Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts.
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.
Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem.
There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a solution because it's easy and popular but not necessarily a good fit for your specific requirements, etc. Many of these practices are popular unfortunately. That's not to say others don't have great ideas, just don't copy them blindly.
Say what you will about MS, but the fact that Windows was backward compatible for so long (it may still be, I haven't kept up) is damn good engineering.
Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate.
Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, even if that means the solution is scrappy and unpolished today, so long as it solves an important problem cheaply and effectively.
In large organizations, accountability for actual value delivery is so diluted across the org chart that it practically disappears.
Leaders gravitate toward building bloated "internal platforms" that offer little external utility. Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact. It becomes a systemic shield, allowing the old guard to justify their headcount without delivering new value.
Software engineering is uniquely plagued by this. Civil engineers understand their objective: build a bridge that safely carries traffic within a specific budget. They don't invent a novel, hyper-complex suspension architecture when a standard short-span bridge will do the job.
I would decouple "build things people want" from "business function". I would put in the former bucket things like: making the computer work smoothly and run apps. I would put in the latter bucket things like: show advertising to the user when the log in. Engineering should always be about the first, or it's bad engineering. The second is far more controversial - business leaders would like you to consider it good engineering to do that, but you get to interpose your own ethics, but you'll probably be fired for having ethics, but that doesn't make it bad engineering.
Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one wants to be part of. There is a lifecycle to product development and different phases require different tradeoffs. You sound like you align with the builder phase and that's great.
I will also note that most civil engineering is about maintaining existing structures and roadways, not building new ones.
> Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact.
Having tech led teams at both high-profile and low-profile tech companies, that is _not_ my experience.
Most engineers worth their salt value quality. Product Management generally doesn't see quality as a feature, therefore doesn't take it into account. For short-lived code, quality is indeed over-rated. For long-lived code, quality is the thing that determines whether you can keep improving or tuning other features or whether you'll miss deadlines. Sadly, retrofitting quality in an existing codebase is awfully expensive.
There's also one important, but often undervalued, aspect. Overwhelmingly, today's tech world has been built by neurodivergent engineers. In my experience, neurodivergent engineers tend to value getting to the end of things, rather than letting them drop mid-way. This can absolutely be seen as over-engineering, but it's often a cognitive scaffolding that will ensure that the work can be resumed (by them or anyone else) even after context-switching to something entirely different.
Whether it actually _is_ over-engineering often depends on how well the engineer is aware of the actual needs, rather than being spoon-fed instructions without visibility. Or on the maturity and skill of the engineer, depending on the case.
My best friend bought a house. She noticed within the first month that the name of the road she lived on was misspelled in Google Maps. Specifically, it's a slightly unusual spelling of the road name. Like "Chickorie" vs "Chickory". It's particularly annoying because there's a road the next town over with the traditional spelling. It doesn't even share address numbers, but Google Maps still frequently misdirects people.
It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well.
My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was some conflict with overlapping systems deep in the map bowels - and the bar is visible again. It's just good luck that the owner happened to talk to me and I happened to know someone who looked into it!
This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google.
The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.
Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.
This is something U.S.-Americans often do not (want to) understand. The misconception often is that just because their legislative efforts are an ineffective, lobby-ridden crapshoot, that the free market is automatically the best answer to everything.
You can affect really good and positive change through lawmaking, the entire point of it is to regulate and intervene when the wellbeing of the populous and fair competition is in jeopardy.
They became big enough because they were free and had massive cash behind them to destroy all competition (Mapquest, Garmin and others)
Now they are this big, they have become quasi public record for many other organizations who rely on this data.
Since they want to keep costs low, if their data is wrong, it can have significant impacts on your life and getting someone to correct it is almost impossible.
Want to, not really. Want GMaps moved from Google? Yes. If it can stand on it's own free, fine whatever. If not and people need to be charged for it, fine.
These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?"
Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?
Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.
I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.
When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
Google just lost a lawsuit by an unnamed big media company in Germany because its AI kept telling people the media company was a scam. This is the only form of feedback that companies like Google actually listen to.
> I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
My anecdote is worth just as much as yours. I moved cross-country in early 2016 (for work at Google) and noticed when we closed on our house that the next street over was mis-pronounced by Google Maps. I reported it and it was fixed within a week.
Nothing -- I reported it via the consumer Google Maps function. In fact, I've reported several Maps errors over the years and all have been addressed fairly promptly. This includes before I worked at Google, during my time there, and after leaving.
Ha. But I guess I was too subtle. Google is likely to care more about addresses in the Bay Area, because if they're wrong, their Tesla or Waymo could drive them into a ditch.
Google Maps put a town label near my parents' house that is a name that was on some old maps in the 1910s, but fell completely out of use before the current suburb was built in the 70s and 80s. I had never heard it once in my life until I was in my early 20s and met a transplant who had picked up the name from Google Maps. I attempted to report it as inaccurate (USGS has had it as being out of use for decades) multiple times over the years, but no reply.
Most of the neighbourhood names in my large European city were like this on Google Maps. Either old names or hyperspecific landmark/street names that I had never heard being used as synecdoche for the area.
This was definitely true 4-5 years ago. I looked now and it's mostly better at most levels of zoom.
Google maps uses suggestive names (e.g. a park walkway given a name by the municipality) as official road names, and when it does that it marked it as a cycling path. Both are invalid and cycling on them is illegal. This has been going on for years.
Google Maps have an address API some companies use when filling out addresses for shipments.
Despite my building existing for over 10 years, putting in “flat number, building name” into that system will be rewritten to “house number, building name road” which is an address on a he other side of town (and London ain’t exactly small).
The only universal address input is a freeform text box. Optionally with a country, which should also be a freeform text box because countries get created and destroyed and you won't remember to update it. City or district is probably okay - as a freeform text box - addresses without one can write (no district). But street addresses are different everywhere and must be freeform unless you're the government of that region.
More concretely, a postcode is usually specific to between 7 and 30 dwellings, in the usual case it's about 15 houses.
Contrary to common belief, they're not always on the same street, but in the vast majority of cases (like maybe 99%) house number + postcode is sufficient. Definitely flat number + building name/number + postcode should get your stuff there.
The trick is use the right keywords.
"Dear Sir and Madam of google, im writing you to inform you, about a possible liability your software opens itself up to, by referencing emergency vehicles to the wrong road. Example:
Usually street data comes from an official source. You probably should have reported the issue to the local government rather than Google. (Just because the name is correct on some government material doesn't mean it's correct everywhere.)
No kidding. When I zoom in on a few square miles around my house and ask to see restaurants, it shows only a few of them even though there is plenty of space -- it isn't like it has to prune some to make it readable. I zoom in and some appear that weren't there before ... why? There was room to display it before I zoomed in. Gaaah!
Oh wow I always complain about this, I didn't realize other people were also so frustrated by this. Tons and tons of cafes by my house, but I zoom in with about a six block radius, where there are at least 20 cafes or cafe-restaurants there, and literally 1 or 2 come up.
The grocer on my block is so tiny that I hit the max zoom before it shows up. If you pan around fiddle I can occasionally get it to appear, but it effectively does not exist according to google maps.
Yeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear.
I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.
Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.
This also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
It is still drawing bike lane networks in cemeteries and random bits of grass and pavement. So no. The way I see it is is actually worse than it was in 2006. When I opened it today it asked me if I would like to see Dua Lipa's recommended restaurants.
Not relative to its available resources. For example, there's still no option to penalize intersections. I'm still getting absurd side-street routes and unprotected lefts/crossings to save 1 minute on a 20-minute trip.
It's rather baffling how little they've improved it in certainly the last 15 years. Waze is certainly the better consumer product, even if it relies on similar (the same?) backend software. Apple Maps has caught up and passed it in terms of usable software, even if the actual map quality is worse in some places.
For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.
It's been up and down for about 8-12 years. Problems get fixed and new ones get added without a particular direction, at least that's what it feels like as a regular user. Some come back years after they were first fixed.
Maps peaked after Google acquired Waze in 2013 and integrated the data. Since then they've added worthless annoying social features and more advertising.
Go to a park near your house with walking paths in it. Compare Google Maps with OSM.
That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.
I’ve agreed for a long time… Unfortunately though, Apple Maps just added Ads, so expect them to start having the same issues as Google Maps does (like showing big ads for every location whenever you’re moving around at the map).
After Apple Maps being one of my favorite reasons for having an iPhone for the last 7ish years, I’m back to OpenStreetMaps mostly, or still Google to look up business hours. Sad… but having downloaded maps will probably be a good thing long-term
Google has said to turn right at an intersection where you are turning left for years because it doesn't know about a T shaped intersection that tens of thousands use a day.
Maps straight up can't navigate sanely in Australia I've found.
I've switched to OsmAnd for driving because it'll give a sensible main road following route.
Google Maps reliably sends me down residential roads and adds a whole bunch of turns and then winds up with idiot ideas like "turn right into this two way 4 lane road we tried to slightly avoid".
My house and street and surrounding streets still aren’t on Google Maps after a month post closing (new development). It’s on Apple Maps and Uber; Amazon and FedEx deliver.
Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.
It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.
It's a mixed bag at best. The product has had numerous features pushed, but in the US, the navigation feature is objectively worse than 5+ years ago. Too much spoonfeeding of directions to ensure the app is kept on. But the app won't actually tell you the freeway number and direction - which the driver can see on the dozen signs on the road.
Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.
I didn't realize till you said this how it's their fault I have to turn on my screen at every important turn to tell which road they mean, because they won't just say "turn onto the interchange, EXIT 7A".
I used to be able to view maps in 3D. Not anything fancy, just a tilt shift. This year I noticed the feature appears to be gone. Also, if I want to see my home city with an up to date overhead view from this side of 2023 to see what has been built lately, I have to go look up Sentinel imagery.
I would say Google Maps regressed, over bloated, showing ads or at least unrelated results. Mysterious hang-ups, where app refuses to work every once in a while.
Keyhole dates back to 2001 and draws on several precursors, eg: ERMapper (Perth, Western Australia) which offered similar functionality in the 1990s - in addition to computational process pipelines for, say, warping and geomosaicing inputs, multi spectral filtering (adding and subtracting weighted bands to sharpen certain features, etc).
ER Mapper was the first software I dog fooded that transferred images without the dial up scan line by scan line top down process that existed to that point in time.
The same discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and variation techniques occurred to several entities at much the same time .. some US patent pettiness killed a lot of development for a couple of years from 1999 forward:
I'd say it's devolved aggressively at least on mobile. Between the firehose of modal bullshit I didn't ask for, sub-optimal pathfinding, and annoying prompts from waze legacy features there's a ton of unwanted friction added to the process.
They literally would have kept the entire thing to themselves and never productized it. Think about how much investment capital and human capital OpenAI poured onto this by having their big "hello world" with ChatGPT.
They literally had a productionized transformer model (translate) which was the inspiration for all of this. The famous paper was written about a productionized ML Model.
They also had a productionized LLM in search (known as 'mums') before the whole "AI Chatbot" craze.
They also had a chat-tuned LLM chatbot (LaMDA) in testing internally. It was shown off over a year before ChatGPT was created (2021)... and later released as an app (AI test kitchen) before ChatGPT was announced.
ChatGPT may have been the big industry moment, but Google was releasing LLMs to production before OpenAI.
Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.
Google has bad governance, same with many other big businesses in the tech related sector partially because of the extremely generous position founders were in during the 00s and interest rates. In industries with lower margins like chemical/material industry you don't get away with this because managers in these industries are way better at telling value from non-value. There's been activist investors ( e.g. Christopher Hohn) who tried getting Google to run a tighter ship but with the dual stock setup there's not much which can be done.
The 2000s were a startup winter after the dotcom bubble burst. In those days you were extremely lucky if you could raise over $100k in funding and in revenue $100m was the ultimate fantasy. ZIRP was the 2010s
You're right, what did happen around that time is that founders would be kept in charge of their companies instead of being replaced by CEOs (e.g. Founders Fund). The combination of the founders staying in power facilitated with dual class shares/ZIRP in 2010s (Google had their 2004 IPO) would be more correct.
I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook.
They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.
My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.
That's back end. With the money they make they could have rewritten the front end so it doesn't have to reload everything whenever you upload an image.
Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P
If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.
A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.
One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.
They introduced desktop version, dark theme and multiple accounts post the acquisition by meta. Hate the ad and social stuff they're shoving down, though.
In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google).
WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.
IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).
I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.
Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).
Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.
Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).
Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.
I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.
The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.
At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.
There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.
Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire.
Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
That's funny about your last line about Messenger. When I was at Facebook in 2020 and 2021 I thought the "Lightspeed" version of Messenger [1] was something of an engineering marvel. Specically the way it was centered around SQLite as the datastore, how the sever side could integrate with it, and how the UI was power by this reactive-style framework written in C. With lots of testing to keep binary size under control and things working reliably. And the DX was not bad for all these constraints. I think CG/SQL [2] is one of the few open source artifacts from this effort.
There were other reasonably nicely engineered things there, like some of the code-as-configuration things in PHP like the ORM and the structured logging. Where you just write and commit code and the databases and data warehouses just get set up automatically.
The choice to have a monolithic web stack at Facebook had some benefits. The latency from landing a diff to being in prod was a couple of hours, not matter what part of the site you touched. And given an arbitrary URL, there was a tool that used static analysis to tell you which file handled that request. Compared to Google where every damn thing is a micro-service with its own variable release schedule and different ways of doing request routing. Trying to figure out where a request goes is combination of dynamic tracing of the RPC trace behind it plus a bunch of grepping through the related code bases.
All that said, I was far away from doing real engineering at Facebook. I accidentally joined a growth team. Which meant our teams remit was churning out all kinds of experiments to see what we could to do to make our team's number go up. I did not find this type of work enjoyable and quit. So I have a narrow perspective.
Also to give these multinational corporations some benefit of the doubt, some of the way they operate is path-dependent. They have hundreds of millions of lines code. So they can get to a point where it makes sense to hire a bunch of compiler engineers to fork PHP and make the Hack language. Whereas a startup would almost certainly never create a new programming language to write their product. To take solutions of this context and apply them to the outside world might not make sense.
Thank you for the insight this actually answer a lot of questions or suspicious I had with Google. Surprised about Android and now Fuchsia makes sense.
I wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.
> I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
That makes sense from a consumer point of view. I don't use FB much. In fact, I recently logged on a few times after a few years of a break. It's terrible. You can't even get conversation history anymore. You can talk to someone via the app on your phone, open Facebook in the browser on your computer and not see the messages there. Makes me wonder why is Meta still around?
I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.
So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames.
I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon
Same exact story for me in my prior company that I left lol. In my exit interview I said "I love literally every single person in the company, except for $PERSON because $PERSON has lost their fucking mind and is going to kill this company with their psychotic AI push". I was the 30th dev to leave in 2 months, in a company that had ~40-50 devs to begin with.
Can someone explain to me the symptoms of AI psychosis that you have witnessed? Because I know several 2nd hand stories of people going through this but I haven't seen it myself up close. I am curious about it because this is gonna be the new widespread-social-ill of the next decade
I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he makes insinuations that they had better get with the times or AI is going to replace them. An AI native developer, of course, would not ask annoying questions like "what is the purpose of this change" or "how do you know this will make things better"; this is a time for action, don't you see?
Fortunately for me, he's not senior enough to make my life miserable. But if he ran our engineering org I have no doubt he'd inflict many of the same problems the source article describes on us. Reassigning software engineers to data labeling has all the hallmarks of an idea that came through this process; any human manager would immediately identify the obvious, showstopping problems with it, but to an AI whose experience of the world is exclusively mediated through written text it's not so obvious.
> I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he ...
To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr eng more than agent related. Code isn't sacred — LLMs often easily generate absurdly overcomplicated garbage spaghetti code, but this appears to be getting better, and they are "steerable" towards better outputs with a few rounds of revisions, and some light process around a light spec, TDD, etc.
It's definitely agent related in some sense because it started very abruptly when he started using agents. I could believe a story where it's less "agents themselves have wrecked him" and more "agents have enabled his ambitions to scale to ideas he doesn't have the seniority to execute on".
I have had the chance recently to meet my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss at my current job and it is amazing how in this era of robber-baron capitalism we seem to be promoting exclusively the most unserious, irresponsible, and magical-thinking among us. The fish does seem to be rotting from the head. And it's not just some companies or institutions, it seems to be all of them. At least during the gilded age, the robber barons were serious people. I'd rather have Vanderbilt or Carnegie as my economic royalty than Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel. Vanderbilt and Carnegie may have been evil, but at least they had their heads on straight.
> Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac.
I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.
IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).
Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.
Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.
Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.
> I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.
This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.
Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.
I also read another lesson from this. The performance review system was already broken in the pre-AI golden age the article describes. Lines of code written and individual impact should not have been the goal. Team cohesion, architectural cohesion, building things that make actual sense are what you want.
I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are.
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state.
This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...
I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
> At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?
All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.
> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!
"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.
Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.
To me it is almost tautological that what I said is true. If software can’t solve a knowledge work problem, that means the software isn’t good enough and needs improved.
I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
It might be "enough" but it's not how the show industry works. There is no human story around it; the well-known actors and the people around them would have to be quite stupid to allow it too. And taking this development into the extreme, there will be no living well-known actors, just ai slop everywhere, and while the audience might not be the most demanding, surely that's not enough to make money in the long term.
Most will be replaced by the Soylent green factory after waiters and chefs become a niche luxury for those who did not find themselves economically crushed.
Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.
what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much.
No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.
Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.
I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.
> It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.
Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.
We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage.
