Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams)
Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
That's pretty much what multiple people working at FB at the time told me over the past years. It was also the conclusion of a third-party analysis of the FB mobile app which literally included multiple libraries for doing the same thing for different parts of the app which were developed by different teams. This was also true for the Facebook web app at least during the early React years.
Its more like, if x team doesn't deliver a functionality that y team needs, y team would need to come up with an alternative/short term solution in order to answer y customers/users. Sometimes alternatives doesn't go away even after a permanent fix comes along.
Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.
Eh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here.
If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.