The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by kelnos » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:25 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #260

paganel wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but couldn't while he was still working for Meta... He still took the money, though. That was all I could think about while I was reading that paragraph.

Pay me enough money and I'll work very hard trying to disprove the laws of thermodynamics. I'll tell you it can't be done, of course, but if you insist I'll work hard at trying to do it.

Sure, but you trying to do that won't hurt anyone (well, aside from the bank account of the person paying you, but that's on them). Building a dystopian VR-based social network hurts a lot more people.

I would hope we have better ethics than to work on things that harm others for truckloads of money.

Then again, a lot of people still work for Meta (and Twitter, and...), so I guess ethics is pretty lacking.

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

#272

Post by bombcar » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:26 PM UTC

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.…

There's a big difference knowing ahead of time, also.

If I am hired to do trade secret work I'm already understanding that it will never be "known" even if the product or something associated with it DOES work - and many companies in the world will never be known anyway, let alone their products.

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

#273

Post by bombcar » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

htrp wrote: post #150

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.

The savings are already banked (in the code/infrastructure) so you save the headcount cost as well.

This is the key takeaway. I may save the company $10m today, but then have absolutely no chance of ever saving the company any money again.

Not that this is the case here, but this is how it can seem to the counters of the beans.

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

#274

Post by akozak » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #251

chubot wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Facebook doesn't have something like memegen? I worked at Google when it was created and "went viral". Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity I think memegen made it a lot more acceptable to be cynical, which was probably good, because the company was definitely drinking a lot of its own Kool-aid

> Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity Too lazy to check, but did memegen appear before or after the whole Google+ debacle? Because from the outside Google did seem to drink a lot of its own Kool-aid back then (before and during the first stages of the Google+ launch). In a way, the current discussions around VR remind me of those times, lots and lots of smart people refusing…

Oh yea, but funny enough a lot of the critiques were shared via the internal version of Google+ since people actually took the time to write things and it had a pretty good UX. I don't think it's a great comparison to Meta ... this is anecdotal, but it felt plausible enough as a product strategy and in a self contained org that I think most rank and file gave it breathing room and tried to be constructive (save for a few cases where they'd made some bad calls). Keep in mind it was a period of huge growth and experimentation across the company, so there was a lot to feel positive about even if you were skeptical of Google+, and it didn't feel like they'd bet the farm, in the same way it might at Meta.

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

#275

Post by bombcar » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

ericlippert wrote: post #248

WorldMaker wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how many greatly appreciated his blog and have been upset at the last few years of Facebook-encouraged radio silence (including myself, Eric Lippert has been a blogger I've looked forward to posts from), even if he were to just fall into the exciting "old" project of blogging regularly again (as his post teases at the bottom), I think that would be a great use of "his prime" and I wouldn't exactly call that a r…

That's all very kind of you to say, thank you. I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll give that more thought.

Perhaps we're now almost ready for the E language. ;)

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

#276

Post by version_five » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #264

ericlippert wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

"Big tech" - particularly facebook and google, I think are widely considered to be at worst actively evil and at best responsible for the race to the bottom in the internet experience and public discourse that's happened over the last 15 years. But they also appear to pay really well, have locally cool problems to work on, and have lots of work that has no relevance to destroying society, e.g. all the AI research they both do, which I don't think it's possible to overstate how important it's been for the growth of the field, in a very good way.

So it's easy to see the dilemma in a sense. It's maybe really just a concentrated example of capitalism generally. All money has blood on it

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

#277

Post by lovehashbrowns » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #159

rob74 wrote: post #91

> 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 wa…

> no one wants to wear VR goggles I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12?

I got used to them pretty quickly after some initial motion sickness issues and could wear them for quite a while. Multiple hours if I got super into a few games. I'm pretty excited for having VR replace multiple physical monitors. I'm gonna be looking for a new headset in the coming weeks to see if that's viable right now--maybe the new Meta headset. But if something is promising and can render text fairly well, I'm gonna give it a whirl and see how it goes.

Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.

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

#278

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:31 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #264

ericlippert wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

I think he's saying that nobody internally thinks it will work, not that anyone internally thinks it will create the world of Snowcrash.

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

#279

Post by geph2021 » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

  we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work.

...

  The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure

It's comical, I have to chuckle, even though deeper down I'm truly saddened. The short-sightedness and lack of understanding of upper management seems inevitable as companies grow.

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

#280

Post by acdha » Wed, Nov 30, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

substation13 wrote: post #262

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…

The potential gains from cost saving is always capped at total cost. The potential gains from increasing revenue are (typically) much larger.

Also cost savings has a hard, well known upper bound but revenue growth is speculative with many opportunities for pleasant fantasy. Business leaders love the idea of being the visionary who takes a big gamble and makes it work.

Facebook is an example of where that breaks down: there isn’t an easy way to grow that much larger so they would likely see greater return from cost savings than they are likely to make from VR, but after a couple decades of thinking of themselves as this incredibly innovative tech company it’s hard to accept that they’re stable as an ad company.