At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.
> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals
That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.
It seems at this rate to avoid a large tech crash in the near future we need to start seeing real, transformative value being delivered by AI. Like, the promises are coming due. From where I sit, I don't see that happening. That's bad news.
If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI.
If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.
Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).
Based on existing corporate hierarchy it would probably be the board of directors. There would be some sort of collaboration service where managers/agents push up problems and solutions to the board and they vote yes or no
The grandparent comment of yours mentioned Delamain from Cyberpunk 2077. In that fictional scenario, the company purchased an AI which gradually took over its workforce: maintenance robots, drivers, etc. All that was left was the owners/board of directors, essentially.
What ended up happening was that the AI ended up tricking the board of directors by buying back the company for itself.
You find this out by poking around the abandoned offices of the company and read the emails on the computers. The whole reason you interact with Delamain is that it is basically using your human help to do some tasks that it can't do as an AI (fairly compensated, Delamain actually seems like a pretty stand up AI, and the strange legal status of the company is ignored by authorities because so many people depend on the service).
That scenario is starting to seem highly plausible as long as someone is sets up something badly enough.
> AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry
I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less.
AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams.
In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today).
In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality.
However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it.
It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption.
This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
I'm actually worried that as AI gets smarter and more capable, it will become able to induce AI psychosis in even more people. Either accidentally or on purpose, I have no idea about that part.
Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds.
The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.
So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.
And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.
(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )
The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.
I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.
Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
To be fair they’re doing it by increasingly immoral, unethical, and potentially illegal methods resulting in at this point over 300 lost lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny world wide, blowback over intentionally enabling scams and fraud for profit, enabling csam, trafficking, etc as long as they pay their ads bills.
It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due to damages. Many of the civil suits they’re losing are petty weak cases showing juries and judges literally hate meta. These are signs that their revenues are short term money grabs due to blindly chasing iRev at the cost of literally everything else.
Even hacking they only really follow through on if their large business credit extensions are at risk or chargebacks. Debit and direct funding isn’t pursued because they’re not loss liable - if it’s literal theft via debit cards, it’s not a priority. If it’s their own money via credit that’s refundable, they’re all hands on deck.
This will all blow back on them at some point and that point isn’t far aware. Courts, governments, banks, they’re all starting to notice the lawlessness and pure avarice. The consequences will severely impair their ads business, require them to undergo worse consent, oversight, and audit that waving an AI hand at won’t be sufficient, especially when the courts are concerned as judges are especially skeptical of AI solutions to court orders.
Their only out is to find another business model, which they’ve been trying to do without success since Facebook was first launched.
The reason he seems poor is because he keeps signaling he doesn't have enough money to buy the one thing he really wants: trust. These people out for world domination never get it. He can't set up a platform (VR, AI) for the same reason Windows is dying: their brands are toxic and nobody will work with them if they have a choice.
They've previously wasted a lot of money on stupid stuff (Facebook phone, metaverse etc etc), but my impression is that they messed with their core business less in the course of doing that. Whereas now, as the article mentioned, it seems like they're just kind of breaking engineering completely.
You can call Zuck evil or greedy. But being bad at running a business surely isn't one of his traits. Meta's net earning grew so much in the past decade that it, ironically, has the sanest P/E ratio trend out of all big US techs.
I’m starting to classify great business minds as “earners” vs. “extractors” to help counter the braindead take that anyone who accumulates wealth is worthy of praise. Zuck is an incredible extractor: he does not create value, he exploits gray areas in the social contract of society like an oil baron vacuuming up oil wells using deceit and chicanery.
> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more.
This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.
The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.
Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.
Yes, this is not labeling what is an apple and what is a pear. "Annotation" does not do this work justice.
For a coding agent, for example, there is *very detailed* analysis of the turns and ranking of different portions of the conversation.
Adherence or deviation from specific rules matters. Writing quality matters. Expertise in the topic under discussion matters. Having intuition for the tone and beat of a good conversation matters.
Scoring a 15-20 turn conversation can easily take two and a half hours.
Clicking submit does not mean the author is done. Many annotations will be turned back to them by a reviewer to touch up in some way.
This work can be far more mentally taxing than programming, is measured much more by completions more of a timed exercise than SWE.
FWIW, Meta employees would probably make great coding agent conversation annotators. But it is absolutely not SWE and they won't enjoy it (for long).
I doubt it'll pay off. Let's face it, the average FB engineer is no better than the average Polish engineer, and the Polish guy is 20x cheaper. If you wanted cost-effective labeling you'd send it to Poland. Or better, Chile.
They’ve largely filtered their employees for people who have a mental breakdown if they don’t get 110% on a 100% scale or get the top of the top rating because they’ve done that their whole life until they got their first job at the tender age of 25-28 after getting their masters or PhD.
I’ve met too many meta members who have stories about their direct reports or peers who had a crashout because they got Exceeds Expectations and a mid 5 figure raise instead of Greatly Exceeds Expectations with a higher 5 figure raise not because of the money but because of not getting the top score.
I’m pretty sure zuck is being a rational sociopath and realizing he can use the PSC system to get these people to widely work against their best interests due to their ego.
idk... In their own way these types of people who have blinders on to such a degree that they crashout over such things are also sociopaths...
Seems like a side effect of the k shaped economy... our society increasingly doesn't have rewards for normal hardworking people. Given tech has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Working at Meta already meant you were chasing a bag knowing the product was more or less social poison anyway. It doesn't seem to me that Zuck is uniquely culpable... maybe he's just the best one at the game they're all playing...
The fact he still cares so much about Meta when he is a billionaire is just like those crashouts. Again, it's the same type of person. He's just better at it than they are.
I have no empathy for the types of people who got layd off from meta who can’t see the similarities between them and the industry they disrupted.
I advocated for people who lost their jobs due to tech disruption to learn how to become software engineer not from a place of superiority but from a place of “this is one of the last places you can be self taught and earn a middle class income”
I am saying this has now hit the tech world and I will hold zuck culpable, although not uniquely since that requires a set of 1, but because he’s in charge of one of the top 10 companies in terms of big tech.
You don’t get to be that rich and that in charge of decisions, without holding responsibility. If you want to claim otherwise, then cool, you shouldn’t complain when we take all the assets you are apparently not responsible for.
Zuck literally said that he wants folks with higher intelligence on the Applied Intelligence team. And the best way to do that was to move folks internally, since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.
Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.
The belief that engineers are not doing anything for x amount of time that could be better spent on other immediately measurable things is as old as the profession itself.
Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.
One of the funniest things is how hard it was to get approval for a $100 software license but now people are being encouraged to burn thousands on tokens.
see also: we're all developing on min spec Macbook Pros while being encouraged to burn > max spec Macbook Pros cost in tokens/month while still waiting for builds to compile.
I can't give you exact numbers, but this is line with what I'm hearing through the grapevine. Lots of senior managers being converted back to ICs as well.
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.
> I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context
Cold Harbor is a reference to the TV show Severance.
Without going into any real spoilers it was the code name of a data classification project so mysterious that the people working on it weren't allowed to know what they were working on (and yes, the project in the show was probably named after the battle in the Civil War).
The Meta connection is that there are some humorous parallels between that project and a project involving people tagging data to train technology to replace themselves, and just the overall creepy dystopian vibe of both the fictional and real-world companies (and founders) involved.
My partner works there as an engineer. The org they work in had loads of people transferred to the "AAI" org doing data labelling. I find it almost unbelievable as well, but it is true.
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
>using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources
Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.
I wouldn't trust any engineers I know of with their "taste". At best it's a highly skewed view of the world. At worst, it's outright opposite to genpop.
Are there any examples of this actually working? I keep seeing this fantasy repeated but have not seen a plausible explanation for how they wouldn't be contibuting to the pile of negative examples which are just as valuable if not more.
what about just... becoming mediocre? engineers are already infamously lazy at reviewing PRs. how is Meta incentivizing these Data Labelers to give a shit and actually scrutinize the AI-generated code they're supposed to be reviewing? what's the reward structure? what prevents engineers from flagging minor nitpicks all day while they look at LinkedIn?
Probably forcing them to review each other's work to panopticon "quality," and keeping track of the average throughput per engineer so if people fall behind the taskmasters can pay them a visit.
Poison pilling skills is a thing, though finding evidence for it is difficult given the crux is an absence of information. The baseline instruction and training is given to the model by the expert, but edge cases are willfully neglected. The degree of neglect generally determines how detectable it is, but if all the SMEs are in on it a lot of them will probably persist. Effectiveness and impact are obviously relative to the system and the edge case. Not particularly different from the fallout previously seen during the offshoring era.
I believe it, because it makes a kind of sense. Post-training has a huge impact on how well LLMs perform, and labeled data is what determines the effectiveness of post-training. This is why companies like Anthropic are so worried about distillation.
So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks on them?
Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.
(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)
> I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments
Their bonuses depend on it. They'll have to play ball unless they have other jobs lined up, are ready to retire early, or prepared to be on the shitlist for the next round of layoffs due to "underperformance"
Do the skills these people have overlap with the skills needed for a good data labeler? I'm guessing being a domain expert is most valuable as a data labeler.
Have you heard about the various startups that specialize in expert data labeling, like Mercor? They can pay $100-$200/hr for highly specialized work, who knows how much they charge their clients. Translated to an annual wage, that's definitely in the SF/SV engineer range
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
Those percentages seem in line with what I have heard. Not company-wide, MSL was exempted, of course, and probably a few other golden geese here and there.
Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.
This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.
To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.
On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.
Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over.
Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success
That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.
It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.
It has always been this way though. Who is really qualified to evaluate something but another engineer? Perhaps the first record of a slop product is the Complaint to Ea-nāṣir from 1750 BC.
Not always. I think it's an inherent failure mode of markets when everyone is playing by the same rules.
You could simply invoke Goodhart's law: If the purpose of a business is to make money, its ability to make money is not a good measure of the value it creates. Except when there are competitors playing under different rules. Then capitalists need to make better products and services than their non-capitalist competitors to be able to make money in countries that can buy from either side.
During the Cold War, the planned economies of the communist block provided the necessary competition. When that competition disappeared, financialization gradually took over. Now there is China, which seems to be a command economy that uses markets as a tool and prioritizes the real economy over finances. Maybe it will provide enough competition to force capitalists behave again.
It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want.
There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.
>One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success
So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.
Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).
So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?
As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.
I mean from a bigger picture view. I'm much more likely to think in broader context of what impact a decision would have to the business at large. And my view of that is much more accurate than it used to be, without the exaggerated sense of importance most people place on their work. In other words, I'm better at right sizing effort and velocity.
> Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.
Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.
Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?
I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize.
If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television.
I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.
Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing.
Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
Turns out they have no product vision beyond selling personally-identifiable information to advertisers. I hold them quite a bit in contempt so I would relish in their failure.
Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business.
You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)
As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.
They aren't directly competitive (you wouldn't pick one or the other as product) but they are the premier open source projects of the two companies in terms of industry impact and they both reflect the engineering culture. (e.g. I am picking one as an exemplar for other software... like I want to make something like React instead of make something like Kube)
With just a little bit of hyperbole:
The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products. Google's systems are highly scalable, I grant that, but they have the first mover disadvantage that their foundations are first-generation and not based on experience and still slowing them down... but the market can't discipline them.
Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids. They benefit from huge scale and monopoly profits but Zuck is keeping more in his pocket than he would be if he did things like Google.
The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs. That is, a system like what Hazelcast was before it became an analytics play could support clusters of 30 or so big nodes (two racks) and there are probably just a few 100 systems in the worlds that really need to get bigger than that.
> The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products.
This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.
In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.
Meta is just a newer company than Google.
> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.
I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.
> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.
The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?
Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.
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Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band!
Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations.
I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO.
I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds!
I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered
which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.
But Kubernetes is solving a much messier and more complicated problem than React. There are numerous similar web frameworks to React in different languages that have been created as basically hobby projects.
Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.
Kubernetes has the basic flaw that it has more scalability than 99.99% of companies need and you could serve almost all the market with a system that supports shared data structures (like IBM's Sysplex) and is more opinionated. An architecture which is less scalable could serve almost all of the systems on the planet and would be easier to work with.
I'll grant that there is essential complexity there, but Kube was built by people who didn't have fear of accidental complexity so it has a lot of it. Look at the whole "YAML sucks" thing which is partially a YAML thing (coulda chose something different) and also a function of the system they are trying to configure with YAML.
Kubernetes' YAML problem stems from its CLI tooling, and yes it was an atrocious choice once templating came in and visited horrors like helm on us. Internally, the the k8s api speaks only JSON, and you can already stuff whatever json you like in a yaml file.
> I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers
How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.
Someone who would compare React to Kubernetes instead of React (Facebook) and Vue.js (Google) does not have enough domain knowledge to provide an informed opinion on this matter
Kubernetes is the industry standard cluster orchestrator for a reason - it's fantastic
My main complaint is that React doesn't handle highly dynamic situations. Think of how tools like photoshop or programming IDEs have tons of views and windows and property sheets and stuff and manage to update the right parts of the UI when things change. React on the other hand makes a structural link between the component tree and how state propagates.
Specifically I wrote a bunch of React components for making little biosignals applications that can (say) show two people's heartrate from bluetooth LE and show my breathing based on a strap i am wearing and another person's breathing based on a $20 radar from China.
I can pretty easily snap together the components and the system that feeds the state to the components by writing code. It works great, it's not that hard to do, it looks great.
But: I really wish I could make something where I could drag and drop display and data acquisition and processing components like LabView. Actually I know a lot about how to do the dynamic processing (Hint: read the Dragon book, not On Lisp) but React doesn't support dynamically assembled components... But I know Javascript systems can because I was writing them 2005-2010 back when browsers didn't have async and all the great affordances they offer now.
I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.
I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.
React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.
useState for local state or useContext (+ useReducer if it's complicated) for shared state is the "built-in" way that should be good enough for most things.
Instagram runs on angular doesn't it? They make more money per user than the core FB product... You might want to revisit your criteria for your FAANG journey
Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface:
> I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left.
> On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure.
This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle.
With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.
If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.
Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.
Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
> If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S
This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.
I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.
I just realized that Netflix’s Reed Hastings is the same Reed
Hastings that wrote Purify - the excellent memory leak tool that was a pretty big deal back in the 90’s.
I don't think this is really true, there are plenty of engineers/managers who rotate through major tech companies. Many Meta folks will head off to new companies which would pay at similar levels.
I have a friend that did that, in a 4y stint there, and was happy to get to one of the layoffs phase. He was fairly lucky with the stock price RSUs vs stock price(though he knew a few that were so lucky that their 100k RSUs grant at sign got to like 800k, not that lucky, but yeah, his 4 years of flying to office made him basically "I can retire whenever I please to".
Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...
You can sell your house and roll the equity over to another one in a cheaper area. Depending on how you do it, you might even move into one with no loan or a tiny loan.
This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.
It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.
Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.
Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.
Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.
I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore.
The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers.
Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad Manager) has a very poor image, even with non-technical users.
So it's not even a sure bet you will even get a short term monetary payoff
In their defense (haha), virtually all the ad management platforms for social and search are total dogshit. Like seriously, some of the worst software I’ve used. Constantly broken, incredibly poor UI / UX, slow, frequently burns money for no reason, ads just mysteriously stop working, etc, etc. Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, they’re all like this. They don’t give a shit about the advertiser experience and it shows.
But I put up with it, just like everyone else, because it’s still amazing ROI when you get it working right. And there’s no other choice if you want access to these platforms with billions of potential customers.
When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
> Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped
That's the thing right
So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit)
The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months.
Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea.
At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc.
Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.)
But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident.
Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything.
The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work
"A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple."
So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly.
As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...
Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages.
Felt the same way. Set aside the hyperbole, and it’s coming from the very real fear that data labeling does not have long-term job security. If the company continues to run after you’ve been moved, it’s pretty obvious you were redundant. Tough realization for people that see themselves as having been successful career-wise.
They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.
It's also not like Meta could train it for content moderation, translation or judicial expertise even if it wanted to. They have software engineers idling, not translators.
I find it pretty hard to see how Meta could possibly catch up to the existing frontier labs. Distillation, I guess, if you want to go that route, but between the fact that they're already way behind and the constant deluge of negative press like this, it strikes me that they would straight up need an architectural miracle in order to actually be competitive.
> my manager has no idea who I am, nor what I’m working on, and I’ve never met them despite me being on the team for nearly two months.
This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.
The job contracts include clauses about not posting things that paint the employer in a bad light on social media. No idea how enforceable that stuff is in any given jurisdiction, but really, what individual can afford to find out?
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
I may be the exception, but if I plan to work on non-work related stuff while traveling I absolutely take my personal laptop. I've done this when traveling to my HQ, as well as taking both work and personal laptops on personal vacations.
This must be you being in a different bubble from me, with perhaps a hint of Normalization of Deviance[0]. Those all sound like terrible ideas to me (are you implying looking at porn on a company laptop!?). You absolutely should not cross pollinate work with personal stuff. Use your personal phone or tablet or whatever for anything non work related.
It was a rhetorical question; I am aware that people do stupid things with their employers' hardware. More directly, my point was that the supposed privacy questions raised by the AI-training keyboard tracking system do not matter much, because it has never been safe to do anything which requires personal privacy on work devices in the first place.
There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
If only we all could rise to the level of not doing stupid things on company property (praise), or company time (praise), then we would want for no privacy for there was never any to be taken in the first place.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
> You seem to have selected specifically people who are not likely to know the full implications of their behavior, and I agree with you.
