121–130 of 482 posts
He's not wrong about Meta's VR foray. VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary, Zuck's vision for it in our daily lives is not.
That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and still not ready for prime time.
"Everyone was kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, generous with their time and knowledge, and a genuine pleasure to work with." I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off for any reason and the broader large-organ…
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…
That problem with Eric's group and most Data Science teams is that the company continues to move along. There is some long-term cost, but there are likely teams where there are severe short-term ramifications if they are cut. E.g., imagine if Windows cut their servicing team (snarkiness aside).
"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…
> 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”. The hedge fund guys would say the same about your team. I know you are emotional but this i…
As 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.
In practice, it hasn't happened, and nobody seems excited to do it. Whatever benefits they hope to get from the network effect seem unlikely thus far.
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.
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 corpor…
I'm struggling to relate to this. Me and the rest of my team were literally laid off just a few weeks ago. What I'm hearing from the inside is that half of our work is now in maintenance mode (it's kinda necessary for KTL) and the Big Project™ we were working on is fully abandoned.
I guess I'm sad the Big Project™ will no longer exist, but I learned dozens of lessons while working on it, and I'm more confident and a better engineer because of those lessons and effort. And I get to add some nice things to my resumé.
It doesn't truly feel like a loss. Hundreds of other companies will do similar things and I will try to join them or I'll be interested in some other field in a few years.
But I'm already familiar with changing jobs every few years so perhaps that's why I find it harder to relate.
I'm sure no-one here likes the idea of the Metaverse but from Meta's perspective I definitely think it's the correct bet. This doesn't make it less dystopian but that's exactly the point. If they can pull it off they win. Great video explaining it way better then I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkhjL3WvWQ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I would say that it was closer to a tasty pizza.
It was definitely not fitting either "vitamin" (worth investing for future payoff) or painkiller (solving immediate and urgent need[1])
[1] I guess that hiding/temporary fix is not intended to be part of this allegory