Meta is cutting staff again

Meta is cutting staff again. It's 5% of the total staff, about 3,600 employees.

Last year and the year before last, the number of layoffs exceeded 20,000, and another considerable number of layoffs are carried out here. The total number of employees after dismissal is expected to be in the late 60,000 level.

It is said that they will fire low performers, and considering that Meta is a software technology company, it can be estimated that developers will account for a large portion of the layoffs. Previous layoffs were also centered on developers.
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Meta's corporate earnings have risen even higher after it made a layoff in 2023.

It's a fundamental improvement in AI technology in marketing and advertising targeting systems (Apple's ATT played a significant role in improving Meta's targeting technology),
This also means that even high-level AI technology development no longer requires a large amount of developers.

Who will replace the vacancy due to dismissal?

Mark Zuckerberg recently said this.

"Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of midlevel engineer that you have at your company that can write code."

"Maybe by 2025, Meta and other companies working on this will have AI that can write code like an intermediate engineer in your company."

Many of the vacancies are supposed to be replaced by AI.
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Looking at the history of software developers, I think there is a good chance that the profession of "software developers" remains and will continue to exist.

However, in the process, the technology and role of software developers have changed steadily.

Assembly developers and Fortran developers were important in the days when it was important to just give commands to computers.

Abstraction and collaboration were important in the process of creating tools to solve complex problems. This is the background of the emergence of the C++ language and Java.

After the advent of GUI and Web, interacting well with users became important. It was the emergence of UI developers.

Since software came into our daily lives, software methodologies that can manage complex and frequent changes to requirements have become important.

In the process, developers who were/are not adapted to the change disappeared from the market.

Entering the AI era, technology to solve problems using AI is now important.
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Meta's "underperformer" is likely to be a replacement for AI.

If we enter the developer market anew, the ability to develop using AI will be essential.

For current developers, we need to respond to the reality that AI-powered developers will survive, recalling the history of Fortran developers being fired a long time ago and hiring around developer C, and the survival of developers who can respond to the mobile environment after the advent of the iPhone.