You mean every person in the world who doesn't actively work on the stuff doing the tracking? This isn't selection bias, selection bias is thinking those are the abnormals.
I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat.
So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0].
Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go.
Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move.
Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1].
Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits.
ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2]
A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3].
Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!).
Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced).
My question for anyone still working at these companies:
At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.
Why did Meta think that VR was the end all be all before throwing away billions of dollars? Why did that want to pay an AI expert a billion dollars? The reality is Meta chases shiny objects like a cat with little real or accountable leadership.
I'm not sure how this matters compared to the other platform companies. Kindle has such a small niche market and the Kindle "platform" hardly registers any impact.
This is the result of scale acquisition. Alexander Wang is a notoriously unscrupulous individual. Meta was in a bad situation post Sandberg era but Wang accelerated the process.
In a way, it isn’t that surprising. Executives are constantly being sold the idea that "software is a solved problem." Even if they recognize that this is mostly marketing, it can still influence their internal expectations. They may start thinking, "Maybe AI has solved 30% of software development."
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.
I always point out the Elysium parallels and usually get trashed for doing it. But, if you look at all trend lines, the whole world is very quickly bifurcating into a two tier society with the few "Haves" safely walled off and protected from the many "Have Nots." You can see the moderately rich doing whatever they can to maneuver themselves in to position and ensure their ticket to the space station when the split happens. The rest of us are going to end up being economically irrelevant.
Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.
Can’t really win here. If Facebook doesn’t have open APIs, it gets accused of being a walled garden and hoarding data. If it builds those APIs and lets third parties act with the same permissions as the authenticated user that gave permission to that third party, it gets Cambridge Analytica.
The changes I'm referring to are much later than the CA scandal.
In the last few years, they've locked third-party apps out of publishing to Facebook Groups, closed down the bug ticket system, and gave every indication of having abandoned any efforts at improving the ecosystem.
This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs.
Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age.
Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era.
The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating.
It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how to monetize a PhP web app - something my buddy in high school could create for our M.U.N. club. Zuck spends millions on VR glasses, low income high schools, 100,000 software engineers, and all he has is the same webapp + some monopolistic acquisitions and a loving wife and child.
Elon is a total dick to everyone, impregnates his executives, gets high on ketamine, does the Nazi salute on live television, but, importantly, launched more satellites into space than any country on Earth. For less than the price of a shitty VR webapp that 20 people used, Elon will solve Global Warming and bring humans into the outer reaches of the solar system. The duality of man.
If Elon started pissing his pants in public or flinging poo at his enemies, Zuckerberg would start doing the same thing.
What's wrong with Ketamine? Everybody (or at least population majority I'd bet) have consumed hardcore drugs like Alcohol, Cocaine, Ketamine and so-on, what does it have to do with anything?
You have not tried any hard drugs like Alcohol or softer ones like Marijuana in your lifetime? I mean kuddos to you but I don't really see what's wrong with it in moderation, and shaming people that decide to partake into it is a bit low :)
> Needless to say, this is invasive and raises privacy questions: If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call? Meta held no consultation and there are no workarounds; just a top-down decision being pushed through.
I'm not going to defend Meta's recent practices but any expectation of privacy when using an employer's device is forfeit. I thought this was basic common sense?
I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus.
I feel that most of the Procedures that they took to push AI are inherently wrong
i,e full time data labelling relocation won't be appreciated by anyone why not part time ?? also Measuring token usage is weird.
It is true that exectives are so hyped on AI but these procedures are shortsighted and poorely thought of
If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.
> Managers inside Meta “fight” over the pay packets of their employees, which involves “knocking down” the packet of engineers on other teams
> Quotas are handed down to managers for the splits of the workforce to be put in each ‘bucket’, and the internal politics gets heated as managers try to get their reports into higher buckets.
Curious, why can't the management assigns budgets (or resources in general) to individual teams? That is, it is the managers who are responsible for the resources that their teams get, and the budget is tied to the importance of the "team" that each manager owns. In that way, all the performance review will be local to each team. As a manager, I'd be responsible for the output and importance of my team, and I answer to my manager because they will allocate the budget (or resources in general). Recursively, my team members will answer to me and I don't have to justify who gets rewarded by how much to my peers, except that there will be some form of check and balances.
How Meta manages their perf review seems to set up their managers to be ineffective.
Because that would give managers too much agency. You aren't supposed to get that agency until you are director. Managers manage people and get headcount. Directors manage money and get budgets.
That agency has a price, though. Whatever level you get it at, your boss will not give a single crap about any excuses for why you didn't deliver. A meteor could have hit your building, and it wouldn't matter.
>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”
That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D
Um. What's there to engineer at Meta? They are an ad-tech company. I thought the HN crowd would make fun of them for this. For years. But now I guess AI coding is easier to pick on than advertisements?
There's nothing at Meta that other companies (engineers) haven't already solved. It's not impossible to load to millions of pictures per second and have them displayed to billions of users.
Just the other day, there was a blog post talking about how we should stop idolizing these companies because they're not doing anything groundbreaking or innovating. But now we're doing just that: expecting an ad company to ... do groundbreaking engineering?
Say what you will. Zuckerberg for all that we make fun of him is an insanely successful software guy and businessman. Being good at software is easier, but being strong at both is rare, and he's a multi-billionaire from it. The dude is wildly successful and no matter how much we hate on him or his orgs for it, the people love it. And the advertisers love it. People love Meta's products and even folks in AI governance and safety fields get the Meta glasses and actively use them.
He's built a company that's pretty much self sustaining and you don't need 1000s of engineers for that. Maybe that fact is hitting too close to home?
How about proper account support? Not getting banned while the racist page you report 'doesn't violate community standards'? How about being able to actually see people's posts in the feed?
Past a certain point top talent care more about how they are treated then even more money. The top of the field can get generational wealth at a bunch of different places, why would they put up with Zuck?
From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen.
It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org.
On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things.
There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything.
So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink
because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE
software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing
the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)
He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy".
I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals:
- core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis.
- I believe we are seeing this.
- I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else
It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!
I don’t have much to add, but it’s been interesting reading the comments here. I don’t engage with many of their products. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2014, one of the few times in my life I’ve done something before it was “cool” to do so. I do reluctantly use WhatsApp, but that’s really just because literally everyone in my life does so its just easier.
However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus?
Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.
Could it be possible that Zuck has a Llama-shaped magic 8-ball to which he has fully committed himself to “dogfooding” an AI-only strategy to his responsibilities in the company?
Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time
Sure, the current Torment Nexus buildout might be a bubble. But just think: in 10 years we will already have all this torment infrastructure built, ready to use.
please stop being so mean, they also create echo chambers to kill political discourse (i.e. the foundation of democracy) and show the most inflammatory material to their users to pit them into a shouting match against each other
Truly who could blame them though. They have to trap people in rage bubbles or they might make slightly less money!
I'm so tired of these double standards, nobody ever blames fentanyl manufacturers for making such an addictive product so why is everyone mad at facebook? All they did was poison discourse for a generation and provide material support to an autocrat.
Hey now that was an accident! They created a taskforce to prevent that from happening again, ignored all their recommendations and then laid them all off.
Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.
It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.
I would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).
You don't become a Big Tech company by being ethical. It's like trying to become a world champion boxer by refusing to punch. Not happening.
The reality is that most of these self described rational and super intelligent devs who see themselves as good people refuse to accept that joining big tech and joining an ethical company are mutually exclusive by definition. Hence all the companies saying "We make the world a better place by doing x". Everyone knows it's not true. But it helps swallow the fantasy and selling your ethics for a big fat pay check every month.
A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.
What groups do you subscribe to? My feed is mostly relatives, friends and their photos. Occasionally there are panels with people I don't subscribe to, which you can press X on and you won't see them again.
I don't subscribe to any groups except maybe a neighborhood association or similar. I was basically inactive on Facebook from 2014 until the last year. I've never been remotely right-wing and while I'm sure I have some old acquaintances who have become MAGA, the overwhelming majority of my Facebook friends are decent people--either normies, moderates, or left of center.
> you can press X on and you won't see them again.
I'm not worried about Facebook showing me propaganda, I'm worried about Facebook aggressively propagandizing society at large.
> Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar.
> they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda
In my feed, they are aggressively pushing an approximately equal mix of woke propaganda, far-right propaganda, funny memes, and discussions of literature and philosophy. It just depends on what the Meta model decided you and your friends are into.
> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React
People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
Totally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.
Meta assigned hundreds of engineers to work PyTorch. That is only going to happen at a handful of companies. You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it.
What kind of mindset is this, telling people to feel like they're indebted to a nameless for-profit corporation? That's bananas.
Send the responsible people who actually created the projects and wrote the code a thankful email if you feel like it, no one is indebted to any companies here because they use FOSS software, especially not companies like Meta who take from the world more than they give.
> People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Exactly. The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.
And the bad things that some people did at Facebook / Meta are also due to their own choices, not by the virtue / sin of working for a particular org.
> The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.
I kind of disagree. You're associating yourself with these people, supporting the same machine. If you actually disagree with the machine, then don't work there in the first place. Not to mean these people are inherently evil or whatever, people have different circumstances, people reflect, sometimes change and people don't always think before acting, it's only human. But everyone who worked there while having other opportunities available, because the pay was better or whatever, definitively should reflect on what imprint they want to leave on the world really.
I agree that Meta is not uniformly bad, but I would not consider React to be a great tool. Every React project I worked on has turned into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti.
I was going to say, isn't React something to hold against Meta? Being intimately familiar with it, I don't consider it a positive contribution to the world.
I work in film, not software engineering, but I've heard lots of shade thrown on React for a long time, mostly for this reason- messy code.
The question I have is, does React somehow encourage or enable code that is messier than in other frameworks? Why is it so popular if it's so widely hated? There's something I'm missing here.
Facebook spent a lot of effort marketing React, and there are widespread misunderstandings about React that made it popular. One of the most hyped features of React was a "virtual DOM" that supposedly improved rendering speed, but actually did not significantly improve performance.
Rendering a UI should be quite fast, even for a complex web app. Noticeable slowness in the UI is due to poorly optimized rendering, or logic that has nothing to do with rendering.
Nowadays, it is considered a default choice for a UI framework.
It's got a number of really nice Quality of Life (QoL) features, but who's going to go into the Internet and be positive about something? At best you'd be called a shill or astroturfing. If it's the younger crowd they'll be sure you call you cringe. So why would you hear anything positive about React. Or life in general when you can just be negative? That has a number of broader implications for society that aren't get to get solved here.
As far as React goes, it's composable, which means I can create a <PreferencePane> and then put a <CameraPref> inside that, and then later on in a wizard, I can put the <CameraPref> and it's totally fine. This means I don't have to write the same fucking code, ever. If the people im working with know their shit, as the progtammer, I never have to see the css/stylistic code/elements unless I go looking in another file for them. No shit the CSS is a distraction when I'm trying to write a code that is not CSS. It's all JavaScript. This is a good thing, but people that grew up hearing that JavaScript sucks have never challenged that successfully, so having React forced upon them just sticks in their craw. This is a good thing because JavaScript runs on bother the server and the client/your laptop, so as the programmer, you don't have to switch contexts as your work on the app. Before this current bout of "you will all lose your job to AI" there's always been waves of newcomers too the field that "didn't know what they were doing", and that we were supposed to shun them for it. (And that JavaScript was was only for noob designers.) So you have to balance everything you hear with that sort of negativity. If everyone your age minus 10 was here to take your job and will work for $200k less a year, and they started learning react the year it came out, same as you, how do you think FilmNews forum would sound? The film industry banded together to ban AI script writing and other tools, so we'll have to see how that pans out. React is fine. Any large app is just going to be messy. And proprietary. Open Source is great, but the number of success stories are few, and not at all replicable. (If someone has a project with one that isn't "sell support", I'm all ears.)
The fact that people bitch about it is a good thing. It's when they don't that Facebook needs to worry about things. (Oh yeah also it's from Facebook, and that's not exactly an industry neutral employer. As we see here. If someone told you they work at Meta, what, are you not going to sleep with them? Two million dollars of RSUs buys a lot of not giving a shit. What are we going to vote to underfund the bus they already don't take, that we also don't take?)
That’s a choice. This isn’t a story about someone poor who needs to work at McDonalds to make ends meet to feed their family. We are talking about the top earners in the world who made a decision to make more money than working at a competitor (Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc) where they would still be in the top 1% of earners.
As someone who quit their corporate tech job to focus on community building work, I don't think finding better job is that simple.
Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.
One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.
Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.
Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.
If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there
I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
No kidding, the damage react has done to front end engineering will be felt for decades. Bloated, slow applications that don’t conform to system conventions and burn power like crazy have been the norm ever since React caught on.
The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious:
The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]
Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.
The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.
Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.
If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.
This is an uphill battle, I'm afraid. As evidenced from their other comments, slibhb struggles a lot with basic moral concepts like "you are responsible for the things you do".
It's very fashionable for Westerners to evince belief in the idea that inhabitants of third-world countries have no free will and aren't responsible for their actions. We're told that everything bad that happens in those countries is due to large Western companies or a history of colonization.
This is all very silly. The genocide in Myanmar (it's a civil war last I checked) isn't Facebook's fault (legally or morally). Facebook has surely made mistakes, but that doesn't make them to blame for people killing each other on the other side of the world.
> You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee.
You clearly don’t understand this, and maybe you never will (it seems beyond some people), but moral responsibility is assigned here because of the actions facebook and their employees took.
It is not assigned to Tim Berners-Lee because, again this is important, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t spend years spreading targeted genocidal propaganda in a country with a violent history and fragile peace.
Hope that helps. If you still can’t understand it, I can recommend some philosophy books on morality and our responsibilities to our fellow humans.
Great counter argument, it really illustrates your thought process - or lack thereof.
It’s really sad that you don’t comprehend basic morality, but unfortunately not much can be done in cases like this.
The will for change must come from within, but if you ever do find yourself feeling empathy or even sympathy for other humans I promise there are lots of resources available to help you learn and understand more about living like a responsible human. All it takes is asking for help.
> The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
True, none of us are innocent.
> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options.
I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.
The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.
Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.
I don’t disagree that there are many evil companies and one should try to be selective in who they work for. But life, in my experience, exists in shades of gray and it’s foolish to judge others without understanding their circumstances and the path that lead them to where they are today.
>Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.
Would these material conditions change if the person involved was responsible for making bombs used in a genocide? Or if they were working for the Torture Nexus company? Or responsible for money laundering and other illegal activities?
Life certainly has many shades and while I can be sympathetic to certain conditions here we're talking about a highly educated group of individuals who have multiple options to choose from. They've made their choice (or a series of choices) to end up where they are and that does not render them immune to criticism.
Downvoters are wrong. Everything here is true. As someone who compromised their morals (not Facebook but other big tech) after being laid off, it was a choice
Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.
Nope sorry, you still aren't having a positive effect unless you live a barebones selfless life dedicated to helping others. You purchase products from companies, use services, and do things for entertainment that all somehow negatively affect someone in some form and way.
Oh, you think that the arbitrary line your draw in your own life determines the standard for being moral? Well, welcome to the club with the rest of us. Its easy to make an argument that shifts the blame away from Meta - they offer a product that is completely optional, its up to the individual person whether to use it or not, so working for Meta is not immoral. Thats a line someone could draw in their own life, and there isn't a single argument you can make based in any sort of grounded framework for them being wrong.
This is tired and reductivist reasoning deployed only by those rationalizing wrongs, and immediately recognizable by nearly everybody as such. My kids could tell you what's wrong with this thinking. I believe that working a job where I would knowingly contribute to mass mental illness (including but not limited to inducing teenage depression and body image issues leading to suicide), the destruction of liberal democracy and free society, mass surveillance unlike anything constructed before in the history of mankind, and even genocide falls on the wrong side of the line. If you have convinced yourself otherwise, this is a weight you must carry. Acting so callously against your fellow humans always exacts a price, knowingly or not; it requires destroying part of your capacity to care for other people.
Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults.
Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.
Gotcha so basically what you are saying is that its not the parents responsibility to raise their kids, the society should be structured so that everything that the kid has access to be under tight legal control, from tv shows, to prodcuts they see in stores, to celebrities being legally required to speak and act a certain way, and so on.
TLDR, if you can do that much mental gymastics, you can probably do the same to justify you taking the Meta job.
I wouldn't normally reply again, but please try and take my arguments in the good faith and appeal to the heart and humanity that they were given. I think you're quite capable of reading what I've written and responding to it coherently; consequently, I also think you must be aware that you haven't done this in the heat of the disagreement. It's only if we're charitable, not cynical, about this stuff that the world may improve. Thanks. :)
Your good faith arguments are not good faith. You are basically saying it feels right to be against Meta, therefore your arguments are correct. World doesn't work like that.
> I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years
Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".
The point is that there is a number for everyone to go against their "high level" morals (i.e stuff that is far removed from actually physically harming humans yourself). Anyone who says they don't have one (and not a buddhism follower) is lying.
As for BMWs, thats the idea - you can buy an M car with that salary and everyone who can't afford an M car is gonna wanna be your friend.
No - not everyone has a moral number, believe it or not. And no, most people don't give a shit about the car you drive, or want to friend you for it. Maybe in your social circles, but as someone in circles of both non-tech people and (literally) the richest bunch in tech - I promise, they don't.
What a truly sad mindset/worldview that you believe that to be true.
I've been offered to interview at these places several times but always declined. Some on principle but mostly because I didn't want to relocate and I don't want to work for a large company.
> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.
They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.
edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too.
These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.
