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Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

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Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#191

Post by lotsofpulp »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #121
t_mann wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights. I don't know the current numbers, but Zuck was known for aggressive use of priority shares to retain voting control of the company as he was selling shares.

>17% of stocks != 17% of voting rights Stock classes are the biggest robbery of modern times.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robbery

> larceny from the person or presence of another by violence or threat

How does Facebook’s share offering meet the definition of robbery?

That Zuckerberg was selling a product with such high demand and so little supply that he was able to sell at a very high price does not qualify as Zuckerberg robbing others. It is not even bread for a starving person, it is equity to chase returns.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#192

Post by papito »

xtracto wrote: post #186
papito wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been to the metaverse? It's atrocious. 3G graphics from 1996, no real interactivity, nothing to do just "walk around". It's a thing that was stitched together by a bunch of people who clearly do not believe in any of it. Just the bare minimum to collect the fat FB paycheck and options.

Can I ask a genuine question (I'm 40 years old so please bear with me): What the heck is the "Meteaverse"? Is it an app/game that Facebook implemented similar to "Second Life"? is it something like Fortnite? Those have been for quite some time... shit, I was playing Unreal Tournament online decades ago. Eve online players have been having full financial/belic/development online interactions also for decades. What's t…

Well, that's it. I have never met anyone who bragged about owning a unique car in GTA. Literally no one cares. Why I would want to pay hundreds of dollars for virtual Nike sneakers is beyond me.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#193

Post by Balgair »

achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

The second Iron Law of Bureaucracy states:

"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."

It seems that FB, err Meta, is going to advance the turn of the breaking wheel one rotation. They may be attempting, in good faith, to eliminate the flotsam and jetsam in the bureaucracy, but are more than likely to just eliminate those least connected to internal politics.

I would not be surprised if remote-only workers are the most affected, followed by the most 'heads-down' programmers.

It's interesting that these steps are occurring with the recent leaving of Sandberg and I wonder if there is any connection.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#194

Post by tinyhouse »

spookthesunset wrote: post #189
tinyhouse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a problem that VR is a completely new business. (It has a social aspect to it but it's not relevant to the discussion). I do agree that a better model would be the Amazon one. Amazon grew a completely new business (AWS) that had nothing to do with its core business (retail) but didn't lose focus on its core business and managed to grow both at the same time.

But when AWS started with s3 the stakes were small and they already had the technology. It was a natural, low stakes attempt to diversify. They didn’t bet the farm on AWS it just kinda happened organically. At least that is my assumption, I could be wrong. FB is betting the farm on a completely new technology with almost no user validation or product market fit. It’s incredibly higher risk than Amazon expanding into…

I agree Amazon's approach was better. But I wouldn't say that FB is getting on something completely new without product market fit. They acquired Oculus in 2014, so they have almost a decade of experience with the technology. Also their VR headsets are very popular and have high demand. The problem is that they didn't figure out a way to monetize yet and it's far from mainstream. The main use case is still video games, far from the social vision Zuck has. I have a Quest and I like it, but even for video games if I had to pick one console, the Quest wouldn't be in my top 3 choices. I hope they succeed and I think it's not fair to judge them so early.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#195

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

threeseed wrote: post #57
boredtofears wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how bleak it must be to be an average SWE at facebook. Sure, you get paid a ton of money, but now they are going to "turn up the heat" on you to pump glorified CRUD message board features faster. (yes, I know there are probably lots of intellectually interesting jobs at Meta, but the overall purpose and mission just isn't exactly inspiring)

> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.

CacheLib appears to be a library that's useful to large centralized organizations that control large numbers of servers. So it is probably not value-neutral, but a force for increasing social centralization. "Scale" is fundamentally authoritarian, and it necessitates hierarchies of domination within abusive corporate structures.

Imagine what the engineer capable of writing CacheLib would have done instead, had they not worked for Facebook.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#196

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

papito wrote: post #148
threeseed wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> glorified CRUD message board features faster I think this comment says more about you than anything. If you look into Meta's tech stack they have challenges no company on the planet has and clearly a lot of talent. Having just played with CacheLib it's an impressive project and yet to see an equivalent anywhere else. And I imagine much of what they do is like this when you're operating at their extremes.

