How FAANG Became General Electric
The promise expired. Nobody sent the update.
There used to be a social cost to laying off people. Not a legal one — a reputational one. The kind that made engineers think twice about joining you, and recruiters nervous about representing you. For a long time, Big Tech understood this — Google went decades without a mass layoff. It was part of the brand. Not just the free lunch and the 20% time1, but the implicit promise underneath all of it: if you’re good enough to get in, you’re good enough to stay.
A whole generation of engineers made real decisions based on that promise. They took the equity over the salary. They turned down less exciting jobs at less exciting companies. They optimized their entire careers for a shot at the logo — because the logo meant something beyond compensation. It meant you’d won a kind of stability that the rest of the market couldn’t offer.
Then, in 2022, Meta cut 11,000 people and called it the “year of efficiency”2.
What happened next matters more than the cuts themselves. Meta’s net income went from $23 billion to $60 billion in two years3. The stock went up. And every board in Silicon Valley took notice. The lesson learned was simple: you can do this, the market will reward you for it, and the reputational costs you were afraid of don’t actually exist.
Amazon watched.
Then Amazon cut 27,000 people4 — a company that had largely avoided mass layoffs since the dot-com crash, a company that posted $59 billion in profit the year after5. The justification was familiar: efficiency, streamlining, investing in the future. The stock went up.
The taboo didn’t erode gradually. It died over one winter.
None of this required malice. That’s the thing that’s hard to sit with. No one had to lie, or scheme, or decide to betray anyone. It’s just what happens when a company runs a play, gets rewarded, and other companies notice. The promise wasn’t broken so much as it quietly expired — somewhere between the press release and the earnings call, with no announcement and no acknowledgement that it had ever existed.
I watched a principal engineer get laid off recently. Sixteen years at the same company. Started his career there. Smart, productive, the kind of person who just makes things work. But he’d been on the wrong side of an internal argument — backed a project that lost, in an org where losing that particular argument turned out to matter. He got an email. I found out through LinkedIn. That’s just how it goes now.
He didn’t fail. The company didn’t fail. Someone ran the numbers, and the numbers included things that were never in the job description.
FAANG companies were never a different type of company. They were regular companies that had an unusually long run of growth, and the promise was implicit — which made it easy to keep, and easy to let expire. When it became expensive, they did what companies do.
Stop holding them to a standard they invented for recruiting purposes and have now quietly retired. They’re often still good places to work, they pay well, and the problems are interesting. But they’re not a covenant. They’re an employer.
The free lunch is probably still there. The promise isn’t.
Google’s 20% time policy encouraged employees to spend one day a week on self-directed projects. Via CNBC.
Zuckerberg announced the “Year of Efficiency” in a March 2023 memo to employees a few months after layoffs. Via The New York Times.
Meta’s net income grew from $23.2 billion in 2022 to $62.4 billion in 2024. Via MacroTrends.
Amazon’s layoff announcement via AP News, January 2023.
Amazon swung from a $2.7 billion loss in 2022 to $30 billion profit in 2023 following 27,000 layoffs. Via MacroTrends.