Damn, even the top performers are jaded and checking out. Someone has to keep believing, no?
The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
111–120 of 482 posts
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#112I’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.…
You may not always feel that way.
At some point you may start to wonder what your legacy on this planet is. At the very least: if you've made a good use of your limited time (and the scarce resource that is your labor). (Hard mode: if you've left the planet better off than you found it?)
The last few years have pushed a lot of people's "burn out" buttons and the self-reflection of "what have I accomplished with my time?" (and "have I contributed more to good or to evil in this world?") are very easy burn out spirals to experience, so a lot of people are asking these sorts of questions now. (Including just about every day lately for months on "Ask HN", in a million different unique individual ways, if you've not yet noticed.)
You sound like you are in a very fortunate place in your life that you aren't struggling with that right now. I envy you a little. I'm also glad for you and I hope it remains that way for you.
(I've spent too much time in the last few months worried that too much of my precious labor into finished projects and net revenue generation has been spent in service to the greater evil than the greater good of the world and have been struggling to figure out what that means or what I do with that cursed feeling.)
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#113As someone not in the topic the metaverse seems even worse, i.e. it looks like Facebook spent 20 Billion and didn't manage to add anything to VR other small companies haven't added years earlier...
I'm probably missing something, but it honestly looks worse then burning money, it looks like extremely inefficiently burning money.
Anyway sounded like an interesting work before the team was dissolved.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#114I 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…
I've been a part of this argument before. I have another, additional perspective on why growth is more important than cost-cutting in many cases. If there are costs to be cut, you can cut them today, you can cut them tomorrow, they're right there and eventually, you can hire someone/buy something to cut those costs.
But growth is a tricky thing. If you're in a land grab market and you cut your costs at the expense of growth, you may find that you lost your chance to grow, because the market is now dominated by other people.
For people with this mentality, they expect in the long term to cut costs, but only after growth has slowed for reasons out of their control, e.g. the makret is stabilizing and has already chosen the #1 big gorilla, the #2 little gorilla, and numbers #3 though #100 small monkeys picking up scraps.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#115Sorry 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.
Just wanted to say thanks too. Back when I was at the university, your blog helped me discover programming languages are something you can actually design. I even ended up contributing to the Rust compiler, which was an incredible learning experience. Thanks for the inspiration!
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#116So which one was it? Was the team very important or is the work being thrown away?
Both.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#117Such 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 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.
If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#118> 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”. Sounds like this guy was totally opposed to the company's new focus, to the point of descri…
Just staring at facts on paper... It sounds like Facebook has no interest in cutting costs since they cut a team that reduced the cost of every single team they interacted with. By a large multiple of whatever it cost to have that team employed. Regardless of your take on the "Metaverse", it's clear that this was in fact, not the best thing for everyone.
How much money did it save? How much was this in savings after paying their salaries? Article doesn't say. If they were breaking even, or barely "profitable", then maybe it wasn't worth the management overhead, especially with a team lead vehemently opposed to the company's focus.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#119I 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…
> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed. I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up t…
Ironically this quote also show how broken the US is: It's normal to take pain killers.
It should not be.
It should be a last resort.
You should take what fixes the problem and give your body time to heal not take pain killers and pretend nothing is wrong.
Pain killers are addicting, can have an increasingly reduced effect, can have a bunch of side effects and can make the end result much worse by not healing wounds (metaphorically) when they are still easy to heal(1).
(1): Through sometimes they can also help you healing by preventing you from doing pain-caused bad actions, like setting down your food in a bad angle.
EDIT: Just to be clear I mean pain killers for a "normal live" situation, not in context of you lying in a hospital bed or having extrema healthy issue which can't be fixed/heal anytime shortly.
Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
#120I 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…
> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed. I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up t…
It's a trope with some truth to it, but it runs out of steam fairly quickly. Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram? $1000 iPhone? Liver King?
I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then, desire can win over pain many times.
Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.