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Meta lays off 11,000 people

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Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#811

Post by nicolashahn »

blsapologist42 wrote: post #804
nicolashahn wrote: post #758

Some data from the inside: Reality Labs (AR/VR) hit less hard than the rest of the company. No one on my team or adjacent teams let go. Most bootcampers (unallocated new hires) are gone, even ones that were performing well. Low performer from my past team outside RL was let go, so it appears performance was a factor for a lot of roles, rather than just axing entire teams based on business need. edit: updated to clear…

Not true that "most" bootcampers are gone. Please don't spread misinformation.

I don't have hard data (do you?) but all bootcampers we were working with were laid off and threads on Blind seem to indicate bootcamper layoffs were heavy

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#812

Post by antegamisou »

goodpoint wrote: post #796
sytelus wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects th…

> he was unapologetically a hacker Huh? Like Gates and Musk, he's not even a highly skilled developer, even less a hacker.

Seriously I was never aware how badly the word's meaning has been butchered by the SV techbros until I joined the site.

I first heard it used to traditionally describe computer security whizzes like Kevin Mitnick, Diffie & Hellman, Robert Morris (Morris worm) etc. But apparently the last ~15 years it's just a compliment for the next random corporate grifter who has 0 technical experience and is just in for the $$$.

However Gates definitely deserves the title, he had helped make some significant contributions a few years before or right after dropping out of Harvard by co-authoring a paper in complexity theory next to a very prominent name in the field.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=922367...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#814

Post by worik »

ipaddr wrote: post #789
princevegeta89 wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta may sound like an unethical company frequently from a product standpoint, but Zuckerberg is a very good guy in general and he treats employees very well.

Blame Sheryl Sandberg for many of the unethical decisions

No post body was provided.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#815

Post by carimura »

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

Billions of people use the service for "free". As long as everyone knows they are what's for sale, the rest makes sense. Any company of this size is going to sway discourse so it's time to accept that. I for one do not and thus deleted our family accounts long ago.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#816

Post by jrm4 »

Leires wrote: post #690

I'm sorry, but honestly fuck Meta. Conducting psychological experiments on users without consent, and enabling psyops from organizations like Cambridge Analytica, is enough for me to never use their services. I hope they implode as a company. I happily said no when people from meta approached me on LinkedIn.

I'm sorry, but the "A/B" responses to this sentiment are some of the worst euphemistic cope I've ever seen. You all really need to get out of your "tech" shells and take seriously this idea that "running nonconsensual psych experiments on humans" is a fundamentally evil thing to do.

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#817

Post by dantyti »

sytelus wrote: post #683
alasdair_ wrote: post #670

I worked at Facebook when covid first hit. Zuckerburg treated everyone in the company very, very well. There was a blanket "don't worry about performance, take care of your families" guarantee that honestly was an enormous help. The thing that particularly struck me though was the way he handled contract workers like (some of) the kitchen staff, cleaners, etc. These people don't work for Facebook and he had zero obli…

I am particularly sad about current state of Meta. Regardless of what people think of Facebook and Zuck, he was unapologetically a hacker. I visited FB campus few times and emphasis on hacker culture everywhere was just immensely delightful. He knew the value of good hacker and raised bar for the compensation across the entire industry. Ship your code today was absolutely refreshing. Number of open source projects th…

I get your point, but is that really such a great thing when it comes to business ethics? e.g., spying on people and hacking their private communications just to get ahead: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i...

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#818

Post by jsmith45 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #460
adamzerner wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a Bayesian perspective is helpful here. 1) How likely is it that Zuck makes that statement if he feels like he is responsible? 2) How likely is it if he doesn't feel responsible? I think the answers to those questions are quite similar, in which case hearing the statement doesn't actually tell us much.

Just to elaborate on this since I had to think about it and I might save someone else the effort: Let M = Makes the statement Let R = Feels Responsible Notation: ~R = Not R Answering OP's questions 1 & 2: I think it's safe to assume P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1 So P(M) = 1 So Bayes' theorem simplifies as follows: P(R|M) = P(M|R)P(R)/PM) = P(R) Thus, OP's point is that the statement tells us essentially nothing about the prob…

To use Bayes to update here, you must determine the conditional probabilities as they were before you knew that M occurred, and could thus update to P(M)=1. If one did not already know that M happened then one certainly could not say `P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = 1`. One might be able to claim `P(M|R) = P(M|~R) = P(M)`, which is just saying the events are independent.

Certainly with a prior that the events are independent, then you won't be able to update your probability of R by knowing that M did happen, any more than knowing last nights lotto numbers would probability of R.

In reality, things are even worse, as assuming independence is not fully reasonable, so you will end up with uncertainly about how or if the variables relate. One could assume some form of meta probability distribution of various ways the variables could relate, but then direct application of Bayes formula not feasible. You would still in that scenario not be learning much if anything useful about P(R).

Re: Meta lays off 11,000 people

#819

Post by Yhippa »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #246

> I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that. As always with these things, I wonder what taking responsibility actually means in practice. Businesses usually try to find ways to correct for major failures in decision making. In the case of Zuck, given his ownership, does anything actually happen or change? I'm sure his net worth has been reduced by changes to Meta's share price, but he was a multi-billionai…

Think about it this way. If I, for example, did a series of activities that led to 13% of my division's business being impacted adversely, I'm almost assuredly getting fired.

When you go higher up the food chain, the same thing happens. When the people at the very top do something like that, does the same happen? Sometimes. Depends on who's on the BoD I guess.

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