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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

#261

Post by themafia »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #69
themafia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ford style assembly lines The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable. > Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint. > as the efficiency benefits are too important. You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evi…

"The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable." The whole innovation was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots. Once you're there, having removed any agency and freedom, pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.

> was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots.

So they make fewer mistakes. Not that they become zombies that you are then able to abuse.

> pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.

There's nothing logical about ignoring consequences. Which is probably why the "union strike" even exists. It's fighting illogic with illogic.

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

#262

Post by themafia »

apsurd wrote: post #45
themafia wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology is simply a technique to leverage and extend human desire. It's a tool. It's in the hands of those who control and use it. You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem. The people who want to subj…

"The problem is them " no no, we're not doing that.

I named three specific groups. You can easily find the bad actors within these groups. There is no "them." There is a highly identifiable set of individuals that take actions which cause major problems in our society. On this there is absolutely no question. In fact there is even good social consensus as to who these people are.

I get that hacker news would rather avoid inconvenient issues or simply satirize them but I take absolutely no care of this.

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

#263

Post by zmmmmm »

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…

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into the future. And he makes money like crazy.

But looking at the track record there's a very concerning lack of execution around critical strategic objectives. Take metaverse - I know most people laugh at it because they think it was a bad idea to start with. I push that aside and look at the execution. They poured a startling amount of money into it, and the end result - technically - sucks. This is not good execution of a bad idea. This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. After 5 years of huge investment the characters in Horizon Worlds still look like cartoons. All the advertised features of hyper-realistic worlds, generative world building etc failed to materialise. They made a face saving pivot to mobile where they claim it is successful but I literally never heard of anyone using it. I think it will be entirely synthetic traffic driven from their existing properties.

Then you can look at AI. You can say the jury is still out on their AI reboot, but it has been out a long time now, and it seems like at best they are just grading into being at par with leading AI labs. But I think that's being generous because so little has been released. What is certain is they went from a leading position right up to 2022-2023 to falling completely off the radar. Despite still holding the undisputed leading AI framework in PyTorch.

I have to conclude there's a genuine culture and execution problem that probably centers on the fact that Zuck is simply not a good people manager. And his relationship with the next level down (Andrew Bosworth etc) is such that he doesn't enable them to be either. And this all permeates through to an organization that delivers at a fraction of what it should given the resources it is expending.

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

#264

Post by erentz »

trollbridge wrote: post #247
erentz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

But now even this is just producing more information and requires more work both of you and of the original sender.

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

#265

Post by dinkumthinkum »

atq2119 wrote: post #248
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is saying things that are true called propaganda? Also, it is not just genetics but that is a part of it. The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc. Honestly, it just completely obvious and is playing out in real time. It's just obvious.

> The idea is also that parents with lower intelligence will value education for their offspring less and care less about whether their kids learn to read well, etc. Educated people can neglect their kids. And less educated people can still recognize when education is valued by society. Now look around. Do you feel like we're living in a society that values education? Did the successful people that kids see in their…

But, all your exceptions, at best prove the rule. Just go and observe out in the world. That is why I said it is happening in real-time. I think you are not looking at what's in front of you. Teacher's pay? Teachers were never highly paid. It is quite clear that many of the families of kids in low performing are not families that push education or reading or any of that sort. Yes, you can have a well-to-do family where both parents are lawyers and they neglect their kids. I think its not a coincidence that many such families produce kids that are lawyers. You may think overall people are valuing education less and that might be true but that is not what my argument. My argument is there are clearly families that value it much, much less and that is a cycle and it is not down to teachers or all the the other boogeymen.

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

#267

Post by Terr_ »

ceejayoz wrote: post #200
Aurornis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> LLMs came along and erased that assumption. Now you don't know if that e-mail, that 12-page design document, the 100 or 1000 line PR, or those 10 Jira tickets were written by someone who invested a lot of their own time into producing something, or if they had their AI subscription generate something that looked plausible. Oh, we know. It's pretty clear in many cases.

Perhaps a less-brittle version would be to replace "we don't know X" with "we can't easily prove X to the extent needed to deter it."

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

#268

Post by pinkgolem »

Avicebron wrote: post #195
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 default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

I mean, i struggle with spelling/wording and ask the LLM to proofread a lot.

I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly.

It's not a bad way to extend your vocabulary & catch spelling mistakes

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

#269

Post by jijji »

Facebook the web site reminds me of a really bad implementation of MySpace. MySpace was better, even in 2003. There are hundreds of usability bugs that exist on various parts of the platform that for over a decade remain unfixed. For a company that has 78,000 employees, you would think one of them might want to dig in and fix the web interface bugs. What's weird is in the age of Claude Code, it would probably take one software engineer a week to fix all of them, so its really pure incompetence. I think they spend more time on automation around restricting the usage of the platform that they forgot about the user interface bugs that plague it.

Also, avoid using Meta Pay aka Facebook Payments, where a user can send a payment to another user via the Messenger app. Someone sent me money a few weeks ago, and a two weeks alter they still have the payment marked as "Completed" on the sending side, and "Cancelled" on the receiving side. I told the sender to just do a chargeback with their bank because Facebook basically stole the money. Don't use Meta Pay for sending payments to anyone. Then when you try to open a "case" about it, you call a call center in Indonesia and the people have no access to see anything about the transaction, they just send it up the chain, only to have an automated response telling you to do something that the web site doesn't even offer as an option. I don't think there is any humans in the loop, besides the Indonesian call center that has no access to any of what you're calling about.

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