🥵 Tech's Talent Wars Have Come Back to Bite It

Plus: The Reason for Meta's Massive Layoffs?, The Age of Social Media Is Ending, and more…

Today’s pick

Tech's Talent Wars Have Come Back to Bite It. When Stripe, a payments start-up valued at $74 billion, laid off more than 1,000 employees this month, its co-founders blamed themselves. “We overhired for the world we're in,” they wrote. “We were much too optimistic.”… (Erin Griffith / The New York Times)

erin griffith @eringriffith

New from me: The tech layoff letters all sound the same -- CEOs blame themselves for overhiring. Here's a look at how tech's talent wars turned into 100,000 lost jobs (and counting).

nytimes.comTech’s Talent Wars Have Come Back to Bite ItHiring the best, the brightest and the highest number of employees was a badge of honor at tech companies. Not anymore as layoffs surge.

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The Reason for Meta's Massive Layoffs? Ghosts in the Machine. Remember Libra, Meta's ambitious plan to enter the cryptocurrency market? Or Lasso, Meta's ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? Alongside projects like Shops, Meta's ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook into e-commerce giants its podcast… (Chris Stokel-Walker / WIRED)

WIRED @WIRED

In pursuit of becoming the everything platform, Mark Zuckerberg has thrown a lot of stuff at the wall. Precious little has stuck, except for the headcount brought to work there: wired.com/story/meta-lay… 📸: Getty

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The Age of Social Media Is Ending. It's over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg's empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk's takeover of… (Ian Bogost / The Atlantic)

Ian Bogost @ibogost

It was never a *terrible* idea to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons. The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession.

theatlantic.comThe Age of Social Media Is EndingIt never should have begun.

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Musk Tells Twitter Staff Bankruptcy of the Social Network Possible. Elon Musk, in his first address to Twitter Inc. employees since purchasing the company for $44 billion, said that bankruptcy was a possibility, according to a person familiar with the matter. Yoel Roth and Robin Wheeler, two executives who until… (Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg)

Bloomberg @business

Twitter resignations in the last 24 hours: - Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth - Sales VP Robin Wheeler - CISO Lea Kissner - Chief privacy officer Damien Kieran - Chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty

trib.alBloomberg - Are you a robot?

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Substack @SubstackInc

Today we're introducing the Substack Bestseller badge. Paying readers, not Substack, decide who gets a badge. We don’t give out these badges for subjective reasons and they can’t be bought. Learn more: on.substack.com/p/badge

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