So yeah, I was caught up in the Meta/Facebook layoffs in March 2026.
There are a lot of parallels to the 2001 dot com bust, and I'd like to just briefly touch on one of them now.
There's been a lot of layoffs over the last year or three in tech. I think the tech market has seen what, more than 100,000 in the last year alone? And most of those aren't due to performance. There are a lot of very smart people who've spent quite a few years learning how to build, debug and maintain all kinds of interesting stuff.
And they're now in the marketplace.
When this happened in 2000/2001, you had a whole lot of people who learned how to build internet tech and infrastructure at companies that were pushing the boundaries with things. And they were let go, due to downturns, change of focus, all kinds of reasons.
A lot of those people went off to eventually build the new stuff that likely overtook a lot of those internet and telco companies in the 90s.
I think this is going to happen with the layoffs from Meta/Facebook and other technology companies. Meta ran (runs?) a huge research arm in Reality Labs pushing the boundaries in AR, XR, wearable/portable technology. There have been plenty of public technology demonstrations showing all the stuff going on before the current AI trend.
Just over in Reality Labs - people learned how to build stuff from ASIC design up through optics, display, camera technology, highly miniaturized electronic design and power, all the fun stuff around 2D/3D audio and video stuff on wearable glasses (how do you provide head and world locked surfaces to your applications and not have it be so laggy that it gives people headaches?), making it all work over wifi, and then .. well imagine the lessons learned in what can and can't work in manufacturing the devices and where the pain points are in current technology. (And yes, a lot more I can't talk about, for hopefully obvious reasons.)
That knowledge is now embedded in a few hundred people, soon to be a few thousand people, who are being laid off. And that's just reality labs - the other people spread throughout the company and other technology companies have gathered a lot of experience about how to make and grow technology "stuff", what works and what doesn't.
At some point some of those people are going to make startups that do really amazing things. The technology underpinning a lot of what people have been trying to make now will get better (and I will argue that right now it is good enough - if you're willing to shift your focuses a little) and things will appear that will knock the socks off the current offerings. They're not what you would view as "founders" in the bay area tech scene. They're the people who know how to make things work, not necessarily the people who got rich early on in the scene.
Just like what happened after the dot com bust of 2001.
I've heard from a few people now that those they're hiring from Meta and other large technology companies are top notch and know what they're doing. You can't spend 10 years at a company that heavily invested in cutting edge R&D and not learn a thing or two.
I think its their loss, and .. eventually, everyone elses gain.
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