste their time this way.
I actually didn’t get a job offer after a 12 month internship during the height of Covid in a critical infrastructure industry because they decided to offer a black girl who still had a year left the job instead. I got a call 6 months later asking if I wanted the job as she had taken the job and been double dipping by submitting 40+ hours on her timesheet while never showing up at the plant and being in school full time.
As a side note the Competency Crisis they talk about is just the fact that DEI meant any sort of meritocracy and standards went out the window for very technical critical positions.
Never ever let a developer near the interview loop, they're terrible at it. Admittedly I -mostly- suck at interviews too.
Alternatively, you could just have a conversation about the candidates' work history and ask some questions about their github/past projects. In a more relaxed, "shootin' the shit" environment where the candidate has to recall from memory everything he's done, then you can probe him for more technical details. And based on those details is how you gauge his knowledge, whether he was just "blast and cruising" in his team, or if he carried the whole thing by himself. Besides, he cannot fall back to ChatGPT or any of that nonsense, so this method kills the sneaky Pajeets.
One of the best bosses I've ever had tried that on me, the whole interview lasted around 1 hour 10 minutes, we basically overstayed the technical interview but by the end he had gathered so many details about my previous work and experience (and he noticed that I was pretty easy to talk to), that it was all he needed to know to make his decision. And again, we overstayed the interview partly because we lost track of time (a sign that I was fairly relaxed), and partly because we've covered many areas.
I swear by that method ever since.
Fuck "take home assignments" and all that noise. In 10 minutes or less, you can definitely tell when someone knows his shit or not. If you fuck up the selection process, it should be entirely on you.
Alternatively, you could just have a conversation about the candidates' work history and ask some questions about their github/past projects. In a more relaxed, "shootin' the shit" environment where the candidate has to recall from memory everything he's done, then you can probe him for more technical details. And based on those details is how you gauge his knowledge, whether he was just "blast and cruising" in his team, or if he carried the whole thing by himself.
I dont know, I have seen women regurgitate memorized cs concepts flawlessly and then be unable to write, explain or understand what is happening within a one dimensional loop with a tiny amount of data involved.
Never ever let a developer near the interview loop, they're terrible at it. Admittedly I -mostly- suck at interviews too.
Alternatively, you could just have a conversation about the candidates' work history and ask some questions about their github/past projects. In a more relaxed, "shootin' the shit" environment where the candidate has to recall from memory everything he's done, then you can probe him for more technical details. And based on those details is how you gauge his knowledge, whether he was just "blast and cruising" in his team, or if he carried the whole thing by himself. Besides, he cannot fall back to ChatGPT or any of that nonsense, so this method kills the sneaky Pajeets.
One of the best bosses I've ever had tried that on me, the whole interview lasted around 1 hour 10 minutes, we basically overstayed the technical interview but by the end he had gathered so many details about my previous work and experience (and he noticed that I was pretty easy to talk to), that it was all he needed to know to make his decision. And again, we overstayed the interview partly because we lost track of time (a sign that I was fairly relaxed), and partly because we've covered many areas.
I swear by that method ever since.
Fuck "take home assignments" and all that noise. In 10 minutes or less, you can definitely tell when someone knows his shit or not. If you fuck up the selection process, it should be entirely on you.
That method doesn't always work because people are very good at BS. They also might not fit the skillset you are looking for. There's so many people who look great on paper, sound great in a conversation, but cannot do the very basic programming tasks. At the end of the day, we need someone who has both the development experience and hard skills to implement, otherwise its a net negative for the team. It doesn't matter how much technical details you quiz them on, because they know enough to pretend to own the complexity other people built. I assume they had to learn politics to bullshit and coast in their previous roles. I had one guy I interviewed who had over a decade frontend experience. He knew enough to pass the HM screen and he seemed promising to me just talking at the start. He needed to look up syntax for a basic JS loop. You're free to use documentation in our interviews, but a 10 year frontend veteran not knowing how to write a loop is a major red flag. Of course he bombed the rest of the interview. Stories like that are dime a dozen.
