Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 566 posts

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

#281

Post by zmmmmm »

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

> Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all

The fallacy is believing that some kind of invisible hand will guide it to automatically produce an equal outcome and therefore any and all regulation is inherently bad. This seems to be a prevailing belief in the US in the current climate.

We have institutions that are designed to redistribute power and they are called governments. People have to believe in their role in doing that enough to actually empower them to implement it though.

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

#282

Post by xp84 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256
mathgladiator wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 100% understand the appeal of freedom from external pressures that retirement offers. But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects. And don’t get me wrong, I love goofing off. Been doing plenty of it. But given my inevitable death I have to appreciate a little external pressure forcing me to do good work.

If I were fortunate enough to be in that position, I think I’d partner up with a buddy to build something cool (that is unlikely to be a big moneymaker) and rely on each other for that pressure.

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

#283

Post by Mars008 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256
mathgladiator wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 100% understand the appeal of freedom from external pressures that retirement offers. But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects. And don’t get me wrong, I love goofing off. Been doing plenty of it. But given my inevitable death I have to appreciate a little external pressure forcing me to do good work.

> and struggle to complete any of their many projects

Hmm.. I don't struggle, I enjoy it. The goal isn't to start glossy product production. It's to learn how to do it. As soon as it's obvious project is usually shelved. Except for the 'main line' projects which together can result in something significant.

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

#284

Post by menloshark »

dlandis wrote: post #251
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…

> People gatekeep actual work and save it for political favorites and everyone else on the outside is stuck cooking up bullshit projects. If you do manage to find work on your own, people will immediately start scheming to steal it So this applies to even, say, mid-level developers? Wouldn't you get work assigned to you after you're hired, or do you actually have to hunt for your own projects, like you might in some…

> or do you actually have to hunt for your own projects, like you might in some consulting firms?

This is how the company works on a fundamental level.

On healthy teams, having something assigned to you (for levels under staff/6) is normal. On unhealthy teams, you're just a sitting duck and it's better to find your own work. Or else you'll be forced to work on bullshit projects with no upside.

Side note: the "they" who does the assigning is not a manager, it's another IC. The ones that go out and find their own work. That could be at any level technically, but usually staff+ because they form little political mafias.

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

#285

Post by toast0 »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256
mathgladiator wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 100% understand the appeal of freedom from external pressures that retirement offers. But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects. And don’t get me wrong, I love goofing off. Been doing plenty of it. But given my inevitable death I have to appreciate a little external pressure forcing me to do good work.

> But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects.

I retired early and ended up going back to work part time. I didn't complete many of my projects, but that's not why I went back. Most of my projects were things I wanted to play with, not things I expected to finish.

Working part time is nice because of external pressure, but really, the most of the pressure is cause I'll feel bad if I disappoint the people that are letting me work with them.

I don't feel bad if I don't get my personal projects done, because nobody is going to use them anyway.

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

#286

Post by swingboy »

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…

How were you measuring productivity gains (prior to the dashboard)?

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

#287

Post by whateveracct »

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!!!

7 years at a toxic workplace is tough

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

#289

Post by xp84 »

rdtsc wrote: post #272
threecheese wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I follow the same strategy, but loosely - I need those emdashes to signal that I’m using the tools.

That’s my latest joke — that we’ll have to pretend like we used the tools so they can feel validated they’ve spent all this money on hyped up technology. So, yes, it’s em-dashes and “it’s not just this, it’s that …” so they can hopefully leave us alone.

I remember feeling embarrassed one time that I used a very early GPT thing to help organize perf reviews for employees from the various bullet points I had written for each (I had a lot of direct reports). But in current world, I assume I’d be praised for doing so.

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

#290

Post by pfannkuchen »

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…

> There's a reason why the average tenure is Companies that hire a lot or hired a lot recently always have this. The 3 month people drag down the average. It isn’t necessarily due to turnover.

Not disagreeing with the overall point, I’ve just seen people say this same thing about a lot of companies and it doesn’t always mean something.

Post reply on HN