Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0].
Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go.
Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move.
Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1].
Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits.
ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2]
A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3].
Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!).
Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced).
My question for anyone still working at these companies:
I save all the jobs I apply to, so it's fairly easy to check/compare and I found plenty of cases where job ads get reposted after some time.
In one instance, I applied for a role in December '25, got a (boilerplate) rejection email a couple of days later (although my profile directly matched the job requirements and I had previous experience working in that specific field), job ad goes offline and re-appeared 3 months later - exact same time and job description.
I'll write a full article in a year or two, but here's the short version: some weeks ago, as I was looking for job offers, I found one that was interesting. As I didn't knew the company, I wanted to do my due diligence and check them out.
I open the website and find a ClickFix (the "prove you're not a bot" type) attack on their main page.
I spent over 2 hours and a small (but bigger than 0) amount of my own money to report the issue by emailing and even trying to call them (they didn't have any dedicated responsible disclosure page or contact).
After some time, they finally answered my emails, took down the website and "fixed" the issue.
When I finally applied for the role, got ghosted for a week and only after I wrote them again, asking for an update, I got rejected as they allegedly were looking for someone more junior - though the job title was explicitly "Senior XXX Lead".
Some years ago, I went to interview (in person) at a big European financial institution.
As I got there around lunchtime, I happened to get to the front door at the same time as some employees were returning from lunch who, very kindly, held the door open for me.
I was in their office around their computers, unsupervised and unaccompanied, for 10-15 minutes, enough time to plant some O.MG USB-C cables.
During the interview, I had a chance to talk to the CTO and told them what happened and how I was allowed access in the office, and immediately saw his face change and quickly change topic, and end the interview.
Unsurprisingly, I didn't get the job - I should have probably kept my mouth shut.
I almost fell for a very sophisticated phishing attack last December and most of the "verifiable" information was from my LinkedIn account.
For each role I had described some of the tasks and accomplishments and this was used in the phishing message.
Since then, I removed my photo, changed my name only to initials and removed all the role-specific information.
It's a bit of a bummer as I'm currently in the process of looking for a new job and unfortunately having a LinkedIn profile is still required in some places, but once I find it, I'll delete my profile.
yes, they were (theoretically) a python developer, should have mentioned this was an ML role (your guess is right, slice just before the last char)
Just to be clear: the main problem is not that they did not know what `:-1` was - there are many weird syntax additions with every version - understandable.
IMHO the problem is that there's usually a single interviewer that decides go/no go.
We all have biases, so leaving such an important decision (like hiring an EM) to one person is, (again IMHO) ...stupid .
somewhat off-topic: I had an interview for an Engineering Manager position with the Head of Engineering.
They had some leet code problem prepared and I tried solving it and failed.
During the challenge, I used some python string operand (:-1) (and maybe some other stuff) that they didn't knew.
In the end, I failed the challenge as I didn't do it in the O(n) way...
These kind of stupid challenges exemplify what's wrong with hiring these days: one interviewer, usually some "vp"/"head of" decides what is the "correct" way to write some code, when they (sometimes) themselves couldn't write a line of code (since they've been "managers" for a millennia)
ps. they actually did not know what `:-1` means ...I rest my case