"Someone else would be willing to ruin this, so I may as well ruin it and get paid for it" is not a direction everyone wants to, or even is willing to go.
You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?
You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??
How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.
A clear line would be if you are compensated directly in shared of Facebook, then your culpability is much higher than if you're just working a salary or buying ads.
Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere
Not exactly...
> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.
Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...
So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?
Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??
Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?
My answer already addresses this? I didn’t say every engineer works on those things. I said it’s a spectrum, with the people working on those things at one end. I also already answered that they all contribute to the edifice, with different levels of moral culpability, which it’s up to them to hash out how they feel about.
Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.
If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.
It must be exhausting having someone like that (the person you replied to) in your life. So negative, judgmental, and filled with hate. Have to be careful about everything you do and say around them or you’ll be labeled as some kind of -ist or destroying the world.
Y’all are not good at reading comprehension, is the only label I’ll apply to you here. I’ve had good friends work for Meta, and I don’t judge them for it. I wouldn’t work there, because how I feel about the company means I can’t feel good about myself contributing to it in any significant way. Other people will feel differently, and, again, that’s fine.
But if you fundamentally disagree with a system, trying to avoid contributing to it in any way makes sense! Whether it’s making the algorithm or addictive more farming out moderation to underpaid contractors or building a cool open source library for frontend coding or whatever, you can choose not to do it.
Or you can say, my contribution is not meaningful enough to the broader organization for me to worry about my place in it. Or you can say, I will siphon money out of the beast and use it for good. You are still contributing to it, but how you feel about it is up to you.
I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.
Do you really think the guy branding thousands of people working at Meta as basically pedophiles can really be said to care about "solidarity"? I certainly wouldn't consider someone a peer if they randomly go and call me a pedophile because of where I work. I'm sure 95% of people working there have 0 relation to the algorithm decisions and definitely have no particular fixation on giving teenage girls depression.
Material outcomes are the only thing that matters, not personal wants or wishes.
If you worked as an accountant for Epstein after 2006, then yeah you may not be exactly a pedophile but you have shown you're okay with not only working with pedophiles but having a pedophile actively enrich you.
Very few people on this planet are willing to actually do this. Those are Meta are willing to do exactly this.
Also solidarity is a two way street and acting as if the literal 1% of earners in the nation will suddenly develop empathy is foolish. I have solidarity for actual workers trying to better society; not for those that exacerbate the climate crisis, help minorities get cancer through data center expansions, personally profit off of scamming seniors, are okay with allowing a genocide on their watch, do nothing to help prevent the erosion of democracy, and have directly caused many suicides/self harm/deaths of despair.
They have to commit to a lifetime of repenting and self-flagellation isn't going to cut it. It's not the middle ages.
"Someone else would do it if I don't" is not, and never has been, a valid argument for whether something is moral to do. If you want to argue that it's morally permissible to work at Facebook, you need to argue that on its own merits, not by appealing to fallacies.
> You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
Putting Meta aside as I do not have a sufficiently deep view of the total scope of work at Meta and its relation to its misdeeds, I never understood how anyone found this fallacious line of reasoning convincing.
So what if someone else would do it? The point is that you are morally responsible for your actions and your actions alone.
It horrifies me completely to realize that so many people would excuse their own gravely immoral actions on the incomprehensible grounds that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Where is the logic? It is such a severely morally and psychologically crippled way of thinking. Yes, if I don't shoot the innocent civilian in the head, then SS-Schütze Schmidt will do it anyway, so I might as well do it. Incredible.
Morality is not some calculus that is concerned about whether certain events occur or about optimizing some sum total of events. It is about how you, personally, use your agency. That's it!
Regardless of what their hiring process screens for, it's safe to say that people able to pass screening for Meta are able to get work elsewhere. It is never an engineers only option, although it may be the only one in a certain luxurious compensation tier.
And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.
In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".
You might be surprised. I sent out approximately 1200 applications in 2024 while unemployed for nine months, and with over thirty interviews, I only got a single offer, which was Meta.
>One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.
people say this as if having principles will leave you jobless inevitably, but there is so much evidence to the contrary that this rings more hollow the older I get.
I agree with your overall concept of empathy towards others, I disagree with the premise that all organizations are unethical and that there isn't room for the morally principal'd and employed in this world.
contrarily I believe that a morally principal'd and skilled engineer is so rare in this world that there are a few organizations that would snap up every single one they could find if the network was there to find them.
>“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”
>“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
>Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.
I don’t know, seems like they do go around creating slides that mention them.
I am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand.
That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.
edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline. We cant all work in the forest like you.
you realize that the majority of engineering positions at meta in fact arent dealing with the knobs and levers of manipulation? do you have no pity for the coal plant worker who supports his family while working for a company that pollutes the environment? Your shallow morals are disgusting.
What an obnoxious comparison.
Any engineer good enough to get into Meta has had their pick of tech jobs for the past decade. They could easily live comfortably, but less well paid, working for a myriad of less exploitative tech companies. Your average coal plant worker had no such options.
I have been flamed for saying this in public, and I do not know how it will be received by an HN crowd, but someone who enjoys being a meta employee is a red flag.
Either they are actively a narcissist, actively immoral, not intelligent enough to understand the vibe there, or they're actually unhappy and not being honest enough to tell you they hate it there. I have a hard time envisioning any other possibility. The place actively filters out morally coherent and intelligent people.
It's not always about profits, it's about the user experience. In the late 1990s, almost everyone was on AOL and spent a lot of time using it. Now Facebook has a lot less usage.
Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts.
I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.
I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.
Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem.
There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a solution because it's easy and popular but not necessarily a good fit for your specific requirements, etc. Many of these practices are popular unfortunately. That's not to say others don't have great ideas, just don't copy them blindly.
> making existing ones continue to work well
Say what you will about MS, but the fact that Windows was backward compatible for so long (it may still be, I haven't kept up) is damn good engineering.
Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate.
Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, even if that means the solution is scrappy and unpolished today, so long as it solves an important problem cheaply and effectively.
In large organizations, accountability for actual value delivery is so diluted across the org chart that it practically disappears.
Leaders gravitate toward building bloated "internal platforms" that offer little external utility. Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact. It becomes a systemic shield, allowing the old guard to justify their headcount without delivering new value.
Software engineering is uniquely plagued by this. Civil engineers understand their objective: build a bridge that safely carries traffic within a specific budget. They don't invent a novel, hyper-complex suspension architecture when a standard short-span bridge will do the job.
I would decouple "build things people want" from "business function". I would put in the former bucket things like: making the computer work smoothly and run apps. I would put in the latter bucket things like: show advertising to the user when the log in. Engineering should always be about the first, or it's bad engineering. The second is far more controversial - business leaders would like you to consider it good engineering to do that, but you get to interpose your own ethics, but you'll probably be fired for having ethics, but that doesn't make it bad engineering.
Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one wants to be part of. There is a lifecycle to product development and different phases require different tradeoffs. You sound like you align with the builder phase and that's great.
I will also note that most civil engineering is about maintaining existing structures and roadways, not building new ones.
> Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year
I don't know if bug tech was a typo or intentional but from now on I'm using it in place of big tech.
> Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact.
Having tech led teams at both high-profile and low-profile tech companies, that is _not_ my experience.
Most engineers worth their salt value quality. Product Management generally doesn't see quality as a feature, therefore doesn't take it into account. For short-lived code, quality is indeed over-rated. For long-lived code, quality is the thing that determines whether you can keep improving or tuning other features or whether you'll miss deadlines. Sadly, retrofitting quality in an existing codebase is awfully expensive.
There's also one important, but often undervalued, aspect. Overwhelmingly, today's tech world has been built by neurodivergent engineers. In my experience, neurodivergent engineers tend to value getting to the end of things, rather than letting them drop mid-way. This can absolutely be seen as over-engineering, but it's often a cognitive scaffolding that will ensure that the work can be resumed (by them or anyone else) even after context-switching to something entirely different.
Whether it actually _is_ over-engineering often depends on how well the engineer is aware of the actual needs, rather than being spoon-fed instructions without visibility. Or on the maturity and skill of the engineer, depending on the case.
Relevant
https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted...
Dremel/big query Spanner Borg Chrome
None of those were acquisitions
And they solved real, hard problems the company was facing for which there were no good external solutions.
Waymo too
V8 that backs Chrome and NodeJS
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
My best friend bought a house. She noticed within the first month that the name of the road she lived on was misspelled in Google Maps. Specifically, it's a slightly unusual spelling of the road name. Like "Chickorie" vs "Chickory". It's particularly annoying because there's a road the next town over with the traditional spelling. It doesn't even share address numbers, but Google Maps still frequently misdirects people.
It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well.
It's still wrong.
She bought her house in 2015.
My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was some conflict with overlapping systems deep in the map bowels - and the bar is visible again. It's just good luck that the owner happened to talk to me and I happened to know someone who looked into it!
This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google.
The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.
Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.
I think in the EU this is mandated. Every algorithmic profiling decision must come with an explanation and human appeal, under GDPR?
Legislating costly support for a free and accessible service is how that service stops being free and accessible.
You need to legislate effectively.
This is something U.S.-Americans often do not (want to) understand. The misconception often is that just because their legislative efforts are an ineffective, lobby-ridden crapshoot, that the free market is automatically the best answer to everything.
You can affect really good and positive change through lawmaking, the entire point of it is to regulate and intervene when the wellbeing of the populous and fair competition is in jeopardy.
If you can't afford to run the service without shitting all over everyone, then you can't afford to run the service.
Same argument for the living wage.
they have four trillion dollars buddy they'll be okay.
The price of the most recent transaction of a share times the number of outstanding shares is not equal to spendable cash.
These are exactly the kind of companies that have enough data and analysis to avoid bleeding money.
so externalizing environmental and social costs is fine, as long as the numbers are big enough?
I am not sure how any of this follows.
They became big enough because they were free and had massive cash behind them to destroy all competition (Mapquest, Garmin and others)
Now they are this big, they have become quasi public record for many other organizations who rely on this data.
Since they want to keep costs low, if their data is wrong, it can have significant impacts on your life and getting someone to correct it is almost impossible.
And that's why you want to start paying for GMaps?
Want to, not really. Want GMaps moved from Google? Yes. If it can stand on it's own free, fine whatever. If not and people need to be charged for it, fine.
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These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?"
Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?
Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.
I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.
When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
Google just lost a lawsuit by an unnamed big media company in Germany because its AI kept telling people the media company was a scam. This is the only form of feedback that companies like Google actually listen to.
> I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
What happened? I also use Wise.
My anecdote is worth just as much as yours. I moved cross-country in early 2016 (for work at Google) and noticed when we closed on our house that the next street over was mis-pronounced by Google Maps. I reported it and it was fixed within a week.
you moved there --to work at google; you reported it --while you worked at google. What is different hmmmm
Nothing -- I reported it via the consumer Google Maps function. In fact, I've reported several Maps errors over the years and all have been addressed fairly promptly. This includes before I worked at Google, during my time there, and after leaving.
If they reported it via the normal Google Maps reporting function, it doesn't actually make a difference, does it?
The difference is the location of the house.
(2026 Googler, struggling to answer an interview question)
Ha. But I guess I was too subtle. Google is likely to care more about addresses in the Bay Area, because if they're wrong, their Tesla or Waymo could drive them into a ditch.
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Google Maps put a town label near my parents' house that is a name that was on some old maps in the 1910s, but fell completely out of use before the current suburb was built in the 70s and 80s. I had never heard it once in my life until I was in my early 20s and met a transplant who had picked up the name from Google Maps. I attempted to report it as inaccurate (USGS has had it as being out of use for decades) multiple times over the years, but no reply.
Google puts the "Warsaw-Berlin Urstromtal" (glacial valley?) right in the middle of the river near the Friedrichstraße train station.
You can be browsing the area and suddenly, yep, there's a glacial valley there in the middle of the river. According to Google.
This is a large-scale geographical feature that crosses most of Germany and Poland. But actually it's in the river next to Friedrichstraße station.
Most of the neighbourhood names in my large European city were like this on Google Maps. Either old names or hyperspecific landmark/street names that I had never heard being used as synecdoche for the area.
This was definitely true 4-5 years ago. I looked now and it's mostly better at most levels of zoom.
Google maps uses suggestive names (e.g. a park walkway given a name by the municipality) as official road names, and when it does that it marked it as a cycling path. Both are invalid and cycling on them is illegal. This has been going on for years.
It redirects cars on foot/bikepaths near rivers, with the danger of sliding in.
Google Maps have an address API some companies use when filling out addresses for shipments.
Despite my building existing for over 10 years, putting in “flat number, building name” into that system will be rewritten to “house number, building name road” which is an address on a he other side of town (and London ain’t exactly small).
I’ve had multiple orders go missing as a result.
Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...
The only universal address input is a freeform text box. Optionally with a country, which should also be a freeform text box because countries get created and destroyed and you won't remember to update it. City or district is probably okay - as a freeform text box - addresses without one can write (no district). But street addresses are different everywhere and must be freeform unless you're the government of that region.
This is why we have postcodes.
More concretely, a postcode is usually specific to between 7 and 30 dwellings, in the usual case it's about 15 houses.
Contrary to common belief, they're not always on the same street, but in the vast majority of cases (like maybe 99%) house number + postcode is sufficient. Definitely flat number + building name/number + postcode should get your stuff there.
Yeah, the google maps address thing just overwrites my post code, and some senders in the US don’t appear to pay attention to that.
The trick is use the right keywords. "Dear Sir and Madam of google, im writing you to inform you, about a possible liability your software opens itself up to, by referencing emergency vehicles to the wrong road. Example:
Regards"
Usually street data comes from an official source. You probably should have reported the issue to the local government rather than Google. (Just because the name is correct on some government material doesn't mean it's correct everywhere.)
It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
Interesting submission on that topic : How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343
No kidding. When I zoom in on a few square miles around my house and ask to see restaurants, it shows only a few of them even though there is plenty of space -- it isn't like it has to prune some to make it readable. I zoom in and some appear that weren't there before ... why? There was room to display it before I zoomed in. Gaaah!
Oh wow I always complain about this, I didn't realize other people were also so frustrated by this. Tons and tons of cafes by my house, but I zoom in with about a six block radius, where there are at least 20 cafes or cafe-restaurants there, and literally 1 or 2 come up.
The grocer on my block is so tiny that I hit the max zoom before it shows up. If you pan around fiddle I can occasionally get it to appear, but it effectively does not exist according to google maps.
Not to mention that zooming in will make some listings disappear
Yeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear.
I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.
Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.
I'd assume it's pruning to make only the best-paying (to Google) restaurants visible.
This is to force you to use search rather than your eyes.
I started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation
I believe that the initial idea there was to refer to notable landmarks and these company signs are readable from a distance.
But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
This also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
So you think they weren’t getting paid for this? You think they just freely mention corporate food companies purely for users benefit?
It is still drawing bike lane networks in cemeteries and random bits of grass and pavement. So no. The way I see it is is actually worse than it was in 2006. When I opened it today it asked me if I would like to see Dua Lipa's recommended restaurants.
Sir, this is Dua Lipas favorites Wendys - do not cause a promotion commotion, not again Sir!
Not relative to its available resources. For example, there's still no option to penalize intersections. I'm still getting absurd side-street routes and unprotected lefts/crossings to save 1 minute on a 20-minute trip.
It's rather baffling how little they've improved it in certainly the last 15 years. Waze is certainly the better consumer product, even if it relies on similar (the same?) backend software. Apple Maps has caught up and passed it in terms of usable software, even if the actual map quality is worse in some places.
For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.
It's been up and down for about 8-12 years. Problems get fixed and new ones get added without a particular direction, at least that's what it feels like as a regular user. Some come back years after they were first fixed.
Maps peaked after Google acquired Waze in 2013 and integrated the data. Since then they've added worthless annoying social features and more advertising.
I feel like every other time I open maps I get some "look at what's new" pop-up, which derails my thought process and muscle memory.
Go to a park near your house with walking paths in it. Compare Google Maps with OSM.
That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.
Apple Maps has been better than Google Maps for at least 10 years and nowadays the way that Google Maps improves is often just by copying Apple Maps
I’ve agreed for a long time… Unfortunately though, Apple Maps just added Ads, so expect them to start having the same issues as Google Maps does (like showing big ads for every location whenever you’re moving around at the map).
After Apple Maps being one of my favorite reasons for having an iPhone for the last 7ish years, I’m back to OpenStreetMaps mostly, or still Google to look up business hours. Sad… but having downloaded maps will probably be a good thing long-term
Id say it improved until about 2016, since then the additions have generally made the software worse.
More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes.
Thats just the start
"needlessly verbose navigation instructions"
You ever try to navigate the highway systems in either DC or Houston with verbal instructions enabled? It sounds like someone is having a stroke.
Yep to the point where its easier without the gps.
Google has said to turn right at an intersection where you are turning left for years because it doesn't know about a T shaped intersection that tens of thousands use a day.
odds of a given street being labeled on gmaps for android still feels like 50/50 unless you get the zoom exactly right
This is my biggest annoyance. Such a crap shoot if I can actually see the street names.
Maps thinks it's fine to do a u-turn on the Sydney harbour bridge.
Maps straight up can't navigate sanely in Australia I've found.
I've switched to OsmAnd for driving because it'll give a sensible main road following route.
Google Maps reliably sends me down residential roads and adds a whole bunch of turns and then winds up with idiot ideas like "turn right into this two way 4 lane road we tried to slightly avoid".
I wonder if it ever does that for the SF Bay Bridge.
"Perform Immelmann turn in 200 feet"
Is this like a platform 9 3/4 thing?
