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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#221

Post by Ifkaluva »

jp57 wrote: post #189

They mention Meta's layoffs, which probably have more impact on employee morale than the AI stuff. My current theory of tech layoffs is that over the last decade or so, churn-inducing practices like stack-ranking have gone out of vogue. One can speculate as to why this happened. Perhaps generational made middle management unwilling to do the dirty work? Nevertheless it happened. However, companies still want to, and…

Not sure about other tech cos, I think Meta and Amazon currently do stack ranking.

It seems to be a thing that comes and goes as the job market is weaker or stronger

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#222

Post by milkshakes »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

you could always do this: https://marketoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/230327.n...

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#223

Post by bandrami »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #202
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

My current bar is “if you know I’m expecting to hear from a person don’t paste unedited ChatGPT outputs and hit send.” Everybody wants to send out the efforts of their corner-cutting, but nobody wants to receive them. Most people know when they are doing it. If you feel the need to obscure your LLM usage, it means you didn’t put enough of your own voice and work into the final draft and you need to do something about…

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce.

The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#224

Post by _doctor_love »

whyenot wrote: post #215
DragonStrength wrote: post #193

Well, yeah, management sees a weak labor market and imagines the ability to fire all those troublesome engineers. Remember, especially in recent years, tech management is made up predominantly of grads from a select set of "elite" universities, whose caliber is determined mostly by how rich the parents are. It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. The idea engineers with years of education are as…

> It's no surprise we're in a moment of extreme labor disdain. So sad to think that a generation or two ago, everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. Now all of that is gone and unless you are a superstar, you're just a commodity to be managed, and extinguished when the time comes.

Sorry, going to have to disagree with you there friend. It is not the case that everyone wanted to emulate the HP Way. The HP Way represented the best of Silicon Valley thinking, and if you read the book, you will see that even those guys were an outlier.

I remember that there is a passage in the book where the HP guys go and meet with other leaders of American corporations, and most of them felt that they did not have any kind of obligation back to society. I am a huge fan of the HP Way, but they were unusual, and not the norm.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#225

Post by [deleted] »

mathgladiator wrote: post #212
menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

OR join meta, sell your soul, stay for 7 years, then retire and be done with work forever!!!

[deleted]

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#226

Post by figassis »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

And it’s too soon to have these norms. Employers today are willing to part with them at the hint of the slimmest efficiency gains, you’ll waste time. So I think the correct response today is wait for it to settle. Norms will form on their own.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#227

Post by menloshark »

mathgladiator wrote: post #212
menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

OR join meta, sell your soul, stay for 7 years, then retire and be done with work forever!!!

Maybe if you joined 10 years ago lmao

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#228

Post by stasomatic »

loeg wrote: post #171
Aurornis wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is on the extreme other end of this. The article opens with how they're now using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers. It's still insane to me that Meta thought this would be a good idea, or that employees would be comfortable with it even though they claim it's only used for anonymous AI training.

> using AI to monitor how everyone uses their computers It's the other way around -- they're monitoring the computers to train AI.

Could this be a vector to poison the AI? I am not one for sabotage, just bad karma all in all, but not all are like that, and if one knows their days at ACME are numbered, the sirens start singing.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#229

Post by cheschire »

asveikau wrote: post #174
loeg wrote: post #170

Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.

Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy. I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything w…

Jesse Eisenberg captured this perfectly.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#230

Post by jmyeet »

It's hard not to look at Meta and come away with any conclusion other than they shit the bed. Hard.

I think the last good move Meta made was buying IG. Maybe not good for IG users but absolutely a great move for Meta. Not quite as good as Google buying Youtube but it's up there. Best $1 billion any company has probably spent.

But Facebook is a graveyard of conspiracy theory Debras, anti-vaxxers and your racist uncle just posting links all day. Sharing links was a contentious decision and it clearly improves short-term engagement but (IMHO) it destroys the platfrom's initial purpose of keeping in touch with friends and family.

Let's not forget too that Meta spent probably billions on building its own crypto (ie Libra). But that was just a taste of what was to come. The Metaverse was one of the largest boondoggles in corporate history. $70B+ with no product-market fit. It was an entirely ego-driven "build it and theyw ill come" moment from somebody who doesn't know waht to do with the empire he's built who is surrounded by Yes Men.

Facebook and AI feels a lot like Microsoft and mobile. Microsoft just completely missed the boat based on poor leadership and conflicting priorities (eg wanting one Windows code base for all devices). Facebook has a huge corpus of human communication and engagement, which should be a treasure trove for building AI but I don't think anybody really believes Meta knows what they're doing or will get anywhere doing it.

I've seen in this in big tech companies: big initatives get well-funded. Seasoned veterans swoop in and cash the fattest checks (in bonus stock) until the entire thing falls apart. Think Google Wave.

What I really think is going to kill these companies is the corporate layoffs or, rather, what they represent. They represent big tech companies turning into Corporate America where politics defines your careers, the company seems incapable of doing anything due to competing fiefdoms (a la Intel) and middle management just reorganizes every 6-12 months so nobody in management ever faces the consequences of their actions.

Monitoring your employees keystrokes with AI ins't going to help either. But management (or the consultants they end up paying) are never going to come to the conclusion that the problem is management.

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