The great 2024/2025/2026 tech firings, and what happens to all that clue

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.

 

Being accused of taking down a Data Centre, or "what happens when adrian is the only one who isn't oversubscribed on power?"

This happened circa what, 2008? 2007? I forget now. Anyway, it was a while ago now - and it wasn't my fault - but at the time it was pretty "wtf oh shit I'm in so much trouble" scary levels of scary.

So here we go.

Around that time I was running a little consulting / hosting company. I went into the data centre which hosted my equipment to install a second hand Dell I had acquired and tested. I plugged it into the rack, then plugged in the power, then pushed the on button.

Then bang. Then everything went dark. Then bang again.

Then I get a phone call on the VOIP phone in the data centre. It was their owners, asking me what the fuck I had done.

Anyway, it turned out that everything was dead. It wasn't just that the circuit breakers had tripped. A large part of their power equipment in the DC had also gone.

So yes, I was blamed for taking out a whole data centre. By plugging in one Dell server.

But why was I not in court over it? Why am I not still paying back the damages? Well, it turns out there's way, way more to the story.

First up they added a new rule - "You need to test equipment at this outlet/breaker before you install it." Cool, my server definitely passed that test. It worked just fine.

But then it turns out that although my rack was perfectly under the rated current limits, the other racks were not. Like, in any meaningful way. There were some other customers way, way over their allotted power. So when I plugged in my server - again, I'm way way under my own rack power allotment - I tripped some breaker on the distribution board.

Tripping that breaker meant that the other phase now took the brunt of the load. Again, my rack is fine, but everyone elses was apparently not, so it .. pulled very hard on that rail. And it immediately tripped the second phase breaker.

But that wasn't it.

Then, the second click was when they tried remote flipping the breakers back on.  The massive draw of power on phases when the computers in the data centre were powered back up caused some part of their power distribution setup to just plain fail. I forget the exact details here; I think the UPS was pulled on pretty hard too in that instant and I vaguely recall it also got cooked.

I had like, four? servers, a router and a switch. I was definitely not going to cause inrush problems. But the big hosting customers? Apparently they .. had more. Much, much more. Now this isn't my first rodeo when it comes to power sequencing of servers in a data centre - I had done this for like, a LOT of Sun T1s in circa 2000, staging how to turn them on a rack at a time upon a full power-off / power-on cycle event. But apparently this wasn't done by either the data centre or the hosting customers. All power, all on, all at once.

Now, I'm a small fry customer with one rack still paying the early adopter pricing. The companies in question had a lot more racks and were paying a lot more. So, this was all mostly swept under the rug, I stopped being blamed, and over the next few months we all got emails from the data centre telling us about the "new, very enforced power limits per rack, and we're going to keep an eye on it."

Anyway, fun times from ye olde past when I was doing dumb stuff but people were making much more money doing much dumber stuff at times.