My house and street and surrounding streets still aren’t on Google Maps after a month post closing (new development). It’s on Apple Maps and Uber; Amazon and FedEx deliver.
Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.
It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.
It's a mixed bag at best. The product has had numerous features pushed, but in the US, the navigation feature is objectively worse than 5+ years ago. Too much spoonfeeding of directions to ensure the app is kept on. But the app won't actually tell you the freeway number and direction - which the driver can see on the dozen signs on the road.
Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.
I didn't realize till you said this how it's their fault I have to turn on my screen at every important turn to tell which road they mean, because they won't just say "turn onto the interchange, EXIT 7A".
I used to be able to view maps in 3D. Not anything fancy, just a tilt shift. This year I noticed the feature appears to be gone. Also, if I want to see my home city with an up to date overhead view from this side of 2023 to see what has been built lately, I have to go look up Sentinel imagery.
I would claim it has indeed become worse.
I would say Google Maps regressed, over bloated, showing ads or at least unrelated results. Mysterious hang-ups, where app refuses to work every once in a while.
Google bought Google Earth from Keyhole.
I had a Keyhole account long before Google was in the business, and it worked about like Google Earth does now.
Keyhole dates back to 2001 and draws on several precursors, eg: ERMapper (Perth, Western Australia) which offered similar functionality in the 1990s - in addition to computational process pipelines for, say, warping and geomosaicing inputs, multi spectral filtering (adding and subtracting weighted bands to sharpen certain features, etc).
ER Mapper was the first software I dog fooded that transferred images without the dial up scan line by scan line top down process that existed to that point in time.
The same discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and variation techniques occurred to several entities at much the same time .. some US patent pettiness killed a lot of development for a couple of years from 1999 forward:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....
It does less than before and it blocks more things and has more spam. Now you have to pay for map embedding on a website. Let's go back 20 years
Over the last 8-10 years or so, I’d say it has gotten considerably worse.
I'd say it's much worse than it used to be.
It’s regressed a lot.
I'd say it's devolved aggressively at least on mobile. Between the firehose of modal bullshit I didn't ask for, sub-optimal pathfinding, and annoying prompts from waze legacy features there's a ton of unwanted friction added to the process.
Google: HOW ABOUT SOME AI ON IT?!? You know you want it.
Lmao
[dead]
Google Cloud has a solid product, not sure about internal engineering culture.
brain was grown in house and likely deserves as much or more credit than open ai for the current llm boom
They literally would have kept the entire thing to themselves and never productized it. Think about how much investment capital and human capital OpenAI poured onto this by having their big "hello world" with ChatGPT.
They literally had a productionized transformer model (translate) which was the inspiration for all of this. The famous paper was written about a productionized ML Model.
They also had a productionized LLM in search (known as 'mums') before the whole "AI Chatbot" craze.
They also had a chat-tuned LLM chatbot (LaMDA) in testing internally. It was shown off over a year before ChatGPT was created (2021)... and later released as an app (AI test kitchen) before ChatGPT was announced.
ChatGPT may have been the big industry moment, but Google was releasing LLMs to production before OpenAI.
> LaMDA
Wow thanks for reminding me of this. Remember that leaked story of an engineer claiming it was sentient, even before ChatGPT came out?
Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.
That's the unfortunate outcome of running a business at scale.
Google has bad governance, same with many other big businesses in the tech related sector partially because of the extremely generous position founders were in during the 00s and interest rates. In industries with lower margins like chemical/material industry you don't get away with this because managers in these industries are way better at telling value from non-value. There's been activist investors ( e.g. Christopher Hohn) who tried getting Google to run a tighter ship but with the dual stock setup there's not much which can be done.
The 2000s were a startup winter after the dotcom bubble burst. In those days you were extremely lucky if you could raise over $100k in funding and in revenue $100m was the ultimate fantasy. ZIRP was the 2010s
You're right, what did happen around that time is that founders would be kept in charge of their companies instead of being replaced by CEOs (e.g. Founders Fund). The combination of the founders staying in power facilitated with dual class shares/ZIRP in 2010s (Google had their 2004 IPO) would be more correct.
So in other words, "Thanks Obama"
I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook.
They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.
Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.
That's because they don't want you to use the web application
My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.
That's back end. With the money they make they could have rewritten the front end so it doesn't have to reload everything whenever you upload an image.
Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P
If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.
that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.
+1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example.
Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.
I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish
A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.
One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.
That wasn't my experience at all, I found the orgs I was in (infra) to have great culture.
Probably well run compared to the rest of meta, not to the versions of themselves pre acquisition. Whatsapp is worsening by the day.
They introduced desktop version, dark theme and multiple accounts post the acquisition by meta. Hate the ad and social stuff they're shoving down, though.
In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google).
WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.
IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).
I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.
Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).
Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.
Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).
Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.
I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.
The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.
At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.
There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.
Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire.
Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
That's funny about your last line about Messenger. When I was at Facebook in 2020 and 2021 I thought the "Lightspeed" version of Messenger [1] was something of an engineering marvel. Specically the way it was centered around SQLite as the datastore, how the sever side could integrate with it, and how the UI was power by this reactive-style framework written in C. With lots of testing to keep binary size under control and things working reliably. And the DX was not bad for all these constraints. I think CG/SQL [2] is one of the few open source artifacts from this effort.
There were other reasonably nicely engineered things there, like some of the code-as-configuration things in PHP like the ORM and the structured logging. Where you just write and commit code and the databases and data warehouses just get set up automatically.
The choice to have a monolithic web stack at Facebook had some benefits. The latency from landing a diff to being in prod was a couple of hours, not matter what part of the site you touched. And given an arbitrary URL, there was a tool that used static analysis to tell you which file handled that request. Compared to Google where every damn thing is a micro-service with its own variable release schedule and different ways of doing request routing. Trying to figure out where a request goes is combination of dynamic tracing of the RPC trace behind it plus a bunch of grepping through the related code bases.
All that said, I was far away from doing real engineering at Facebook. I accidentally joined a growth team. Which meant our teams remit was churning out all kinds of experiments to see what we could to do to make our team's number go up. I did not find this type of work enjoyable and quit. So I have a narrow perspective.
Also to give these multinational corporations some benefit of the doubt, some of the way they operate is path-dependent. They have hundreds of millions of lines code. So they can get to a point where it makes sense to hire a bunch of compiler engineers to fork PHP and make the Hack language. Whereas a startup would almost certainly never create a new programming language to write their product. To take solutions of this context and apply them to the outside world might not make sense.
[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...
[2]: https://cgsql.dev/
Thank you for the insight this actually answer a lot of questions or suspicious I had with Google. Surprised about Android and now Fuchsia makes sense.
I wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.
> IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now
As a user, Instagram is about the only part of the Meta empire that doesn't suck
> I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.
That makes sense from a consumer point of view. I don't use FB much. In fact, I recently logged on a few times after a few years of a break. It's terrible. You can't even get conversation history anymore. You can talk to someone via the app on your phone, open Facebook in the browser on your computer and not see the messages there. Makes me wonder why is Meta still around?
I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.
So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames.
I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon
Same exact story for me in my prior company that I left lol. In my exit interview I said "I love literally every single person in the company, except for $PERSON because $PERSON has lost their fucking mind and is going to kill this company with their psychotic AI push". I was the 30th dev to leave in 2 months, in a company that had ~40-50 devs to begin with.
Can someone explain to me the symptoms of AI psychosis that you have witnessed? Because I know several 2nd hand stories of people going through this but I haven't seen it myself up close. I am curious about it because this is gonna be the new widespread-social-ill of the next decade
I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he makes insinuations that they had better get with the times or AI is going to replace them. An AI native developer, of course, would not ask annoying questions like "what is the purpose of this change" or "how do you know this will make things better"; this is a time for action, don't you see?
Fortunately for me, he's not senior enough to make my life miserable. But if he ran our engineering org I have no doubt he'd inflict many of the same problems the source article describes on us. Reassigning software engineers to data labeling has all the hallmarks of an idea that came through this process; any human manager would immediately identify the obvious, showstopping problems with it, but to an AI whose experience of the world is exclusively mediated through written text it's not so obvious.
> I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he ...
To me this reads like a personal resistance to feedback / resistance to behavior change or a very jr eng more than agent related. Code isn't sacred — LLMs often easily generate absurdly overcomplicated garbage spaghetti code, but this appears to be getting better, and they are "steerable" towards better outputs with a few rounds of revisions, and some light process around a light spec, TDD, etc.
It's definitely agent related in some sense because it started very abruptly when he started using agents. I could believe a story where it's less "agents themselves have wrecked him" and more "agents have enabled his ambitions to scale to ideas he doesn't have the seniority to execute on".
I have had the chance recently to meet my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss at my current job and it is amazing how in this era of robber-baron capitalism we seem to be promoting exclusively the most unserious, irresponsible, and magical-thinking among us. The fish does seem to be rotting from the head. And it's not just some companies or institutions, it seems to be all of them. At least during the gilded age, the robber barons were serious people. I'd rather have Vanderbilt or Carnegie as my economic royalty than Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel. Vanderbilt and Carnegie may have been evil, but at least they had their heads on straight.
what decisions did the CEO do that you would believe is poor? Just conceptually if examples are make you too easily identifiable - iam purely curious.
How much real productivity gains do you think people saw.
I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?
If the company is going down in flames I’d say that’s a loss in productivity.
Not necessarily, as productivity is usually measuring output, not outcomes.
Even then, outcomes at companies require external factors, like markets and competitors, and often don’t majorly depend on the company’s efforts.
Agree not “necessarily”
> Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac.
I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.
IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).
Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.
Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.
Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.
> I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.
This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.
Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.
I agree, people don’t change, the circumstances change to expose their true self.
I also read another lesson from this. The performance review system was already broken in the pre-AI golden age the article describes. Lines of code written and individual impact should not have been the goal. Team cohesion, architectural cohesion, building things that make actual sense are what you want.
I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are.
The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.
I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both.
We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.
The mistake is thinking "the most powerful people on earth" aren't just like anyone else.
Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.
I've definitely seen some articles on the topic of AI psychosis among executives. I think there's something about being in a position of power that makes the sycophancy really psychologically dangerous.
It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state.
This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...
I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
> At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.
Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?
All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.
> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.
In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!
"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.
Except the PM is better at the internal politics needed to survive the drama.
> every PM is soon going to be able to do your work
This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News
At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work.
From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use.
Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?
Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
Exactly this, software engineering is “intelligence complete.” If you can solve it, you can solve all knowledge work.
No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.
To me it is almost tautological that what I said is true. If software can’t solve a knowledge work problem, that means the software isn’t good enough and needs improved.
I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
AI "in the likeness of well-known actor" surely is enough for most of the slop-eating pigs Hollywood serves.
It might be "enough" but it's not how the show industry works. There is no human story around it; the well-known actors and the people around them would have to be quite stupid to allow it too. And taking this development into the extreme, there will be no living well-known actors, just ai slop everywhere, and while the audience might not be the most demanding, surely that's not enough to make money in the long term.
Explain to me how automating CS automates waiters and chefs.
Most will be replaced by the Soylent green factory after waiters and chefs become a niche luxury for those who did not find themselves economically crushed.
Robots
Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.
> absolutely certain
what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much.
No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.
At the end of the day it's a battle of competence of who runs your company.
Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while.
But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably.
I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.
Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.
Statistics really is a bitch.
I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.
> It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.
Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.
> Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea
We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage.
At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.
> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals
That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.
IDK, I think overall it will be more like the 'SAAS' and 'Low Code' waves than the 'Blockchain' fever dreams I've heard in my career.
Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
It seems at this rate to avoid a large tech crash in the near future we need to start seeing real, transformative value being delivered by AI. Like, the promises are coming due. From where I sit, I don't see that happening. That's bad news.
If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI.
If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.
The irony is that I’d totally test out replacing the CEO with AI - best bang for buck by a million miles
Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.
Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).
Based on existing corporate hierarchy it would probably be the board of directors. There would be some sort of collaboration service where managers/agents push up problems and solutions to the board and they vote yes or no
The grandparent comment of yours mentioned Delamain from Cyberpunk 2077. In that fictional scenario, the company purchased an AI which gradually took over its workforce: maintenance robots, drivers, etc. All that was left was the owners/board of directors, essentially.
What ended up happening was that the AI ended up tricking the board of directors by buying back the company for itself.
You find this out by poking around the abandoned offices of the company and read the emails on the computers. The whole reason you interact with Delamain is that it is basically using your human help to do some tasks that it can't do as an AI (fairly compensated, Delamain actually seems like a pretty stand up AI, and the strange legal status of the company is ignored by authorities because so many people depend on the service).
That scenario is starting to seem highly plausible as long as someone is sets up something badly enough.
Can't the board of directors be replaced by a board of AI ?
Yes, if you don’t believe the board ever exercises effective restraint or holds effective responsibility.
Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.
Sure, but that's not really the point as long as we exist in a world where the ultimate responsibility rests on humans. The alternative is skynet
Would be interesting to have a worker-owned coop where the workers vote on the prompt for the AI CEO.
How wild would that be if in 20 years it turns out one of the main jobs destroyed by AI is overpaid CEOs? A man can dream...
But then we wouldn't have had the metaverse, that was a barrel of laughs.
> AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry
I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less.
AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams.
In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today).
In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality.
However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.
I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it.
It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption.
This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.
I don’t think it’s psychosis if the ground level people are using it effectively. That’s just the reality of having / wanting good tools.
I'm actually worried that as AI gets smarter and more capable, it will become able to induce AI psychosis in even more people. Either accidentally or on purpose, I have no idea about that part.
The examples you give aren't exactly inspiring.
Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds.
The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.
So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.
And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.
(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )
The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.
Nah, in Facebooks case it was more that they scaled engineering as they scaled sales.
Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.
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I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.
Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.
To be fair they’re doing it by increasingly immoral, unethical, and potentially illegal methods resulting in at this point over 300 lost lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny world wide, blowback over intentionally enabling scams and fraud for profit, enabling csam, trafficking, etc as long as they pay their ads bills.
It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due to damages. Many of the civil suits they’re losing are petty weak cases showing juries and judges literally hate meta. These are signs that their revenues are short term money grabs due to blindly chasing iRev at the cost of literally everything else.
Even hacking they only really follow through on if their large business credit extensions are at risk or chargebacks. Debit and direct funding isn’t pursued because they’re not loss liable - if it’s literal theft via debit cards, it’s not a priority. If it’s their own money via credit that’s refundable, they’re all hands on deck.
This will all blow back on them at some point and that point isn’t far aware. Courts, governments, banks, they’re all starting to notice the lawlessness and pure avarice. The consequences will severely impair their ads business, require them to undergo worse consent, oversight, and audit that waving an AI hand at won’t be sufficient, especially when the courts are concerned as judges are especially skeptical of AI solutions to court orders.
Their only out is to find another business model, which they’ve been trying to do without success since Facebook was first launched.
Holding the rich and powerful to account is not something that seems to happen much, or ever, in the US these days.
The reason he seems poor is because he keeps signaling he doesn't have enough money to buy the one thing he really wants: trust. These people out for world domination never get it. He can't set up a platform (VR, AI) for the same reason Windows is dying: their brands are toxic and nobody will work with them if they have a choice.
They've previously wasted a lot of money on stupid stuff (Facebook phone, metaverse etc etc), but my impression is that they messed with their core business less in the course of doing that. Whereas now, as the article mentioned, it seems like they're just kind of breaking engineering completely.
You can call Zuck evil or greedy. But being bad at running a business surely isn't one of his traits. Meta's net earning grew so much in the past decade that it, ironically, has the sanest P/E ratio trend out of all big US techs.
I’m starting to classify great business minds as “earners” vs. “extractors” to help counter the braindead take that anyone who accumulates wealth is worthy of praise. Zuck is an incredible extractor: he does not create value, he exploits gray areas in the social contract of society like an oil baron vacuuming up oil wells using deceit and chicanery.
> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more.
This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.
> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.
The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.
Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.
Yes, this is not labeling what is an apple and what is a pear. "Annotation" does not do this work justice.
For a coding agent, for example, there is *very detailed* analysis of the turns and ranking of different portions of the conversation.
Adherence or deviation from specific rules matters. Writing quality matters. Expertise in the topic under discussion matters. Having intuition for the tone and beat of a good conversation matters.
Scoring a 15-20 turn conversation can easily take two and a half hours.
Clicking submit does not mean the author is done. Many annotations will be turned back to them by a reviewer to touch up in some way.
This work can be far more mentally taxing than programming, is measured much more by completions more of a timed exercise than SWE.
FWIW, Meta employees would probably make great coding agent conversation annotators. But it is absolutely not SWE and they won't enjoy it (for long).
It's a bold move cotton.
I doubt it'll pay off. Let's face it, the average FB engineer is no better than the average Polish engineer, and the Polish guy is 20x cheaper. If you wanted cost-effective labeling you'd send it to Poland. Or better, Chile.
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> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.
Zuck basically went to a town hall and explained to his employees that their remaining value to him is as training mules for his AI.
It seems really dumb to tell them that. I assume they’re all feeding garbage to the models now.
They’ve largely filtered their employees for people who have a mental breakdown if they don’t get 110% on a 100% scale or get the top of the top rating because they’ve done that their whole life until they got their first job at the tender age of 25-28 after getting their masters or PhD.
I’ve met too many meta members who have stories about their direct reports or peers who had a crashout because they got Exceeds Expectations and a mid 5 figure raise instead of Greatly Exceeds Expectations with a higher 5 figure raise not because of the money but because of not getting the top score.
