TIL Slashdot is still around.. haven't been on that site since the early 2000s.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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So that’s like $12B/year. At $200k/employee/year that would be 60,000 people!
How many people do they have working on VR, or is this creative accounting to bury operating expenses as capital investments?
Compensation for engineers in the Bay area will average much higher than $200k, and that's not counting benefits (medical, etc.). So cost to the company will be way higher than 200k/employee.
For a project that has hardware, there will be large expenses associated with that
custom silicon has huge setup costs, for example.
It'd be much more reliable if we can see the real data that shows how much these employees cost the company.
Employees like this usually cost the company at least double their salary in support and benefits, so you're probably talking about half that at most.
Along with that, there is probably a lot of R&D expenses as well.
Finally, Meta seems to be subsidizing the consumer hardware, so that's probably hurting the bottom line even more.
I'm not really sure if that's a lot of money nowadays
It's only like 1/4th-1/10th Zucks wealth. When you're a billionaire the rules are made up and the points don't matter. They'll be fine.
Oh don't worry, we're all keeping score. But past a certain point, I suppose they don't matter anymore.
That's like one and a half Twitters?
I don't understand how that's even possible when they have so little to show for it. I like to imagine it's full of maliciously-compliant people trying to bleed Meta dry from the inside.
Just for one example, it's well known that they sell their hardware at a steep loss just to try to entice people to get locked in to their ecosystem. Meta's plan is to get VR devices into people's homes and then figure out how to spy on them to make money off of it afterwards, and in the bargain use the piles and piles of cash they make from Facebook to squeeze out any competitors and become the defacto monopoly in the VR market.
For this blatantly obvious reason I always recommend that nobody buy a Meta/Facebook VR device, ever, for any reason, no matter how "cheap" it is.
Let Zuck Zuck continue to lose money on it until he either goes broke or gives up. This is a rare case where deliberately not buying a product from the dominant player in the market can literally help the entire scene as a whole.
Except if you can root it ofc.
Sounds like good news to me. People without any moral compass and malicious intent, only existing to enrich themselves and have no regard how their actions and/or products affect millions of people and society as a whole can go f*** themselves. Wish for Zuck to lose every single penny as he is truly a POS.
Send the bill to Zuck
Wait, Slashdot is still around?
always has been.
Are there any other websites that still let you put in your AIM and ICQ numbers? Or brag about your super low user ID? 19437 BTW 🤣
79 🫠
bows in solemn gesture
no bowing necessary, but you did remind me to go log in again. 🤝
I remembered my login, my UID is in the 200,000s so I'm not as cool as you.
The place doesn't seem to have changed at all, and that's not necessarily a good thing.