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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

#51

Post by 300bps »

georgeburdell wrote: post #26

I’m probably not as talented as the author, but I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used. I have been working for ten years post-PhD and every single product I’ve ever worked on has been canned, sometimes very circuitously via acquisitions. My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. I have zero outwardly observable accomplishments.…

I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used

Everyone is motivated by different things. My strongest motivation and satisfaction comes from implementing technology to make drastic and lasting positive change in the work done by other people. Agile development methodology with iterative development and meaningful change every couple weeks suits me very well.

What you described as your work would not be fulfilling to me.

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

#52

Post by csa »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #32
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.

> 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.

1. No need to beat a man while he is down.

2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.

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

#53

Post by drc500free »

vikingerik wrote: post #35
drc500free wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, their total comp is $500k+. They are taking up a portion of the management time of someone whose total comp is approaching (or over) $1M.

Software Engineer: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

Software Engineering Manager: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

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

#54

Post by cpsns »

zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #46

3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.

Nah, this is a huge deal for some of us. Many of us put in years of work for something to be thrown away without a second thought, all of our time and effort for nothing.

I am someone who wants to build long lasting, useful systems. When my last employer was acquired and killed it really, really upset me to see all my hard work and my coworkers hard work destroyed.

I’d go so far as to say it seriously affected my view of the industry in a negative way and permanently hurt my career satisfaction.

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

#55

Post by nemo44x »

brutus1213 wrote: post #40
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?

That would be an extreme action. You do still need to be working with the future in mind. Anything that looks promising to revenue growth in the nearish future should probably continue to be invested in. You may ask those teams to become more scrappy and figure out how to achieve their goals with minimal new investment, especially if the new revenue streams are still a few quarters from coming online.

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

#56

Post by echelon »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #37

"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.

I'm not a fan of Meta, but they're doing the cutting edge research in VR/AR that nobody else is [1].

Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics...

They're going to own this space for decades to come, and everyone will license from them.

It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them together.

[1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.

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

#57

Post by johnfn »

vikingerik wrote: post #35
drc500free wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Facebook employees make a lot more than 250k. Someone with Eric lippert’s level of experience probably makes well over 600-700k in total compensation - just see levels.fyi!

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

#58

Post by hkon »

ericlippert wrote: post #34
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…

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.

> We were working on signal loss models that had potential to save billions

What are signal loss models in this context?

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

#59

Post by egypturnash »

zoklet-enjoyer wrote: post #46

3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.

The retail work was not huge and important but it was definitely work - people came into the shop looking for a thing the shop might be able to provide, and many of them left with the thing they wanted.

You would not have anything to show for three years of that beyond a series of paystubs, but every day you would have seen the fruits of your work.

Laboring for years on something that ends up trashed and under corporate NDAs, with nothing to show beyond a series of paystubs, is different from that. Most of my friends who work for corporations have felt this at least once in their career, to be honest. It generally pays better than the retail job, at least.

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

#60

Post by colineartheta »

georgeburdell wrote: post #26

I’m probably not as talented as the author, but I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used. I have been working for ten years post-PhD and every single product I’ve ever worked on has been canned, sometimes very circuitously via acquisitions. My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. I have zero outwardly observable accomplishments.…

How were you able to acquire a PhD without a publication?
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