Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 482 posts

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

#71

Post by ska »

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.…

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

People are fulfilled by different things. Some people are far more interested in their working having a meaningful (to them) impact to the "outside" world than the specifics of the work.

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

#72

Post by moloch-hai »

To Management, you are either in a Cost Center or a Profit Center. In all advertising-supported monstrosities, only adtech and sales are profit centers. Literally everything else is a cost center. Everyone at Facebook and Google is in a Cost Center if they are not directly involved in landing advertising accounts, presenting ads, or billing for ads.

Never look for work in a Cost Center.

Come hard times, Cost Centers are cut first. Not because it is good for the business, but because cutting payroll impresses Wall Street, inflating stock valuation. To Wall Street, layoffs mean you are serious.

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

#73

Post by [deleted] »

colineartheta wrote: post #60
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?

[deleted]

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

#74

Post by cpsns »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #70
cpsns wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vie…

Of course it's a huge deal. What they're saying is that it happens. Constantly. Sometimes I even ponder if my decades-worth experience is not basically because I'm writing the same program over and over again, just for different companies...

> What they're saying is that it happens. Constantly.

And I’m personally not okay with that when it comes to the work I do.

It was a personally very eye opening experience to drive around with a guy who built homes. He'd point out every house he worked on, even ones 30 years ago and you could tell he was really, truly proud of his work and showing it off.

I realised if someone asked to see my past work it simply doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. I take pride in my work, but it doesn't exist long term like his does. I want that same kind of satisfaction he had, but there's no way for me to get it. His work lasts a lifetime and makes the lives of people better, mine lasts a few years at best and often doesn't.

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

#75

Post by drc500free »

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.

Unfortunately, top-down mandates are imperfect and should be avoided as much as possible. Net profit matters to an operator who cares about today's profitability, but not at all to someone whose paradigm is "thinking in bets" and future payoffs. And the street has been rewarding people who ignore today's profits in favor of the narrative about tomorrow's growth.

From afar, it looks like Meta's leadership is a bunch of future thinkers who got told to cut today's costs, and it's not a well-practiced muscle for them.

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

#76

Post by apohn »

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.

>I genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this team to save costs.

I've been in a situation where a company was under pressure, was trying to make a big pivot, and there where multiple rounds of layoffs.

At one point I could only make sense of it by picturing a somewhat blind lumberjack getting an order that says "There's a forest that needs 15% of trees cut. Go cut." Good trees get get, bad trees get cut. Thankfully we are not trees and if we get cut we can move on. We don't die just because we got chopped down.

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

#77

Post by time_to_smile »

sp332 wrote: post #66
Satam wrote: post #62

Author mentions that his team's work saved "millions" of dollars for Meta every year - let's assume that's $10 million. Meta's operating expenses are over $80 billion annually. That's barely one hundredth of a percent in savings for Meta. I'm sure they were doing interesting work otherwise, but it make sense why the team would be considered for cuts if there weren't any breakthroughs on the horizon.

If the team is costing less than $10 million/year, it still makes less sense to let them go.

It's not hard for a team at Meta to easily cost more than $10 million/year. Average TC for each IC could reasonably have been in the 500k/year area and that doesn't count other benefits/infra overhead. A few very senior people on the team could easily have pushed the average TC up quite a bit.

So if the team was around 20 people that already doesn't make sense.

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

#78

Post by trenchgun »

Satam wrote: post #62

Author mentions that his team's work saved "millions" of dollars for Meta every year - let's assume that's $10 million. Meta's operating expenses are over $80 billion annually. That's barely one hundredth of a percent in savings for Meta. I'm sure they were doing interesting work otherwise, but it make sense why the team would be considered for cuts if there weren't any breakthroughs on the horizon.

Full quote:

"The mission of the Probability division was to create small teams that applied the latest academic research to real-world at-scale problems, in order to improve other groups’ decision-making and lower their costs. New sub-teams were constantly formed; if they didn’t show results quickly then they were failed-fast; if they did show results then they were reorganized into whatever division they could most effectively lower costs.

We were very successful at this. 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. We were almost ready to be spun off.

We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path."

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

#79

Post by gknoy »

moloch-hai wrote: post #72

To Management, you are either in a Cost Center or a Profit Center. In all advertising-supported monstrosities, only adtech and sales are profit centers. Literally everything else is a cost center. Everyone at Facebook and Google is in a Cost Center if they are not directly involved in landing advertising accounts, presenting ads, or billing for ads. Never look for work in a Cost Center. Come hard times, Cost Centers…

> billing for ads is in a Cost Center.

I've only briefly worked closely with a billing team, but my impression was always that billing is seen less as a cost center, but more as a critical "without this team we get no money" team, which seems closer to a profit center. I'm not sure how far up the management team that perspective stays true, though.

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

#80

Post by WorldMaker »

higeorge13 wrote: post #22
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…

Yeah that’s especially unfortunately true for data science and data engineering teams in companies where ml or data are not the core business but nice-to-have. They are usually the first ones from engineering being axed in times of lay offs.

Even for companies that have ML and/or Data in the core business. I think few would argue Meta in this specific layoff example doesn't have data as a core business.

(And those few are probably the ones drinking the "metaverse Kool-Aid" and thinking the pivot away from data siloes is already complete to some sort of VR scape where data somehow doesn't matter or doesn't exist, that Meta still hasn't actually convinced consumers to buy or figured out how to build. They finally figured out "legs", pivot complete I guess?).

Post reply on HN