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Roses are red, Meta is blue, Reality Labs lost $4.5 billion during Q2 (www.gamedeveloper.com)

submitted 3 months ago by simple@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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What the hell are they even spending all this money on when they don't have much to show for it?

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[–] count_dongulus@lemmy.world 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] dan@upvote.au 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] count_dongulus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 5 points 3 months ago

17,000 employees is ridiculous in itself. It's at least an order of magnitude too high.