There is no denying that there is some interesting "engineering exhaust" coming from Facebook, side and passion projects developed on company time that are genuinely interesting and in ways industry-changing (React), but that is driven by devs and not the company. That is almost expected from a FAANG, where they have enough money to let that happen. Now, I bet, things will be different. You won't just be able to "do…

Exactly this. The historical value of tech companies was that they provided safe, stable employment that gave employees enough slack to do things of value to society while tending to the profit engine. As these companies have evolved instead towards tightly-managed, low-slack organizations focused on KPIs, they now actively (and coercively) divert talent and attention from the "exhaust" that had been the positive externality. In this new state they become an active drain on society.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#197

Post by pcthrowaway »

Cerium wrote: post #179
eru wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, your work is being used to process financial information and trades a few nanoseconds faster, or your work is being used by the military, ...

For a long time I thought that cat videos, HFT, and military tech were the options. I worked HFT for a while. Then I discovered medical technology. You can work on interesting hardware and software for devices that absolutely make the world better. It's great.

Do any companies in the medtech space pay as well as the other options?

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#198

Post by hinkley »

go_elmo wrote: post #95
hinkley wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it asserted that your median level of talent doesn't change much with these strategies. But that means you're losing people that you could probably ill afford to lose.

Maybe you didnt mean it that technical, but the median is very robust to outliers. So your first statement is true but the conclusion is not necessarily.

No, this is an old saw and we see it happen over and over and the managers never learn. When they announce things like this, or voluntary layoffs, they mean for the lower quartile to leave in droves and for the overall quality of the remaining employees to improve. For the amount of stuff per dollar to increase.

But what actually happens is that a few of the lower quartiles leave, and at least as many from the upper quartiles leave. None of the Dunning Kruger people leave because they’re all that and a bag of chips. So you tend toward mediocrity. Doubly so because when the changes that management expected don’t happen, now everyone knows there is likely to be a round of involuntary layoffs. So the people you have left either start playing it safe or become demotivated, further lowering the stuff per dollar. And now the company is doing worse, and some idiot upstairs thinks it’s just their predictions coming true, instead of self fulfilling prophecy.

Not that I mean any of this as a lecture or warning for Zuck. More like a movie trailer. I hope it all burns and we get to watch it happen. But more likely they’ll turn into Microsoft. Fewer teeth, but still essentially the same bastards they always were, because changing a negative founder culture is really, really hard for any social or business group.

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#199

Post by cableshaft »

dimmke wrote: post #185
achow wrote: post #2

Interesting quote from CEO in an all hands directly to employees. I don't want to be at Meta right now.. .."turning up the heat" on performance management to weed out staffers unable to meet more aggressive goals. "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn't be here," Zuckerberg said. "Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turni…

There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election. And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the world. But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good busi…

> it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there

Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping push the technology much further than any other company right now.

Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into the technical challenges, and what they've been doing to address those issues, as well as showing off prototype devices they've been working on[1].

And there's an hour long episode of Adam Savage's Tested series where they get to try the prototypes and go into even more detail[2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThLeiw8h2Y

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc

Re: Meta slashes hiring plans, girds for 'fierce' headwinds

#200

Post by dimmke »

cableshaft wrote: post #199
dimmke wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time where I wanted to work at Meta/Facebook someday - it was actually "next" on my list. I didn't care about the negative press that Facebook got, I felt like they were unfairly targeted because of the 2016 election. And a lot of the engineering work that has come out of Facebook has been excellent, like React/React Native have changed the world. But it's just really hard to see Zuckerberg as a good busi…

> it just isn't happening with dorky headsets and probably won't until the tech matures enough to get there Zuckerberg is well aware of the technical challenges of VR headsets and they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be. Seems like they're helping push the technology much further than any other company right now. Here's a 30 minute video where he and Michael Abrash go into the…

>they're putting a lot of effort into getting the headsets where they need to be.

1. Nobody knows "where they need to be" to become suitable for mass adoption. Definitely better than they are now, but personally I highly doubt I'd feel comfortable using a full VR headset regularly unless it was a "full dive" experience where I don't have to use a controller.

2. Hardware is a lot more difficult than software. Facebook's hardware track record is non existent beyond what they acquired with Oculus, which was a startup.

Apple has more experience designing and producing hardware than Google, Facebook and Amazon combined and if they don't think the tech is ready, it's probably not ready.

3. Why is Mark Zuckerberg the face of this? People find him talking so uncomfortable that they make memes about him being a lizard person. That more than anything is what makes it feel like a billionaire's vanity project. How is he being allowed to bet the entire company on this? Does the board have any real power? If I had any kind of significant equity in Meta I'd be really concerned right now that the CEO seems to be in la-la land and is issuing missives telling his employees to quit.

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