I’m pretty sure zuck is being a rational sociopath and realizing he can use the PSC system to get these people to widely work against their best interests due to their ego.
idk... In their own way these types of people who have blinders on to such a degree that they crashout over such things are also sociopaths...
Seems like a side effect of the k shaped economy... our society increasingly doesn't have rewards for normal hardworking people. Given tech has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Working at Meta already meant you were chasing a bag knowing the product was more or less social poison anyway. It doesn't seem to me that Zuck is uniquely culpable... maybe he's just the best one at the game they're all playing...
The fact he still cares so much about Meta when he is a billionaire is just like those crashouts. Again, it's the same type of person. He's just better at it than they are.
I have no empathy for the types of people who got layd off from meta who can’t see the similarities between them and the industry they disrupted.
I advocated for people who lost their jobs due to tech disruption to learn how to become software engineer not from a place of superiority but from a place of “this is one of the last places you can be self taught and earn a middle class income”
I am saying this has now hit the tech world and I will hold zuck culpable, although not uniquely since that requires a set of 1, but because he’s in charge of one of the top 10 companies in terms of big tech.
You don’t get to be that rich and that in charge of decisions, without holding responsibility. If you want to claim otherwise, then cool, you shouldn’t complain when we take all the assets you are apparently not responsible for.
I like the part when he “took full responsibility” for HIS Metaverse mistake, and fired everybody else lmao
Gavin from Silicon Valley did it first
Zuck literally said that he wants folks with higher intelligence on the Applied Intelligence team. And the best way to do that was to move folks internally, since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.
Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.
> since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.
I haven't interviewed with them in almost 10 years. But aren't they doing the same interview everyone else does?
The belief that engineers are not doing anything for x amount of time that could be better spent on other immediately measurable things is as old as the profession itself.
Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.
One of the funniest things is how hard it was to get approval for a $100 software license but now people are being encouraged to burn thousands on tokens.
My favorite one is "NO ACCESS TO PRODUCTION DATA" "it's for agent" "do whatever you want"
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see also: we're all developing on min spec Macbook Pros while being encouraged to burn > max spec Macbook Pros cost in tokens/month while still waiting for builds to compile.
I can't give you exact numbers, but this is line with what I'm hearing through the grapevine. Lots of senior managers being converted back to ICs as well.
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
It's only until Cold Harbor is completed.
Then all the engineers will get to rejoin their outies.
I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.
> I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context
Cold Harbor is a reference to the TV show Severance.
Without going into any real spoilers it was the code name of a data classification project so mysterious that the people working on it weren't allowed to know what they were working on (and yes, the project in the show was probably named after the battle in the Civil War).
The Meta connection is that there are some humorous parallels between that project and a project involving people tagging data to train technology to replace themselves, and just the overall creepy dystopian vibe of both the fictional and real-world companies (and founders) involved.
My partner works there as an engineer. The org they work in had loads of people transferred to the "AAI" org doing data labelling. I find it almost unbelievable as well, but it is true.
It's 100% unbelievable and hysterical that its true. Have they done the simple math on how much labeled data they need to make a model of value?
They are likely managing them out.
This is starting to feel like a Peter Watts short story.
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
Your team lost 50-75%? Is that an approximation, or do you just not know? Can't you just count who left to get the actual ratio?
Maybe it's better to be vague in a situation like this?
>using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources
Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.
I wouldn't trust any engineers I know of with their "taste". At best it's a highly skewed view of the world. At worst, it's outright opposite to genpop.
I assume taste was meant in term of coding. "taste" is still often the lacking trait that LLMs have when it comes to code design.
Seriously, what a world that would create.
Unless they collude and hatch a plan to sabotage the LLM training.
Are there any examples of this actually working? I keep seeing this fantasy repeated but have not seen a plausible explanation for how they wouldn't be contibuting to the pile of negative examples which are just as valuable if not more.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/data-poisoning/ Data poisoning.
its fantasy
scale ai's value prop was catching people like this
what about just... becoming mediocre? engineers are already infamously lazy at reviewing PRs. how is Meta incentivizing these Data Labelers to give a shit and actually scrutinize the AI-generated code they're supposed to be reviewing? what's the reward structure? what prevents engineers from flagging minor nitpicks all day while they look at LinkedIn?
Probably forcing them to review each other's work to panopticon "quality," and keeping track of the average throughput per engineer so if people fall behind the taskmasters can pay them a visit.
It’s just advertisement/SEO. It’s basically guaranteed, just not the way you think
Poison pilling skills is a thing, though finding evidence for it is difficult given the crux is an absence of information. The baseline instruction and training is given to the model by the expert, but edge cases are willfully neglected. The degree of neglect generally determines how detectable it is, but if all the SMEs are in on it a lot of them will probably persist. Effectiveness and impact are obviously relative to the system and the edge case. Not particularly different from the fallout previously seen during the offshoring era.
From the article it sounds like what they're actually doing is reviewing LLM-generated code, for that you do need good software engineers.
Although it goes without saying that good software engineers won't enjoy doing this very much
I believe it, because it makes a kind of sense. Post-training has a huge impact on how well LLMs perform, and labeled data is what determines the effectiveness of post-training. This is why companies like Anthropic are so worried about distillation.
So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks on them?
Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.
(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)
From the article:
> Forced data labeling with 4,500+ engineers is to generate high-quality RLHF
I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments where the now-data labelers don’t actually want to do that kind of work.
It’s crazy to think that Meta leadership believed that it makes sense.
> I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments
Their bonuses depend on it. They'll have to play ball unless they have other jobs lined up, are ready to retire early, or prepared to be on the shitlist for the next round of layoffs due to "underperformance"
Do the skills these people have overlap with the skills needed for a good data labeler? I'm guessing being a domain expert is most valuable as a data labeler.
Because you can just get rid of all those people and do the data labeling tasks for 1/4 the cost?
unironically if those engineers were considered to be 'bloat' its better to have them label data because they are smarter and vetted
basically a soft layoff
> using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources
Is work such as changing the styling of a button on the Instagram app any more useful than that?
Mining work was unglamorous and dangerous but was needed. Labeling work is the mining of the AI era.
Isn't that Scale AI investment in a company that does labeling? what are we missing? Are we all going to be labelers soon too?
Plot twist: we already are through the usage of AI lab's API.
Yes
Have you heard about the various startups that specialize in expert data labeling, like Mercor? They can pay $100-$200/hr for highly specialized work, who knows how much they charge their clients. Translated to an annual wage, that's definitely in the SF/SV engineer range
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
Have you heard about working for mercor? You aren't working full time for them or sniffing anywhere close to a proper annual wage.
Those percentages seem in line with what I have heard. Not company-wide, MSL was exempted, of course, and probably a few other golden geese here and there.
This reads like a way to get engineers to quit while they work on something "useful". After losing Yann, I doubt its going to end up being useful.
They are literally doing the apocryphal corporate dystopian maneuver: training their replacements.
They won't be doing it for long.
Coffin building
Silicon Valley strikes again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS-qZO9uCQ
I still use the phrase "not a hot dog" to describe things that only does one thing while described as having a lot more capabilities
Not 30-50%.
Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.
This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.
Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.
To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.
Yes, but hiring someone with no experience running an AI lab to run your AI lab is a terrible decision for CEO to make in the first place.
He does not micromanage, but at the same time he does not tune out. He has to see what’s going on.
Newspapers have said Zuck has a desk in the meta super intelligence lab
> was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling
I think the main proponent was Bosworth, not Wang
On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.
For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178
Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over.
Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success
That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.
It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.
It has always been this way though. Who is really qualified to evaluate something but another engineer? Perhaps the first record of a slop product is the Complaint to Ea-nāṣir from 1750 BC.
Not always. I think it's an inherent failure mode of markets when everyone is playing by the same rules.
You could simply invoke Goodhart's law: If the purpose of a business is to make money, its ability to make money is not a good measure of the value it creates. Except when there are competitors playing under different rules. Then capitalists need to make better products and services than their non-capitalist competitors to be able to make money in countries that can buy from either side.
During the Cold War, the planned economies of the communist block provided the necessary competition. When that competition disappeared, financialization gradually took over. Now there is China, which seems to be a command economy that uses markets as a tool and prioritizes the real economy over finances. Maybe it will provide enough competition to force capitalists behave again.
It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want.
There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.
spotify should do this
>One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success
So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.
Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).
So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?
As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.
Fully agreed. I'm curious to learn though how your approach changed in particular.
I mean from a bigger picture view. I'm much more likely to think in broader context of what impact a decision would have to the business at large. And my view of that is much more accurate than it used to be, without the exaggerated sense of importance most people place on their work. In other words, I'm better at right sizing effort and velocity.
Ah, but that is the old world, before AI. Given AI, dumb leaders can trash a business at the speed of thought.
"Strong businesses"
Like the feeds not showing any posts, like a login wall on everything, like... god. Any Zuckerberg products
Computer use
> Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.
Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.
Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?
I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize.
If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television.
I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.
Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing.
Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
Turns out they have no product vision beyond selling personally-identifiable information to advertisers. I hold them quite a bit in contempt so I would relish in their failure.
Well probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.
Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business.
You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
A LOT of those work in VR, AI, etc.
Not that many of the 25k work on the core apps.
Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)
As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.
> If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?
React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?
They aren't directly competitive (you wouldn't pick one or the other as product) but they are the premier open source projects of the two companies in terms of industry impact and they both reflect the engineering culture. (e.g. I am picking one as an exemplar for other software... like I want to make something like React instead of make something like Kube)
With just a little bit of hyperbole:
The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products. Google's systems are highly scalable, I grant that, but they have the first mover disadvantage that their foundations are first-generation and not based on experience and still slowing them down... but the market can't discipline them.
Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids. They benefit from huge scale and monopoly profits but Zuck is keeping more in his pocket than he would be if he did things like Google.
The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs. That is, a system like what Hazelcast was before it became an analytics play could support clusters of 30 or so big nodes (two racks) and there are probably just a few 100 systems in the worlds that really need to get bigger than that.
> The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products.
This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.
In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.
Meta is just a newer company than Google.
> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.
I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.
> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.
The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?
Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.
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Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?
Or Angular, if caring about Google
Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band!
Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations.
I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO.
I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds!
https://aframe.io/
I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered
https://react-hook-form.com/
which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.
But Kubernetes is solving a much messier and more complicated problem than React. There are numerous similar web frameworks to React in different languages that have been created as basically hobby projects.
Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.
Somewhat.
Kubernetes has the basic flaw that it has more scalability than 99.99% of companies need and you could serve almost all the market with a system that supports shared data structures (like IBM's Sysplex) and is more opinionated. An architecture which is less scalable could serve almost all of the systems on the planet and would be easier to work with.
I'll grant that there is essential complexity there, but Kube was built by people who didn't have fear of accidental complexity so it has a lot of it. Look at the whole "YAML sucks" thing which is partially a YAML thing (coulda chose something different) and also a function of the system they are trying to configure with YAML.
Kubernetes' YAML problem stems from its CLI tooling, and yes it was an atrocious choice once templating came in and visited horrors like helm on us. Internally, the the k8s api speaks only JSON, and you can already stuff whatever json you like in a yaml file.
Why does helm get all the hate?
I like helm. Helm has so much to offer and it’s not complicated.
It’s basically like handlebars/ mustache using golang.
Handlebars/mustache was what early angular/react used for templating.
> Handlebars/mustache was what early angular/react used for templating.
Yeah and they migrated away from it for good reason.
Look inside any bitnami chart and tell me that's anything you want to maintain. I'd rather have types and not have to count spaces for `nindent`.
> I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers
How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.
Someone who would compare React to Kubernetes instead of React (Facebook) and Vue.js (Google) does not have enough domain knowledge to provide an informed opinion on this matter
Kubernetes is the industry standard cluster orchestrator for a reason - it's fantastic
How do you decide to use useContext, useReducer, useState, or a third party management tool to manage state?
(I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).
My main complaint is that React doesn't handle highly dynamic situations. Think of how tools like photoshop or programming IDEs have tons of views and windows and property sheets and stuff and manage to update the right parts of the UI when things change. React on the other hand makes a structural link between the component tree and how state propagates.
Specifically I wrote a bunch of React components for making little biosignals applications that can (say) show two people's heartrate from bluetooth LE and show my breathing based on a strap i am wearing and another person's breathing based on a $20 radar from China.
I can pretty easily snap together the components and the system that feeds the state to the components by writing code. It works great, it's not that hard to do, it looks great.
But: I really wish I could make something where I could drag and drop display and data acquisition and processing components like LabView. Actually I know a lot about how to do the dynamic processing (Hint: read the Dragon book, not On Lisp) but React doesn't support dynamically assembled components... But I know Javascript systems can because I was writing them 2005-2010 back when browsers didn't have async and all the great affordances they offer now.
I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.
I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.
React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.
useState for local state or useContext (+ useReducer if it's complicated) for shared state is the "built-in" way that should be good enough for most things.
Instagram runs on angular doesn't it? They make more money per user than the core FB product... You might want to revisit your criteria for your FAANG journey
Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface:
> I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left.
> On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure.
This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle.
With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.
It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"
If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.
Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.
Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
> If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S
This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.
I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.
> This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance
I think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)
I just realized that Netflix’s Reed Hastings is the same Reed Hastings that wrote Purify - the excellent memory leak tool that was a pretty big deal back in the 90’s.
My bad. I was talking about both. The Netflix culture, and the book written by Hoffman. Hopefully I spelled their names right.
Oh! You did. I just saw the two in adjacent sentences and assumed you were referring to the Netflix CEO and had mixed up his name.
Nothing to see here, move along...
I don't think this is really true, there are plenty of engineers/managers who rotate through major tech companies. Many Meta folks will head off to new companies which would pay at similar levels.
I have a friend that did that, in a 4y stint there, and was happy to get to one of the layoffs phase. He was fairly lucky with the stock price RSUs vs stock price(though he knew a few that were so lucky that their 100k RSUs grant at sign got to like 800k, not that lucky, but yeah, his 4 years of flying to office made him basically "I can retire whenever I please to".
Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...
> or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
The acronym is outdated. I don't really see a difference between FAANG or Nvidia/Stripe/Uber/etc in terms of brand recognition.
And also it depends on where you land org-wise. What you actually are working on is more important than the brand name
In other words, do not buy a house or start a family within 2 hours of any of their supported work locations.
You can sell your house and roll the equity over to another one in a cheaper area. Depending on how you do it, you might even move into one with no loan or a tiny loan.
If you personally are being rotated out of FAANG, sure. If FAANG isn't hiring, good luck.
This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.
It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.
Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.
Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.
Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.
Someone from Google can quickly enlighten us. Look up the current tenure to be at 50% in percent, for Eng.
I think it was about 2 years 10ish years ago, but that was during rapid growth. Now that overall growth is down it is useful for this.
> median employee tenure
it's less than two years, probably well below average. maybe it was more previously
I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore.
The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers.
Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad Manager) has a very poor image, even with non-technical users.
So it's not even a sure bet you will even get a short term monetary payoff
In their defense (haha), virtually all the ad management platforms for social and search are total dogshit. Like seriously, some of the worst software I’ve used. Constantly broken, incredibly poor UI / UX, slow, frequently burns money for no reason, ads just mysteriously stop working, etc, etc. Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, they’re all like this. They don’t give a shit about the advertiser experience and it shows.
But I put up with it, just like everyone else, because it’s still amazing ROI when you get it working right. And there’s no other choice if you want access to these platforms with billions of potential customers.
> The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers
Besides top 2 AI labs, don't they outpay everyone?
Yea, they have to as a tax because no sane person will work there anymore.
When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.
Former meta bellend here:
Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR.
The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainless dicks.
Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.
Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.
The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.
Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,
AI slop to boomers? deffo
Rage bait? yup
Fraud? totally profitable.
There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"
They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)
Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped
So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.
Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.
> Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped
That's the thing right
So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit)
The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months.
Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea.
At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc.
Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.)
But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident.
Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything.
The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work
I should be clear "Reporting to a worse leader" the leadership at FAIR was good
'The problem is'...
Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.
This should be top comment. Organizations reflect their leadership and Zuck is a mess.
"A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple."
So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...
Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages.
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
And that’s why they love visa workers
Anyone at Meta able to confirm or expand on the details in this?
Well paid engineers compare their experience to a labour death camp just confirms how out of touch they are.
Felt the same way. Set aside the hyperbole, and it’s coming from the very real fear that data labeling does not have long-term job security. If the company continues to run after you’ve been moved, it’s pretty obvious you were redundant. Tough realization for people that see themselves as having been successful career-wise.
Hyperbole is fun though. So is complaining.
There's a difference between a hyperbole and being tone deaf.
They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.
"It’s literally the gulag" - okay this was a funny comment
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
Because coding appears to be the most monetizable use of AI, for some time to come.
It's also not like Meta could train it for content moderation, translation or judicial expertise even if it wanted to. They have software engineers idling, not translators.
But Meta's had so much success in this area by copying the leading lans already!
but who’s going to pay Meta for it?
??? The same market that is paying for Codex or Claude Code, if Meta offers competitive services.
I find it pretty hard to see how Meta could possibly catch up to the existing frontier labs. Distillation, I guess, if you want to go that route, but between the fact that they're already way behind and the constant deluge of negative press like this, it strikes me that they would straight up need an architectural miracle in order to actually be competitive.
[deleted]
> my manager has no idea who I am, nor what I’m working on, and I’ve never met them despite me being on the team for nearly two months.
This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.
At some point the layoff is probably the preferred outcome.