On the other hand, interviewing is a way for the candidate to learn about the company. As another poster said, not being able to talk to the team is pretty sketchy. I've had interviews where devs are so miserable they can't event pretend to like their job lol. This also reminded me of bad job I ended up taking because the whole interview was talking with the manager who I got along with personally. I thought he was acting a little ironically autistic, but after working there I think he was actually autistic. The whole company was a shitshow, but what stood out was that every other dev on my team had the same experience as me; having no onboarding process, getting chewed out in public. One of the other devs actually come up to me and told me not to worry after a tough uncomfortable standup because every other dev went though the same experience. There was no way they could hire any good devs if they had their development team doing interview. I ended up taking another offer I turned down a month into that job, but still kept in touch with the manager because we had a lot of shared interests lol.
That last one is very funny. No shit people clap when overpaid FAANG dickbags get laid off. Don't think people didn't notice you retards strutting your pay and benefits around.
That last one is very funny. No shit people clap when overpaid FAANG dickbags get laid off. Don't think people didn't notice you retards strutting your pay and benefits around.
Not to mention the amusement of "I'm just gonna jobhop every 1.5 years for maximum gains" followed immediately by "Oh no why is the organization so prepared to dispose of me and why is there no sense of community?"
Crying in the shower. Taking mental health leave. This is what it’s like to work at the tech giant during the AI job apocalypse.
Update: On the morning of May 20, we spoke to the Meta source again to find out if they had been hit by the lay offs, which began rolling out at 4 a.m. They had. “I did indeed get laid off,” they told us. “It is a huge financial bummer but the rest of it is honestly great. I’m definitely relieved.”
A decade ago, it was a real flex in San Francisco to say you worked at Meta, Google, Apple, Tesla, or any of the companies whose campuses ring the city like a fortress of wealth. Workers fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery.
That’s not what it feels like anymore.
Next week, Meta is expected to lay off 8,000 employees(opens in new tab), roughly 10% of its global workforce, with about 500 of those cuts landing in the Bay Area. They will join a worldwide tally of more than 100,000 tech workers laid off since January, with more on the horizon. At Meta, employees are anxiously anticipating a 7 a.m. email Wednesday that will tell them their fate. To these rank-and-file workers, the AI job apocalypse feels like it’s already here. And even as they fear their own replacement, they are being asked by management to use and train the very products that will soon take their jobs.
“This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job,” a longtime employee at Meta tells The Standard.
We granted this person anonymity to avoid repercussions from Meta and used a voice actor to protect their identity in this week’s episode of the “PST” podcast(opens in new tab), especially given that the company recently began key-stroke logging(opens in new tab) employee activity. We reached out to Meta for comment on the description of the working conditions there and have not heard back.
“If you’re on a work machine, you are probably being surveilled. But the framing that we are using this to train AI to do everyone’s job and the sort of unapologetic, ‘we’re training your replacement, and we’re not paying you more for it’ approach is just another signal of how little Meta cares about the humans that it employs,” the employee tells us.
The brazen AI-ification of work — and the fact that it’s the workers creating and training the AI who are first on the chopping block — is what makes this moment in tech layoffs different from all those that came before. And it is what makes tech workers who have weathered ups and downs feel more hopeless than ever before.
On this week’s episode of “PST,” we dig into all this alongside The Standard’s tech editor, Heather Kelly, who herself was laid off this year from the Jeff Bezos-owned The Washington Post and has two decades of experience covering tech’s booms and busts. As the following conversation shows: this time it’s different.
Update: On the morning of May 20, we spoke to the Meta source again to find out if they had been hit by the lay offs, which began rolling out at 4 a.m. They had. “I did indeed get laid off,” they told us. “It is a huge financial bummer but the rest of it is honestly great. I’m definitely relieved.”
The full conversation with the Meta employee has been condensed and edited for clarity and to protect their identity.
You’ve been at Meta for more than a decade. But since January, you and others on your team have been on edge about getting laid off. Now there is a date when you will all be informed: May 20. How will you know if you’re affected?
I’ve been through many, many rounds of layoffs at Meta. There is never any sort of official internal list of who has been laid off. The way that people find out is by going to visit their internal work profile and seeing if it says “deactivated” — manually going and looking.
A couple of years ago, one of Meta’s engineers wrote a script to comb through those profiles, so users can just list all the emails of people they want to know about, and it tells you whether or not they were laid off. So I still have my private copy of that spreadsheet. That’s how bleak it is. I have my layoff-checker spreadsheet.
If I get laid off, I’ll find out via an email sent at 7 a.m. to my personal email. By the time I get that email, I will already have lost access to all of my work accounts and everything internal. So if I am impacted, I won’t have any way to figure out who else was other than going on LinkedIn.
