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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

#231

Post by alexandre_m »

Aurornis wrote: post #166
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…

> She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw. LLMs came along and…

> This is the root frustration spreading across workplaces everywhere. Before AI the only way for someone to generate a design document, Jira ticket, or pull request without investing a lot of their own time and effort into producing what you saw.

That’s not really the point. Engineering has always operated on trust networks, not just artifacts.

Your review naturally adapts based on the level of trust you have in the author. If someone has consistently produced high-quality work, whether they used AI or not becomes mostly irrelevant.

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

#232

Post by _DeadFred_ »

senordevnyc wrote: post #216
alex1138 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'd please a lot more people if the feed hadn't been filled with crap - out of order, at that - that nobody ever subscribed to in the first place, causing them to miss actual posts from friends (whatever you think of 'social media', his website is fucking broken) for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS

[flagged]

If that one change requires every user to click on their friends profiles to see updates x 2.1 billion daily users and say 4 family friends checked and it takes 1 second to click that is 291,000 8 hour workdays lost per day to humanity. Around 100,000,000 work days per year humanity looses out on putting to productive use. And I am REALLY underestimating the time lost to this. Facebook is stealing low end 100 million days of productivity a year from humanity on this one thing.

Or another way, 850,000,000 hours. It took 5-15 billion human hours of work to go to the moon. They steal 1 moon program worth of human time from humanity every 6 or so years. At the scales they operate we need to judge them on that scale. Mark get's paid/rewarded at that scale. He needs to be judged on the same scale. Not on 'the impact per individual'.

Meta has stolen multiple moon programs from humanity (again I am way under measuring) for that one change in order to increase their billions of dollars.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-man-hours-went-into-the-Apoll...

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

#233

Post by janussunaj »

menloshark wrote: post #208
gerdesj wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this supposition or first hand experience?

The latter. I've seen so much unethical shit here, I'd love to give more detail but I'd probably dox myself

Don't let it break you. Take whatever money you made and run.

The rest of big tech isn't much better. Big G is less stressful, but you'll see vicious and cringey behavior left and right. Hyped large startups are cults and 100% cringe. Meta is kind of the worst of both worlds though. "But they pay so well". Yeah, also: life is short.

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

#235

Post by asveikau »

j-bos wrote: post #207
asveikau wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't please every human alive, so I might as well not try to do any better. This is a very Zuckerbergian take.

> This is a very Zuckerbergian take. No, it's just a common fallacy. If you don't like the guy, isn't "zuckerbergian" an example of helping him live rent free in people's heads?

I'm actually not kidding when I say that Zuckerberg likes that particular fallacy a lot and I've seen him use it. You're right that it's not at all exclusive to him.

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

#236

Post by nlawalker »

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 have to call it out when you see it, politely and charitably.

"Hey, thanks! This is a great overview, and I actually asked ChatGPT before asking here and got a lot of the same information, but what I'm really looking for is..."

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

#237

Post by dinkumthinkum »

deanCommie wrote: post #19

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the wor…

The idea that there is not much difference between 200K and 800K per year is absolute nonsense. I feel like its one of those things that are so stupid we are all dumber for having heard it. I don't know if its just one of those things where people on HN seem to virtue signal as if they are the most minimalists, live in 250 square foot tiny houses, live of radishes they grow in their microgrardens or whatever. This is like people that say, "eh, you don't need to make more than $95K."

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

#238

Post by cindyllm »

janussunaj wrote: post #233
menloshark wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. I've seen so much unethical shit here, I'd love to give more detail but I'd probably dox myself

Don't let it break you. Take whatever money you made and run. The rest of big tech isn't much better. Big G is less stressful, but you'll see vicious and cringey behavior left and right. Hyped large startups are cults and 100% cringe. Meta is kind of the worst of both worlds though. "But they pay so well". Yeah, also: life is short.

[dead]

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

#239

Post by a_victorp »

fidotron wrote: post #33
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Let's go there: this is what the Unabomber was on about, and there has long been an effort to stop people noticing this. Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory. In practice we have no cho…

In my view, the core of the solution here is to realize that no system will be stable and "perfect" forever. That is, we may chart into the unknown and arrive at a pretty good solution that benefits people, but over time, as people relax, some people will try to take power and eventually succeed. My point is: some people will always try to get advantages. So it will always come to the community to put in work to improve society and guarantee the benefits are given to all. There is no defining a set of rules and forgetting about it

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

#240

Post by akomtu »

superfrank wrote: post #144
bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

My company did something similar (dashboard to track tokens). It was made available to managers about two weeks before it was available to everyone, so I got to see all my reports' usage before they knew they were being tracked. The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output s…

Those executives are simply implementing the directive to inject as much AI as possible into every gear of the economy. Their bonuses depend on this. The idea is that if the world economy becomes dependent on this AI monstrosity, we won't be able to get rid of it. It will be like a situation with a nasty parasite that does a lot of harm, but cannot be removed without the host dying.
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