Looks like the Facebook employee got scared. They always keep quiet…
The job contracts include clauses about not posting things that paint the employer in a bad light on social media. No idea how enforceable that stuff is in any given jurisdiction, but really, what individual can afford to find out?
The elves are leaving Middle Earth..
"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"
Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.
> Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?
It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.
The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.
That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.
That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.
And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.
I may be the exception, but if I plan to work on non-work related stuff while traveling I absolutely take my personal laptop. I've done this when traveling to my HQ, as well as taking both work and personal laptops on personal vacations.
This must be you being in a different bubble from me, with perhaps a hint of Normalization of Deviance[0]. Those all sound like terrible ideas to me (are you implying looking at porn on a company laptop!?). You absolutely should not cross pollinate work with personal stuff. Use your personal phone or tablet or whatever for anything non work related.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
It was a rhetorical question; I am aware that people do stupid things with their employers' hardware. More directly, my point was that the supposed privacy questions raised by the AI-training keyboard tracking system do not matter much, because it has never been safe to do anything which requires personal privacy on work devices in the first place.
There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
If only we all could rise to the level of not doing stupid things on company property (praise), or company time (praise), then we would want for no privacy for there was never any to be taken in the first place.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
The sibling comments are weirdly out of touch. All the examples you cite are realistic.
You seem to have selected specifically people who are not likely to know the full implications of their behavior, and I agree with you.
I don't even like doing stuff like this on my phone.
> You seem to have selected specifically people who are not likely to know the full implications of their behavior, and I agree with you.
You mean every person in the world who doesn't actively work on the stuff doing the tracking? This isn't selection bias, selection bias is thinking those are the abnormals.
People act surprised when they are tracked on a corporate machine lmao.
Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?
I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat.
So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
On top of that, the company hasn't never hidden the fact that everything on the machine is tracked.
Everyone on the planet is saying this. Every new hire orientation likely states this.
Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0].
Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go. Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move. Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1]. Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits.
ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2] A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3].
Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!).
Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced).
My question for anyone still working at these companies:
Why are you still working there?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-a...
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno
[2]: https://x.com/DJ_CURFEW/status/2057522382315929802
[3]: https://www.tiktok.com/@clickup/video/7638681657058364702
[4]: https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/tech/bloodbath-at-california-t...
[5]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/
It's hard to find a job right now
> Why are you still working there?
Probably for the same reasons you go to work everyday.
Definitely not.
I work to put food in the table.
At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.
It makes sense that you need the best engineers to do the labelling. But the story very much sounds like a panic move.
"Things are going so fast and we need to catch up. Yesterday."
But you still have humans working for you. I doubt these label people are putting in their best efforts...
Why did Meta think that VR was the end all be all before throwing away billions of dollars? Why did that want to pay an AI expert a billion dollars? The reality is Meta chases shiny objects like a cat with little real or accountable leadership.
> Amazon has the Kindle
I'm not sure how this matters compared to the other platform companies. Kindle has such a small niche market and the Kindle "platform" hardly registers any impact.
Yeah I'm surprised they didn't mention Fire TV or even Alexa in addition to Kindle.
This is the result of scale acquisition. Alexander Wang is a notoriously unscrupulous individual. Meta was in a bad situation post Sandberg era but Wang accelerated the process.
In a way, it isn’t that surprising. Executives are constantly being sold the idea that "software is a solved problem." Even if they recognize that this is mostly marketing, it can still influence their internal expectations. They may start thinking, "Maybe AI has solved 30% of software development."
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.
I always point out the Elysium parallels and usually get trashed for doing it. But, if you look at all trend lines, the whole world is very quickly bifurcating into a two tier society with the few "Haves" safely walled off and protected from the many "Have Nots." You can see the moderately rich doing whatever they can to maneuver themselves in to position and ensure their ticket to the space station when the split happens. The rest of us are going to end up being economically irrelevant.
in a way, arent we all?
No. Not everyone. And even those who are thankfully don’t have the wealth and resources to upheave thousands of lives in pursuit of a mirage.
> raises privacy questions
Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.
Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.
Note that both kneecapped their previously quite open APIs, too.
Can’t really win here. If Facebook doesn’t have open APIs, it gets accused of being a walled garden and hoarding data. If it builds those APIs and lets third parties act with the same permissions as the authenticated user that gave permission to that third party, it gets Cambridge Analytica.
The changes I'm referring to are much later than the CA scandal.
In the last few years, they've locked third-party apps out of publishing to Facebook Groups, closed down the bug ticket system, and gave every indication of having abandoned any efforts at improving the ecosystem.
This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs. Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down.
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
layoffs don't explain reassigning half your engineers to work as labelers
There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age.
Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era.
The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating.
It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how to monetize a PhP web app - something my buddy in high school could create for our M.U.N. club. Zuck spends millions on VR glasses, low income high schools, 100,000 software engineers, and all he has is the same webapp + some monopolistic acquisitions and a loving wife and child.
Elon is a total dick to everyone, impregnates his executives, gets high on ketamine, does the Nazi salute on live television, but, importantly, launched more satellites into space than any country on Earth. For less than the price of a shitty VR webapp that 20 people used, Elon will solve Global Warming and bring humans into the outer reaches of the solar system. The duality of man.
If Elon started pissing his pants in public or flinging poo at his enemies, Zuckerberg would start doing the same thing.
What's wrong with Ketamine? Everybody (or at least population majority I'd bet) have consumed hardcore drugs like Alcohol, Cocaine, Ketamine and so-on, what does it have to do with anything?
Haven't you tried?
No I have not
You have not tried any hard drugs like Alcohol or softer ones like Marijuana in your lifetime? I mean kuddos to you but I don't really see what's wrong with it in moderation, and shaming people that decide to partake into it is a bit low :)
> Needless to say, this is invasive and raises privacy questions: If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call? Meta held no consultation and there are no workarounds; just a top-down decision being pushed through.
I'm not going to defend Meta's recent practices but any expectation of privacy when using an employer's device is forfeit. I thought this was basic common sense?
I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus.
[1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...
I feel that most of the Procedures that they took to push AI are inherently wrong i,e full time data labelling relocation won't be appreciated by anyone why not part time ?? also Measuring token usage is weird. It is true that exectives are so hyped on AI but these procedures are shortsighted and poorely thought of
If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.
The AI death march is destroying so many companies. You'd think some CEOs would break away from the herd by now.
I think Tim Cook tried to...
> Managers inside Meta “fight” over the pay packets of their employees, which involves “knocking down” the packet of engineers on other teams
> Quotas are handed down to managers for the splits of the workforce to be put in each ‘bucket’, and the internal politics gets heated as managers try to get their reports into higher buckets.
Curious, why can't the management assigns budgets (or resources in general) to individual teams? That is, it is the managers who are responsible for the resources that their teams get, and the budget is tied to the importance of the "team" that each manager owns. In that way, all the performance review will be local to each team. As a manager, I'd be responsible for the output and importance of my team, and I answer to my manager because they will allocate the budget (or resources in general). Recursively, my team members will answer to me and I don't have to justify who gets rewarded by how much to my peers, except that there will be some form of check and balances.
How Meta manages their perf review seems to set up their managers to be ineffective.
Because that would give managers too much agency. You aren't supposed to get that agency until you are director. Managers manage people and get headcount. Directors manage money and get budgets.
That agency has a price, though. Whatever level you get it at, your boss will not give a single crap about any excuses for why you didn't deliver. A meteor could have hit your building, and it wouldn't matter.
>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D
It’s such a waste for a company that has attracted the best talent, to just toss it.
Getting the right people on the bus is the most difficult task on the world.
And then these people end up in places that cannot utilize their full potential. Everyone is worse off.
Um. What's there to engineer at Meta? They are an ad-tech company. I thought the HN crowd would make fun of them for this. For years. But now I guess AI coding is easier to pick on than advertisements?
There's nothing at Meta that other companies (engineers) haven't already solved. It's not impossible to load to millions of pictures per second and have them displayed to billions of users.
Just the other day, there was a blog post talking about how we should stop idolizing these companies because they're not doing anything groundbreaking or innovating. But now we're doing just that: expecting an ad company to ... do groundbreaking engineering?
Say what you will. Zuckerberg for all that we make fun of him is an insanely successful software guy and businessman. Being good at software is easier, but being strong at both is rare, and he's a multi-billionaire from it. The dude is wildly successful and no matter how much we hate on him or his orgs for it, the people love it. And the advertisers love it. People love Meta's products and even folks in AI governance and safety fields get the Meta glasses and actively use them.
He's built a company that's pretty much self sustaining and you don't need 1000s of engineers for that. Maybe that fact is hitting too close to home?
How about proper account support? Not getting banned while the racist page you report 'doesn't violate community standards'? How about being able to actually see people's posts in the feed?
Meta is starting to recognize that they are hopelessly behind the other model makers, and they have been just burning cash over the last three years.
Past a certain point top talent care more about how they are treated then even more money. The top of the field can get generational wealth at a bunch of different places, why would they put up with Zuck?
From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen.
It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org.
On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things.
There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything.
So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink
it’s worth paying attention to what the stock price was 4 years ago for the next year or so
because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE
software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing
the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)
> because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy
right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"
yes, that is the messaging that meta leadership is going for, you have received it as they intended
Isn't that really common thing now, just look at Microsoft for example...
He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy".
I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals: - core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis. - I believe we are seeing this. - I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else
It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!
every engineer is hands-on with 'A.I' - yet we are not seeing quality software out in the wild.
no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.
We are going to seem some fairchildren spinouts out of this mess
I don’t have much to add, but it’s been interesting reading the comments here. I don’t engage with many of their products. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2014, one of the few times in my life I’ve done something before it was “cool” to do so. I do reluctantly use WhatsApp, but that’s really just because literally everyone in my life does so its just easier.
However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus?
Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.
Could it be possible that Zuck has a Llama-shaped magic 8-ball to which he has fully committed himself to “dogfooding” an AI-only strategy to his responsibilities in the company?
“[Ll]esus take the wheel”
Never stop your enemy from making a mistake.
Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time
”I built the Torment Nexus and I’ll got was a few million dollars and this lousy job.”
Sure, the current Torment Nexus buildout might be a bubble. But just think: in 10 years we will already have all this torment infrastructure built, ready to use.
Yes. Most companies are.
Honestly outside of the forced reassignment and surveillance this comes across as super whiny. Extremely unsympathetic.
they burned too much cash with Metaverse
Folks what has Meta got to do with engineering? Their products suck, we all use them because of network effects, nothing else mostly...
because enshittification probably has a third rail now with the belief that employees dont matter either.
"cattle, not pets"
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Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?
> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?
Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.
Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
the ceo of a former company I was at demanded a rebrand like 6 months after our internal rebrand. Cost ~500k-800k USD.
Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)
I wouldn't be surprised if a much larger proportion of big business and politics boiled down to this
Yeah there's lots of ethics rules and stuff about it but we've seen how little the upper class cares about that
Whenever a big business deal goes down, I tend to assume someone's getting sex or money out of the deal
Frankly there's already just so much corruption that we know about and it seems unlikely we know about all of it or even most of it
A friend of mine has actually posited a variation of this as way to predict the outcomes of legal cases
Hey, the VP is driving a new Ferrari... right after a new 8 figure deal.. weird.
> Schtupping
Note that word isn't joint to tupping unless you're from Tasmania.
I wonder what "commission" the VP received.How now, that’s not fair. They also make a lot of money giving teenagers depression and selling them beauty products and chatbot companions.
please stop being so mean, they also create echo chambers to kill political discourse (i.e. the foundation of democracy) and show the most inflammatory material to their users to pit them into a shouting match against each other
Truly who could blame them though. They have to trap people in rage bubbles or they might make slightly less money!
I'm so tired of these double standards, nobody ever blames fentanyl manufacturers for making such an addictive product so why is everyone mad at facebook? All they did was poison discourse for a generation and provide material support to an autocrat.
> Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
Also the genocides.
Hey now that was an accident! They created a taskforce to prevent that from happening again, ignored all their recommendations and then laid them all off.
I'm sure meta learned their lesson
Big whoopsies on that one.
Or alternatively, it takes some time to destroy a codebase that was created over decades to a point in that it scares the end-users.
Or they got people so addicted/dependent on their social-media crack that they can't quit, regardless of how bad and dangerous the product becomes.
> selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly
I thought that was YouTube's business model.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.
Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?
Maybe.
Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.
You need a set of good lead engineers in monetisation who can hide the fraud well enough from the rest of the company
Wouldn't you be better served by hiring competent accountants for that? An engineer would screw this up and get the decimal in the wrong place.
This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs.
You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence.
You made your bed. I hope your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.
I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.
It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.
Meta's problem isn't that they "maximize shareholder value" it's how they decided to go about doing it.
I would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).
One way to decide is whether the company has a dedicated Wikipedia page with criticism, or, for the next level, a section.
Imagine yourself describing to your relatives how the company has made money and see how embarrassed you feel.
The difficulty isn't in making the moral assessment, it's in searching through tens of thousands of employers and understanding their business models.
How can you take a job without knowing what the company does?
Are we talking about Lumen or something?
You don't need to work tens of thousands of jobs anyways, just 1 (maybe 2 or 3).
>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.
Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?
The "amazing" organizations seem amazingly evil.
For example the just mentioned Cursor. Looks amazing and not evil. Couple years there probably would have made unnecessary any other job after that.
You don't become a Big Tech company by being ethical. It's like trying to become a world champion boxer by refusing to punch. Not happening.
The reality is that most of these self described rational and super intelligent devs who see themselves as good people refuse to accept that joining big tech and joining an ethical company are mutually exclusive by definition. Hence all the companies saying "We make the world a better place by doing x". Everyone knows it's not true. But it helps swallow the fantasy and selling your ethics for a big fat pay check every month.
A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.
What groups do you subscribe to? My feed is mostly relatives, friends and their photos. Occasionally there are panels with people I don't subscribe to, which you can press X on and you won't see them again.
I don't subscribe to any groups except maybe a neighborhood association or similar. I was basically inactive on Facebook from 2014 until the last year. I've never been remotely right-wing and while I'm sure I have some old acquaintances who have become MAGA, the overwhelming majority of my Facebook friends are decent people--either normies, moderates, or left of center.
> you can press X on and you won't see them again.
I'm not worried about Facebook showing me propaganda, I'm worried about Facebook aggressively propagandizing society at large.
Man, are people on HN still this unaware of how personalization algorithms work at all?
They don't _have_ to propagandize for one particular pole by default.
Right, in the tech world it’s a continuum between “do no evil (fingers crossed behind back)” and “They trust me. Dumb fucks”
Also notable that they willingly and knowingly allowed FB to be used to facilitate genocide, which makes them culpable in it.
Can you elaborate?
I'm referring to the 2016 genocide in Myanmar:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/amnesty-report-finds-...
https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
In short:
> Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands Rohingya Muslims in Northern Myanmar.
Thank you
> they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda
In my feed, they are aggressively pushing an approximately equal mix of woke propaganda, far-right propaganda, funny memes, and discussions of literature and philosophy. It just depends on what the Meta model decided you and your friends are into.
Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React.
I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React
People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.
Totally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.
Meta assigned hundreds of engineers to work PyTorch. That is only going to happen at a handful of companies. You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it.
"We’ve committed hundreds of engineers to the framework ..." https://ai.meta.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/
> You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it
What kind of mindset is this, telling people to feel like they're indebted to a nameless for-profit corporation? That's bananas.
Send the responsible people who actually created the projects and wrote the code a thankful email if you feel like it, no one is indebted to any companies here because they use FOSS software, especially not companies like Meta who take from the world more than they give.
> People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.
Exactly. The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.
And the bad things that some people did at Facebook / Meta are also due to their own choices, not by the virtue / sin of working for a particular org.
> The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.
I kind of disagree. You're associating yourself with these people, supporting the same machine. If you actually disagree with the machine, then don't work there in the first place. Not to mean these people are inherently evil or whatever, people have different circumstances, people reflect, sometimes change and people don't always think before acting, it's only human. But everyone who worked there while having other opportunities available, because the pay was better or whatever, definitively should reflect on what imprint they want to leave on the world really.
I agree that Meta is not uniformly bad, but I would not consider React to be a great tool. Every React project I worked on has turned into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti.
I was going to say, isn't React something to hold against Meta? Being intimately familiar with it, I don't consider it a positive contribution to the world.
I work in film, not software engineering, but I've heard lots of shade thrown on React for a long time, mostly for this reason- messy code.
The question I have is, does React somehow encourage or enable code that is messier than in other frameworks? Why is it so popular if it's so widely hated? There's something I'm missing here.
Facebook spent a lot of effort marketing React, and there are widespread misunderstandings about React that made it popular. One of the most hyped features of React was a "virtual DOM" that supposedly improved rendering speed, but actually did not significantly improve performance.
Rendering a UI should be quite fast, even for a complex web app. Noticeable slowness in the UI is due to poorly optimized rendering, or logic that has nothing to do with rendering.
Nowadays, it is considered a default choice for a UI framework.
It's got a number of really nice Quality of Life (QoL) features, but who's going to go into the Internet and be positive about something? At best you'd be called a shill or astroturfing. If it's the younger crowd they'll be sure you call you cringe. So why would you hear anything positive about React. Or life in general when you can just be negative? That has a number of broader implications for society that aren't get to get solved here.
