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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

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Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#31

Post by alasdair_ »

musk_micropenis wrote: post #11
treis wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's no way that is how it went down.

Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation.

Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#32

Post by zeroonetwothree »

snoopy_telex wrote: post #2

Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?

I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#33

Post by ericlippert »

musk_micropenis wrote: post #9

Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack. Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is…

Thank you, that's kind of you to say.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#34

Post by ericlippert »

apohn wrote: post #14
snoopy_telex wrote: post #2

Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?

It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. 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), le…

The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We were working on signal loss models that had potential to save billions. I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this team to save costs.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#35

Post by vikingerik »

drc500free wrote: post #25
apohn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. 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), le…

These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year. It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They are…

How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#36

Post by AlwaysRock »

apohn wrote: post #14
snoopy_telex wrote: post #2

Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?

It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. 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), le…

Doesnt this paragraph indicate that they were making millions of dollars in savings OVER their cost of operating?

"The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work"

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#37

Post by kikokikokiko »

"Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”."

This is so true. Facebook must die.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#38

Post by Karrot_Kream »

abakker wrote: post #29
apohn wrote: post #3

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…

Cutting costs is always a marginal thing, because businesses tend to value growth. Oversimplification: If you have a 50% margin business, the value of one more dollar of revenue is $.50. If you cut costs and change the margin to 55%, then you've added only $.05 of revenue to that additional dollar. Now, a sane person will look at the improvements to margin across the whole business and still want to make those improv…

> Eventually, hard limits come up and the incremental gains shrink and shrink. At that point, growth dominates.

The trick is understanding where the hard limits are. I've noticed that upper leadership tends to be pessimistic about these hard limits (they come quickly) and engineers on these teams tend to be optimistic (there's a lot of fat/cost to cut so the hard limits are quite far down.) Now naturally, the engineers on these teams have a vested interest in being optimistic, as their team charter is based around their work. But I've seen this conflict play out in many organizational situations and I'm not sure this interplay between upper leadership and engineering about these margins is illuminating for the business.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#40

Post by brutus1213 »

apohn wrote: post #3

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 understand the top-line bottom-line divide, but I am not fully convinced if the top-line projects are any safer. Wouldn't another reasonable business strategy be to get rid of all new projects, and only focus on operations-as-is during times of economic uncertainty?
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