Does having a concrete date make you feel more stressed about looming layoffs than before?
Well, it has been very clear that layoffs were happening even before the announcement. And with no sense of timing, there have been weeks where I am checking my email every single morning to know whether or not I still have a job and I should bother to get up and commute in.
So it actually alleviates some of that stress in the short term, because I haven’t needed to check my email for the past few weeks, but it also makes it pretty clear that there is gonna be a massive event, and I am as at risk as all the rumors seemed to hint I have been.
How are you feeling about that now?
I feel torn. Working here is not easy. From the outside, there’s massive negative sentiment, and there’s certainly something there. But the pain of working here is not very well understood. It’s this grand calculus of what it costs to live in the Bay Area and what personal sacrifices you are willing to make and what you’re willing to do for money. On the one hand, I feel massively privileged and lucky to work at a place like this. On the other hand, I’m like, where is my line?
I have been coming to the end of my Meta tenure for a while, so in some ways, this might force me to do something I want to be doing anyway.
So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been. But I don’t have confidence right now that I would be able to. My partner is home with our kids, so I’m currently the breadwinner, and it’s pretty intimidating to think that might disappear.
What a great interview! Terrific insight to the conditions at Meta. What a sh*tshow
Walk me through the roller coaster of emotions. Have you ever laid on your couch and just cried for two hours?
I tend to cry in the shower.
I will say that when I’m in office, I have on more of a brave face. But when I’m at home, if I have breaks where I might normally have had a lovely lunch in the sun, I definitely spend a good amount of that time sort of despondent somewhere in my house.
A lot of my feelings about my job are about the general chaos and not just the layoffs. There have already been two reorgs in the past six months. I am generally dissatisfied with leadership and angry that I’m meant to be productive. And simultaneously, I’m trying to be productive, both because I don’t want to be seen as a low performer who’s at risk, and because I don’t want to let down my colleagues.
So I sort of vacillate between being like, “OK, just keep your head down. Just try to do the good things that you think are worth doing,” and being like, “Oh, should I pretend I’m sick today, ‘cause I could not possibly show up and be a half-decent human?”
How does the stress compare to other points in your career?
This is as anxious and stressed as I have ever been at a job. I’m also just in a life planning phase. Should we move? Should we have another kid? Those are questions that are so dependent on finances. We’re definitely delaying some of these real conversations until after May 20. But at the same time, I’m already hearing rumors there will be another round of layoffs in the fall. So, like, when could I make a decision?
What’s the vibe in the office?
There’s a lot of doomsday joking going around. Very openly in [chat] groups that include directors and even VPs, people are posting memes about getting laid off, dancing skeletons, these kinds of things.
The other thing that’s a bit strange is that leadership is really not talking at all about the layoffs. The expectation is sort of like, “Be an adult, suck it up. This is what it’s like to have a job.” And it’s a little shocking, the lack of compassion. Of course, people are going to be upset that they may lose their job. Of course, that’s going to have an impact on productivity. Imagining there’s a world in which that may not be true is delusional.
One thing that happened over the winter is that we started having AI notes turned on for all of our video meetings. In the past month or so, it’s been much more common to see those being [manually] turned off so that people can speak more candidly about rumors they’re hearing about layoffs.
Are people taking mental health leave?
Absolutely. It’s actually reasonably common at Meta. It feels like a bit of an open secret. There’s a lot of people in my group who are out on leave right now.
Is there a sense that using more AI might protect you from being cut?
We’re getting some pretty mixed messages. In an all-hands meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, our head of HR said pretty clearly that AI use will not be a part of how layoffs are determined. But there is massive pressure to use AI, and there are a lot of internal leaderboards about AI use. People are absolutely looking at the amount of tokens they spend, the amount of minutes they spend using AI, and sharing that around publicly.
I will admit, I do sometimes talk to our internal chatbot and ask somewhat inane questions just to feel like I’m spending some minutes and spending some tokens. I fear that if I don’t have those logged minutes, at some point that will reflect really negatively on me.
Meta recently added key-logging software. How does that make you feel?
There was actually a really interesting post on an internal employee forum recently that was suggesting teams or humans that are able to replace themselves should get paid out five years’ compensation and then laid off as a way to reward people for replacing themselves. The first time I read it, I thought it was pretty bleak, but I think it’s actually pretty in touch with reality. It got a lot of support, which was interesting to see.