As far as React goes, it's composable, which means I can create a <PreferencePane> and then put a <CameraPref> inside that, and then later on in a wizard, I can put the <CameraPref> and it's totally fine. This means I don't have to write the same fucking code, ever. If the people im working with know their shit, as the progtammer, I never have to see the css/stylistic code/elements unless I go looking in another file for them. No shit the CSS is a distraction when I'm trying to write a code that is not CSS. It's all JavaScript. This is a good thing, but people that grew up hearing that JavaScript sucks have never challenged that successfully, so having React forced upon them just sticks in their craw. This is a good thing because JavaScript runs on bother the server and the client/your laptop, so as the programmer, you don't have to switch contexts as your work on the app. Before this current bout of "you will all lose your job to AI" there's always been waves of newcomers too the field that "didn't know what they were doing", and that we were supposed to shun them for it. (And that JavaScript was was only for noob designers.) So you have to balance everything you hear with that sort of negativity. If everyone your age minus 10 was here to take your job and will work for $200k less a year, and they started learning react the year it came out, same as you, how do you think FilmNews forum would sound? The film industry banded together to ban AI script writing and other tools, so we'll have to see how that pans out. React is fine. Any large app is just going to be messy. And proprietary. Open Source is great, but the number of success stories are few, and not at all replicable. (If someone has a project with one that isn't "sell support", I'm all ears.)
The fact that people bitch about it is a good thing. It's when they don't that Facebook needs to worry about things. (Oh yeah also it's from Facebook, and that's not exactly an industry neutral employer. As we see here. If someone told you they work at Meta, what, are you not going to sleep with them? Two million dollars of RSUs buys a lot of not giving a shit. What are we going to vote to underfund the bus they already don't take, that we also don't take?)
Organizations that are overall bad can have people who have done some good things, or at least technically impressive things.
>I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
Oh yes, I would color Meta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...
"Company over country!" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.yahoo.com/news/book-zuckerberg-called-company-ov...
As I learned while burning through all my savings in the 2023-2024 timeframe: You are free to have principles, but principles aren't free.
I am ashamed I worked there.
That’s a choice. This isn’t a story about someone poor who needs to work at McDonalds to make ends meet to feed their family. We are talking about the top earners in the world who made a decision to make more money than working at a competitor (Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc) where they would still be in the top 1% of earners.
It was a choice. I chose it and I wish it was never a choice I considered.
If you worked at Meta and couldn't find a job for a year, its not because of Meta.
I was unemployed before Meta.
If you were remote and LCOL or MCOL you've also made significant inroads towards retirement after just a couple years at Meta.
Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.
As someone who quit their corporate tech job to focus on community building work, I don't think finding better job is that simple.
Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.
One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.
I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.
Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.
Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.
If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.
>Threads ... rage bait
The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.
> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there
I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.
Never understood why Facebook hasn't implemented the 'Explain this post' type feature that you see on X (@grok).
Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.
The scales are different. FB has far and away more users. Could you imagine the headlines? "AI tool now thought police for articles on Facebook"
You mean like React?
Agreed, what a damage to the world.
No kidding, the damage react has done to front end engineering will be felt for decades. Bloated, slow applications that don’t conform to system conventions and burn power like crazy have been the norm ever since React caught on.
React is an overcomplicated mess made popular by manufactured consent.
What alternatives to React do you propose? I found Angular even worse…
<html>
Vanilajs.
you shouldnt feel bad for them because they are smart and could get a job at meta (unlike you)
I work for a frontier lab, lol.
The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee. It's just absurd, a clueless way of thinking about moral responsibility.
Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.
The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.
Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.
If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.
"We shouldn't give Burma the internet because they might commit a genocide"
Do you hear yourself? Let's not give them electricity and fossil fuels either. Just keep them in dark age conditions so they don't hurt anyone.
> Do you hear yourself?
Better than you heard me, given that's not what I said.
This is an uphill battle, I'm afraid. As evidenced from their other comments, slibhb struggles a lot with basic moral concepts like "you are responsible for the things you do".
It's very fashionable for Westerners to evince belief in the idea that inhabitants of third-world countries have no free will and aren't responsible for their actions. We're told that everything bad that happens in those countries is due to large Western companies or a history of colonization.
This is all very silly. The genocide in Myanmar (it's a civil war last I checked) isn't Facebook's fault (legally or morally). Facebook has surely made mistakes, but that doesn't make them to blame for people killing each other on the other side of the world.
You're still shadow-boxing with what you want me to have written, not what I actually wrote.
I reread your posts, and no. You seem unaware of what your posts imply about the agency of certain groups of human beings.
> You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee.
You clearly don’t understand this, and maybe you never will (it seems beyond some people), but moral responsibility is assigned here because of the actions facebook and their employees took.
It is not assigned to Tim Berners-Lee because, again this is important, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t spend years spreading targeted genocidal propaganda in a country with a violent history and fragile peace.
Hope that helps. If you still can’t understand it, I can recommend some philosophy books on morality and our responsibilities to our fellow humans.
Based on this garbage-level post I have a strong feeling I've read more moral philosophy than you.
Great counter argument, it really illustrates your thought process - or lack thereof.
It’s really sad that you don’t comprehend basic morality, but unfortunately not much can be done in cases like this.
The will for change must come from within, but if you ever do find yourself feeling empathy or even sympathy for other humans I promise there are lots of resources available to help you learn and understand more about living like a responsible human. All it takes is asking for help.
See Sarah Wynn-Williams' book and congressional testimony for more.
it's not a perfect exampe of scape-goating of the goat is still alive
> The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
True, none of us are innocent.
> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
WTF?
Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options.
I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.
There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.
The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.
Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.
I don’t disagree that there are many evil companies and one should try to be selective in who they work for. But life, in my experience, exists in shades of gray and it’s foolish to judge others without understanding their circumstances and the path that lead them to where they are today.
>Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.
Would these material conditions change if the person involved was responsible for making bombs used in a genocide? Or if they were working for the Torture Nexus company? Or responsible for money laundering and other illegal activities?
Life certainly has many shades and while I can be sympathetic to certain conditions here we're talking about a highly educated group of individuals who have multiple options to choose from. They've made their choice (or a series of choices) to end up where they are and that does not render them immune to criticism.
Downvoters are wrong. Everything here is true. As someone who compromised their morals (not Facebook but other big tech) after being laid off, it was a choice
labor solidarity, in america... we could only hope.
What options?
I was considering pretty heavily getting a teaching license
Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
And you would be stupid not to.
One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.
On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).
The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.
Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.
Nope sorry, you still aren't having a positive effect unless you live a barebones selfless life dedicated to helping others. You purchase products from companies, use services, and do things for entertainment that all somehow negatively affect someone in some form and way.
Oh, you think that the arbitrary line your draw in your own life determines the standard for being moral? Well, welcome to the club with the rest of us. Its easy to make an argument that shifts the blame away from Meta - they offer a product that is completely optional, its up to the individual person whether to use it or not, so working for Meta is not immoral. Thats a line someone could draw in their own life, and there isn't a single argument you can make based in any sort of grounded framework for them being wrong.
This is tired and reductivist reasoning deployed only by those rationalizing wrongs, and immediately recognizable by nearly everybody as such. My kids could tell you what's wrong with this thinking. I believe that working a job where I would knowingly contribute to mass mental illness (including but not limited to inducing teenage depression and body image issues leading to suicide), the destruction of liberal democracy and free society, mass surveillance unlike anything constructed before in the history of mankind, and even genocide falls on the wrong side of the line. If you have convinced yourself otherwise, this is a weight you must carry. Acting so callously against your fellow humans always exacts a price, knowingly or not; it requires destroying part of your capacity to care for other people.
I hope you realize that you have addressed nothing in my post, you are just squirming on some irrelevant stuff.
Once you find a solid counter argument to "its a product that people are free not to use", then we can have a conversation.
Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults.
Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.
Gotcha so basically what you are saying is that its not the parents responsibility to raise their kids, the society should be structured so that everything that the kid has access to be under tight legal control, from tv shows, to prodcuts they see in stores, to celebrities being legally required to speak and act a certain way, and so on.
TLDR, if you can do that much mental gymastics, you can probably do the same to justify you taking the Meta job.
I wouldn't normally reply again, but please try and take my arguments in the good faith and appeal to the heart and humanity that they were given. I think you're quite capable of reading what I've written and responding to it coherently; consequently, I also think you must be aware that you haven't done this in the heat of the disagreement. It's only if we're charitable, not cynical, about this stuff that the world may improve. Thanks. :)
Your good faith arguments are not good faith. You are basically saying it feels right to be against Meta, therefore your arguments are correct. World doesn't work like that.
I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years.
And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.
> I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years
Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".
The point is that there is a number for everyone to go against their "high level" morals (i.e stuff that is far removed from actually physically harming humans yourself). Anyone who says they don't have one (and not a buddhism follower) is lying.
As for BMWs, thats the idea - you can buy an M car with that salary and everyone who can't afford an M car is gonna wanna be your friend.
No - not everyone has a moral number, believe it or not. And no, most people don't give a shit about the car you drive, or want to friend you for it. Maybe in your social circles, but as someone in circles of both non-tech people and (literally) the richest bunch in tech - I promise, they don't.
What a truly sad mindset/worldview that you believe that to be true.
I've been offered to interview at these places several times but always declined. Some on principle but mostly because I didn't want to relocate and I don't want to work for a large company.
> Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it
Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.
I mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself.
I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.
They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.
edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too.
These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.
> giving teenage girls depression.
FYI there's nothing that said the depression Facebook intentionally causes in teenagers is limited to just girls.
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> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.
You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?
"Someone else would be willing to ruin this, so I may as well ruin it and get paid for it" is not a direction everyone wants to, or even is willing to go.
In case you care, what you're doing is called causal impotence https://philpapers.org/rec/NORTIO-18. Then you can also search why it does matter.
Where do you draw the line?
You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?
You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??
How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?
It requires discernment, to be sure.
The Principle of Double Effect[0] is essential in such cases, because it helps determine when cooperation with evil is remote or proximate, and when such cooperation with evil is morally permissible.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
And Facebook is evil incarnate because some people hate while other people seem to like it just fine?
It's interesting how easy it is to define exactly how evil Facebook is and categorize each worker on an evil spectrum based on job title alone.
Who would have thought life was that simple!
A clear line would be if you are compensated directly in shared of Facebook, then your culpability is much higher than if you're just working a salary or buying ads.
Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).
At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.
Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.
> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere
Not exactly...
> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.
Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...
So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?
Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??
Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?
My answer already addresses this? I didn’t say every engineer works on those things. I said it’s a spectrum, with the people working on those things at one end. I also already answered that they all contribute to the edifice, with different levels of moral culpability, which it’s up to them to hash out how they feel about.
Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.
If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.
> If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society,
It's so easy to reduce things!
I'm still trying to figure out if my cousin who decorates offices for FAANG is destroying society or not.
It must be exhausting having someone like that (the person you replied to) in your life. So negative, judgmental, and filled with hate. Have to be careful about everything you do and say around them or you’ll be labeled as some kind of -ist or destroying the world.
Y’all are not good at reading comprehension, is the only label I’ll apply to you here. I’ve had good friends work for Meta, and I don’t judge them for it. I wouldn’t work there, because how I feel about the company means I can’t feel good about myself contributing to it in any significant way. Other people will feel differently, and, again, that’s fine.
But if you fundamentally disagree with a system, trying to avoid contributing to it in any way makes sense! Whether it’s making the algorithm or addictive more farming out moderation to underpaid contractors or building a cool open source library for frontend coding or whatever, you can choose not to do it.
Or you can say, my contribution is not meaningful enough to the broader organization for me to worry about my place in it. Or you can say, I will siphon money out of the beast and use it for good. You are still contributing to it, but how you feel about it is up to you.
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Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying
EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
Nice dodge.
I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."
It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...
Want to answer the actual question?
I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.
Are you seriously reducing all of FB to an image sharing site?
Very interesting, never heard the term before but are there more philosophical concepts tying in the ideas of solidarity and labor movements?
Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.
Do you really think the guy branding thousands of people working at Meta as basically pedophiles can really be said to care about "solidarity"? I certainly wouldn't consider someone a peer if they randomly go and call me a pedophile because of where I work. I'm sure 95% of people working there have 0 relation to the algorithm decisions and definitely have no particular fixation on giving teenage girls depression.
Material outcomes are the only thing that matters, not personal wants or wishes.
If you worked as an accountant for Epstein after 2006, then yeah you may not be exactly a pedophile but you have shown you're okay with not only working with pedophiles but having a pedophile actively enrich you.
Very few people on this planet are willing to actually do this. Those are Meta are willing to do exactly this.
Also solidarity is a two way street and acting as if the literal 1% of earners in the nation will suddenly develop empathy is foolish. I have solidarity for actual workers trying to better society; not for those that exacerbate the climate crisis, help minorities get cancer through data center expansions, personally profit off of scamming seniors, are okay with allowing a genocide on their watch, do nothing to help prevent the erosion of democracy, and have directly caused many suicides/self harm/deaths of despair.
They have to commit to a lifetime of repenting and self-flagellation isn't going to cut it. It's not the middle ages.
Someone else isn’t a 1:1 replacement, when people refuse to work for you you’re stuck offering higher wages and or taking worse employees.
How well a job is compensated on average very much depends on how willing and able the average person is to do it.
"Someone else would do it if I don't" is not, and never has been, a valid argument for whether something is moral to do. If you want to argue that it's morally permissible to work at Facebook, you need to argue that on its own merits, not by appealing to fallacies.
> You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
Putting Meta aside as I do not have a sufficiently deep view of the total scope of work at Meta and its relation to its misdeeds, I never understood how anyone found this fallacious line of reasoning convincing.
So what if someone else would do it? The point is that you are morally responsible for your actions and your actions alone.
It horrifies me completely to realize that so many people would excuse their own gravely immoral actions on the incomprehensible grounds that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Where is the logic? It is such a severely morally and psychologically crippled way of thinking. Yes, if I don't shoot the innocent civilian in the head, then SS-Schütze Schmidt will do it anyway, so I might as well do it. Incredible.
Morality is not some calculus that is concerned about whether certain events occur or about optimizing some sum total of events. It is about how you, personally, use your agency. That's it!
But your honor! If I didn't sell heroin, someone else would!
"If I didn't cheat on you then someone else would" good lord
>You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?
What does that have to do with any person's individual morals?
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> You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet.
One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.
There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.
Regardless of what their hiring process screens for, it's safe to say that people able to pass screening for Meta are able to get work elsewhere. It is never an engineers only option, although it may be the only one in a certain luxurious compensation tier.
And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.
In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".
You might be surprised. I sent out approximately 1200 applications in 2024 while unemployed for nine months, and with over thirty interviews, I only got a single offer, which was Meta.
>One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.
people say this as if having principles will leave you jobless inevitably, but there is so much evidence to the contrary that this rings more hollow the older I get.
I agree with your overall concept of empathy towards others, I disagree with the premise that all organizations are unethical and that there isn't room for the morally principal'd and employed in this world.
contrarily I believe that a morally principal'd and skilled engineer is so rare in this world that there are a few organizations that would snap up every single one they could find if the network was there to find them.
I imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".
yeah except that isn't how it's presented.
social media boards don't go creating slides and mission statements that mentions those second order effects.
most go something like: "Connecting people and souls through the technologies that empower every day life."
rather than
"Let's get Susie to jump off a bridge for yuks."
>“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”
>“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.
>Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.
I don’t know, seems like they do go around creating slides that mention them.
> There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.
There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.
Almost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol
I am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand.
That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.
edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.
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It’s all a spectrum. Meta is up there with those micro loan companies on the evil side of the spectrum when it comes to tech companies.
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Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline. We cant all work in the forest like you.
you realize that the majority of engineering positions at meta in fact arent dealing with the knobs and levers of manipulation? do you have no pity for the coal plant worker who supports his family while working for a company that pollutes the environment? Your shallow morals are disgusting.
What an obnoxious comparison. Any engineer good enough to get into Meta has had their pick of tech jobs for the past decade. They could easily live comfortably, but less well paid, working for a myriad of less exploitative tech companies. Your average coal plant worker had no such options.
I have been flamed for saying this in public, and I do not know how it will be received by an HN crowd, but someone who enjoys being a meta employee is a red flag.
Either they are actively a narcissist, actively immoral, not intelligent enough to understand the vibe there, or they're actually unhappy and not being honest enough to tell you they hate it there. I have a hard time envisioning any other possibility. The place actively filters out morally coherent and intelligent people.
Yes I was there.
Yeah, I just made the heating elements for the ovens, not the doors!
> Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline
This seems like a fancily dressed up "fuck you, got mine"
I dont work at meta by the way. I just dislike the fake moral front that commenter is parading around to make themselves feel better.
> Your shallow morals are disgusting
Something sure seems to have touched a nerve. Maybe next time count to 10 first?
"When we looked inside he saw that what was said of them was true of him as well. So it was either rage or weep; and so he raged."
You can have a fulfilling and rewarding career in tech without working for a monster.
The mental gymnastics people do to justify their decisions are hilarious. Just admit you have no morals and love money.
This[1] was a beautiful comment and sentiment to preach but difficult to practice I guess ?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802676#40804968
so meta employees have no morals? lol. gotcha. the world must be very simple to people with black and white thinking.
Well, who cares if they do. I wouldn't miss Meta if they disappear tomorrow.
Agreed. Of all the major companies, I am actually surprised I use 0 of their products. 0.
Apple: yes
Google: yes
X: yes
Samsung: yes
Amazon: yes
Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."
what's your point here considering you were wrong? in the last 16 years they've been one of the most profitable companies in the history of the earth
It's not always about profits, it's about the user experience. In the late 1990s, almost everyone was on AOL and spent a lot of time using it. Now Facebook has a lot less usage.