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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

#91

Post by rob74 »

> 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”.

You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta...

But yeah, I can imagine how the decisions on layoffs usually go: "what are those guys doing? Probabilistic something or other?! No idea what that's good for! And wow, look how much they get paid!"

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

#92

Post by progbits »

time_to_smile wrote: post #77
sp332 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The article says their _net_ cost savings were $10M. So I would expect that accounts for the costs of the team (salary, and whatever cost they spent building their projects).

Either way, not disputing the arguments in this comment chain.

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

#93

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.

His other comment clarifies this: "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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806727

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

#94

Post by tristor »

I feel this so much. To my deep dismay the work I’m least proud of in my career somehow endures in production and the things I’m most proud of building were acquired and chopped into parts or killed off. As a PM luckily everything I’ve launched still exists, so far.

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

#95

Post by apohn »

nightski wrote: post #16
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 think this is an insightful assessment. Not everyone in a company can be top line. But I also think there's a lot more opportunity in using statistics/ml/data science in the top line than most companies practice.

>But I also think there's a lot more opportunity in using statistics/ml/data science in the top line than most companies practice.

I consider myself a fairly honest Data Scientist, in the sense that I like it when I can map what I'm doing to the value it delivers. I know some other great people I've worked with who are like this as well.

This is anecdotal, but all of us have hated working with many top line people because there's some really fuzzy mapping from goal to value (since value is realized in the long term), and some of the people are champion bullshitters. I don't need to explain sales people. But marketing, corporate strategy, and even upper product management - they drove us crazy because their standard of being data driven was absolutely not consistent with how we thought about things at all. All of it was because the mapping from project to revenue was over years, not quarters. And it was all projections.

Compare this to bottom line people, where the mapping from project to cost savings is on a shorter time frame. The types of personalities this attracts is different.

Maybe the growth hacking stuff at software companies is different and you can focus on revenue growth and still connect what you are doing to that. I've never worked in that role so I don't know.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by runevault »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #8

Eric Lippert was my hero back when his blog was hosted on MSDN. Sad to see him go into retirement when he's at his prime. Hope he finds some new exciting project.

I didn't take it as retirement, I took it as a break to figure out what he wants to do next and relax. Maybe he just calls it a career, maybe not.

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

#98

Post by trenchgun »

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…

It was claimed to be millions of net savings per deployed model.

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

#99

Post by jimbob45 »

echelon wrote: post #56
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 impr…

I don't think anyone can or will disagree with you. What Facebook is doing with VR/AR is technologically beyond anything anyone else is doing.

We just don't think the ultimate application of all that research is going to be the Metaverse. Pretending that the ultimate goal is the Metaverse is masking the fact that this VR/AR research is all exploratory. We can assume Wall Street would otherwise heavily punish Facebook for investing blindly so heavily in R&D. The willingness of Facebook to mask the Metaverse as something other than R&D and not Eric's team, which allegedly paid for itself, is what is so baffling.

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

#100

Post by Karrot_Kream »

btown wrote: post #49

This is really sad to hear. Probabilistic programming languages are IMO one of the coolest things ever: if you have an idea about how your data could be plausibly generated given some massive amount of hidden state and inputs, and an arbitrarily complex rendering function, you just write the rendering function and it determines probability distributions over the state variables that most likely map your inputs to you…

> But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a chain of conditional probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with significantly less training time and data.

It's a balance between engineer time (headcount costs) and training time/costs (infra costs.) Usually engineer time is more valuable than training costs. Embedding engineers into teams and building cost models is one of those cases where probabilistic programming makes a lot more sense than a DL approach, but most situations favor the economics of a DL approach.

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