What do you wish people understood about what it’s like to work at Meta right now?
The pain of working here. The tradeoffs. A moment like this, where not only is some of the work maybe not great for society, but also we’re not being treated like humans, and as a manager, not really being allowed to treat my people that much like humans. The pay is good. It’s hard to have a clear feeling about anything else.
At the all-hands, execs weren’t super empathetic or human. It was sort of like: Just keep going. Just keep doing the work. Here are some facts about layoffs. Not, hey, maybe we made a mistake. But there was something Zuckerberg said that resonated with me. He said something like, I wish I could tell you I knew what was gonna happen, but AI is changing so quickly, nobody knows what’s gonna happen, and we’re doing our best. I don’t believe that he has the employees’ best interests in mind, but I do understand that this feels like a time of radical change.
So on the one hand, leadership has an impossible problem. On the other hand, they are not at all empathetic enough or human enough in how they are leading humans through this era.
Even if we haven’t lost our jobs to AI yet, we’re being commoditized in advance.
If you get laid off, can you find another job in tech?
I really don’t know. I do know a good number of people in my field who I consider to be very talented who have not had a lot of luck and are still looking six months or a year later. That makes me very nervous. At the same time, I’ve been working for a long time. I have a lot of connections in the Bay Area, so I’m hopeful that some of my fear is overblown. I don’t really wanna find out.
Will you stay at Meta?
It is pretty terrible, and I think I will probably look for another role, hopefully while still being employed. There are a few things I wanna finish out, but I don’t think this is a place I can stay much longer, especially with the continued rumors of more layoffs. It is too distracting and impossible to plan my own life. Yeah ... can’t do it.
May 20 (Reuters) - Intuit (INTU.O) is laying off about 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees worldwide, to streamline operations and sharpen focus on its key bets including its AI efforts, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
CEO Sasan Goodarzi sent an email to staff earlier in the day, saying that reducing complexity and simplifying the structure would help it deliver better products, according to the memo and a source familiar with the matter.
Intuit, which is scheduled to report third-quarter results later on Wednesday, did not immediately return a request for comment. Its shares were down nearly 5% in morning trading.
It joins a growing list of companies that have announced job cuts this year, with some blaming the layoffs on higher efficiencies brought on by AI, including Jack Dorsey's Block(XYZ.N), Amazon(AMZN.O) and Pinterest(PINS.N).
Goodarzi said in his email the layoffs would help Intuit sharpen its focus on the company's big bets, including efforts to infuse AI technology across its services.
Shares of software companies slide as investors fear AI disruption
The company has signed multi-year deals with AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI to integrate their AI models into its software, and add Intuit's personalized tax, finance, accounting and marketing capabilities into Claude and ChatGPT.
The last day for impacted staff in the United States will be July 31 and they will receive 16 weeks of base pay and two extra weeks for every year at Intuit as part of the severance package, the memo on Wednesday showed.
The company is also winding down its Reno and Woodland Hills offices as part of a strategic restructuring to consolidate teams in key hubs, according to the memo.
Intuit had about 18,200 employees in seven countries as of July 31, 2025, according to the company's annual report.
Silicon Valley employees have grown increasingly concerned about AI disruption in recent months after over 140 tech companies laid off more than 111,000 employees this year, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website tracking sectorwide job cuts. The figure was around 124,636 for 2025.
At the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in January, two executives told Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies that were already planning layoffs.
FAGMAN interviews only work for specific places, otherwise HR-Tech-HM is fine. And if you're one of the interviewers, you simply reject any candidate whose name you cannot pronounce.
I agree. I’ve interviewed and filled dozens of positions in my time for technical roles up to the PhD level, from junior roles up to director roles, and have found the numerous and extended interviews bizarre. You generally know what is bullshit and what isn’t with a few questions. Fortunately I’ve only ever had to fire one of those employees. I just have not seen the value in putting these applicants through the wringer and I’m completely opposed to the idea of the pain being a part of the process. I do agree that it’s better to not hire than have a bad hire but I’m not sure you’re going to know more about that with a take home assignment or a bunch of extra interviews. Maybe I’ve just been lucky.
They're an IQ test in disguise, or at least they were until the Chinese and Indians built question bank websites (e.g. 1Point3Acres) and memorized hundreds of possible questions to brute force them.
