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Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.
This is sad. I find probablistic programming languages very interesting. This probably means that many of the most useful ideas are disappeared. Does anyone know any relevant papers that describe what they did?
https://ericlippert.com/2020/09/23/introducing-bean-machine/
Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people.
Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative).
Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year.
Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year.
Total = 1.85 Million/Year.
Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.
I feel like MBAs need to do a better job at learning about selective truths. Far too many snap decisions made based on seeing the tip of a dataset in some corporate spreadsheet and assuming clarity in the data. In this case seeing the cost of this team and not seeing the saving its was generating for other teams.
Or maybe it was just political as Zuckerburg slid the hatchet away from the Metaverse and onto things of (arguably) greater value.
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest w…
Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway)
> But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
I feel this. I'm about to finish up a contract working on a product that's about to be killed (before ever really seeing the light of day) and it's kind of hard not to feel like Sisyphus at this point. Not really interested in looking for something else for a while.