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.
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 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.
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 ;) )
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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’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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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:
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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%?"
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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?
>“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
> 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?
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.
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?
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
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Garbage comment. I hate many subsets of people (mostly those that value money over human life + dignity) and it's quite easy not have it impact my life at all. Just as I'm sure Zuckerberg sleeps soundly as well.
Hate is a very human emotion and I'm not going to let the ghouls that prefer money over humans to try and dictate what is considered good manners in polite society (hint, helping create the misery machine isn't good manners).
The "woe is me card" is getting overplayed. These Metamates have proven time after time that they strictly care about money and nothing else. Maybe if some of them tried to start unionizing efforts I'd have more sympathy but these people are mostly ghouls that do not care about humanity so I'm giving them the same courtesy they give seniors who get scammed on their platforms.
If you don't want people to actively hate you and your terrible life decisions that negative impact everyone on the planet, maybe step away and think about what you've done? They make enough money to afford a therapist. They have the skills to literally work at any company on the planet. What is the excuse?
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.
> 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.
Statistics really is a bitch.
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.
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.
Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.
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.
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.
This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News
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 ;) )
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.
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.
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.
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.
But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes.
Thats just the start
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
"Perform Immelmann turn in 200 feet"
Lmao
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gavin from Silicon Valley did it first
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.
Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.
I haven't interviewed with them in almost 10 years. But aren't they doing the same interview everyone else does?
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.
A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.
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.
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.
scale ai's value prop was catching people like this
Although it goes without saying that good software engineers won't enjoy doing this very much
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.)
> 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.
basically a soft layoff
As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.
They won't be doing it for long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS-qZO9uCQ
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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 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
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.
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.
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 think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)
Nothing to see here, move along...
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.
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.
So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...
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/
Probably for the same reasons you go to work everyday.
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.)
Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.
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.
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
See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.
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.
"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...
its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)
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.
From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"
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.
“[Ll]esus take the wheel”
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.
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.
There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.
Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.
I don't even like doing stuff like this on my phone.
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.
Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?
So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.
Everyone on the planet is saying this. Every new hire orientation likely states this.
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.
no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.
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)
Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.
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?
Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!
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?
Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?
Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.
Oh, and enabling human traffickers.
Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)
Note that word isn't joint to tupping unless you're from Tasmania.
I wonder what "commission" the VP received.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
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.
Also the genocides.
I'm sure meta learned their lesson
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.
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.
"We’ve committed hundreds of engineers to the framework ..." https://ai.meta.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/
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.
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.
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.
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...
I am ashamed I worked there.
Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.
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.
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.
Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.
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.
Agreed, what a damage to the world.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
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.
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.
Better than you heard me, given that's not what I said.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once you find a solid counter argument to "its a product that people are free not to use", then we can have a conversation.
Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.
And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.
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".
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.
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 feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.
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.
FYI there's nothing that said the depression Facebook intentionally causes in teenagers is limited to just girls.
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?
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.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/double-effect/
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.
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?
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'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.
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.
Hate is a very human emotion and I'm not going to let the ghouls that prefer money over humans to try and dictate what is considered good manners in polite society (hint, helping create the misery machine isn't good manners).
The "woe is me card" is getting overplayed. These Metamates have proven time after time that they strictly care about money and nothing else. Maybe if some of them tried to start unionizing efforts I'd have more sympathy but these people are mostly ghouls that do not care about humanity so I'm giving them the same courtesy they give seniors who get scammed on their platforms.
If you don't want people to actively hate you and your terrible life decisions that negative impact everyone on the planet, maybe step away and think about what you've done? They make enough money to afford a therapist. They have the skills to literally work at any company on the planet. What is the excuse?
EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.
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?
Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.
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.
How well a job is compensated on average very much depends on how willing and able the average person is to do it.
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!
What does that have to do with any person's individual morals?
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.
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".
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.
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."
>“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 are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.
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.
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.
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.
This seems like a fancily dressed up "fuck you, got mine"
Something sure seems to have touched a nerve. Maybe next time count to 10 first?
The mental gymnastics people do to justify their decisions are hilarious. Just admit you have no morals and love money.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40802676#40804968
Apple: yes
Google: yes
X: yes
Samsung: yes
Amazon: yes
> 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.
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.