In news you can file under 'painfully predictable,' Meta spent another quarter burning through the GDP of a small nation in a bid to birth the metaverse.
What the hell are they even spending all this money on when they don’t have much to show for it?
Well, about half of that is probably salary. There are apparently 17,000 Reality Labs employees. If you assume the average salary is 100K or more, which is reasonable for tech jobs in high COL areas, you’re already looking at a couple billion after benefits that the company has to spend on headcount. The other spend is probably third-party contracts, hardware, etc.
Total compensation (salary + stock) for software developers at big tech companies in the USA starts around $200k and goes up from there. With 5+ years experience, it’s not uncommon to have $500k+ total comp. You can check https://levels.fyi/ for data. E3 is the starting level at Meta, and 5 years experience would be around E5 or E6.
Plus you need to include all the other benefits like 401k (retirement fund), health insurance, etc.
I don’t know if that headcount I listed includes contract employees. They typically get compensated far less, and anecdotally I’ve been told by a former Meta friend that there are more contracted developers than salaried there. And what’s the ratio of software developers compared to other personnel? HR, QA, marketing, sales, etc? Employees in other countries? I figured a more conservative estimate was reasonable for cost overall.
the headline says that Meta lost 4.5 billion in the 2nd quarter. Also the article says they meta lost 3.9 billion in the first quarter. I think that is an a 8billion dollar loss in 6months.
Unless I’m mistaken on the accounting, You shouldnt count a full years salary when comparing it to a 3 month loss, because meta has only paid 3 months compensation during the 2nd quarter.
Using your numbers
( 17,000 x $100,000 )/4 is $425mill. In salary paid out in the quarter. Although software and hardware engineers at meta make way more than 100k/year.
Well, about half of that is probably salary. There are apparently 17,000 Reality Labs employees. If you assume the average salary is 100K or more, which is reasonable for tech jobs in high COL areas, you’re already looking at a couple billion after benefits that the company has to spend on headcount. The other spend is probably third-party contracts, hardware, etc.
Total compensation (salary + stock) for software developers at big tech companies in the USA starts around $200k and goes up from there. With 5+ years experience, it’s not uncommon to have $500k+ total comp. You can check https://levels.fyi/ for data. E3 is the starting level at Meta, and 5 years experience would be around E5 or E6.
Plus you need to include all the other benefits like 401k (retirement fund), health insurance, etc.
I don’t know if that headcount I listed includes contract employees. They typically get compensated far less, and anecdotally I’ve been told by a former Meta friend that there are more contracted developers than salaried there. And what’s the ratio of software developers compared to other personnel? HR, QA, marketing, sales, etc? Employees in other countries? I figured a more conservative estimate was reasonable for cost overall.
17,000 employees is ridiculous in itself. It’s at least an order of magnitude too high.
the headline says that Meta lost 4.5 billion in the 2nd quarter. Also the article says they meta lost 3.9 billion in the first quarter. I think that is an a 8billion dollar loss in 6months.
Unless I’m mistaken on the accounting, You shouldnt count a full years salary when comparing it to a 3 month loss, because meta has only paid 3 months compensation during the 2nd quarter.
Using your numbers
( 17,000 x $100,000 )/4 is $425mill. In salary paid out in the quarter. Although software and hardware engineers at meta make way more than 100k/year.