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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

#331

Post by yafbum »

> 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.

> The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it.

It does sound naive, but it's also possible that this is plain wrong. Just because your team results in some cost cutting does not mean that your team is generating enough cost savings to justify 50 headcount. I'm sure there are teams at meta with very large / existential cost cutting needs, and it doesn't sound like any one of them was relying critically on your team for enough of their cost cutting objectives for them to make a case to keep this investment going.

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

#332

Post by Eisenstein »

fleddr wrote: post #256
a4isms wrote: post #108

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 accounting bias/culture. Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%. According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books. Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that incr…

If you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist, and when you start to quantify it, the numbers turn into targets that must continually improve.

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

#333

Post by dh2022 »

abakker wrote: post #29
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…

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…

Not to nitpick, but 5% improvement profit does not apply to the additional dollar. It applies to all the revenue.... So the improvement could be massive.

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

#334

Post by UglyToad »

musk_micropenis wrote: post #9

Sorry 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…

Strongly agree, I've not read much of his blog but every time I do read an article the quality and personality stand out.

Hoping he gets the time to recover and decompress.

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

#335

Post by defen »

ericlippert wrote: post #295
defen wrote: post #153

> Then said Jesus unto him, "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword". I'm a big fan of Eric Lippert's work, but this blog post comes across as whiny and evinces a completely unwarranted sense of entitlement. This is a person who voluntarily chose to get paid (I can only assume) a very large amount of money to work on something that he found to be exciting a…

I am very thankful for that opportunity. I learned so much from my colleagues! And they were genuinely great people to work with. I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I lowered FB's costs by about $4000. The argument that I should be eternally grateful to Zuck for allowing me to keep a quarter -- before taxes! -- of the profit that accrued to him for writing zero lines of…

Why did you work for him if you weren't happy with the arrangement? Surely you had other options. You're one of the most talented people in one of the most highly-paid/profitable fields, one with very few institutional barriers to advancement (licensing, accreditation, educational requirements, etc). You made a bad deal with the devil, and now you're upset about it? You were either willfully ignorant of, or did not care, about the ill effects Facebook has on the world. You just wanted to work on cool tech shit and get paid a lot of money. Why should anyone look at your experience as anything other than a cautionary tale?

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

#336

Post by Karrot_Kream »

projectazorian wrote: post #301
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this is quibbling about definitions in my head at least. Fundamentally I like working in environments where folks are optimistic but realistic, keenly aware of how effortless failure is. Discussing both failure and success should be allowed and encouraged, but constantly looking at the negative or opining about how an individual can't change anything in the organization doesn't feel healthy to me. Most Google…

> Most Googlers I've talked to view the company as a large, corporate politics chess game where engineers are the pawns. Are they wrong?

I don't know, I'm not a Googler. I don't enjoy working with large groups of folks who think like this and I don't enjoy working in organizations where engineers are treated as pawns. Seems like either way, Google isn't the place for me. If you're a Googler you probably have a better understanding than I do.

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

#337

Post by treeman79 »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #269
treeman79 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A real fun one is rebound headaches. Spent a few months with horrifically painful headaches. Turned out it mostly from painkillers. More I took. Worse headaches Got. My other less painful headaches that started the cycle were an actual brain issue. Just took a few years to get correct diagnosis. Eventually had a cycle of one round of pain killers every other day. Cycling through To a different kind each time. This mo…

What was the ultimate underlying pathology?

High cranial pressure (IIH) and lots of minor strokes.

Apparently I’m genetically prone to clots. (Factor 5)

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

#338

Post by lurker616 »

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.

Perhaps in the future the company would not be adding any new models or require optimization of any new surfaces, so they don't expect to be spending enough on new initiatives to justify optimizing them. And all the existing initiatives have been optimized efficiently already (though that does seem unlikely when I type it out).

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

#339

Post by brazzledazzle »

ericlippert wrote: post #311
kelnos wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition and lazy parasites who were just collecting a paycheck during the pandemic. (I am paraphrasing somewhat; you can look it up if you want his exact words.) Regarding change from within…

Why would he ever consider taking responsibility for something when he can't really be held accountable? It should be illegal to take a company public with special voting-only shares.

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

#340

Post by lozenge »

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 the common opinion is that nobody will want or use the metaverse. Getting paid to build something that nobody will use isn't immoral, it's amoral.
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