Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by Sgt_Apone » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

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.

Might as well donate money to the AI companies at this point.

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

#292

Post by saratogacx » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

loeg wrote: post #180

sterlind wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably both, to be fair. Meta may know that their employees will put up with it, given how depressing the job market is right now, but unhappy, cynical, resentful employees do not produce good software and innovations. there's a real financial cost to treating devs like cage-raised livestock.

It's unclear how you would use LLMs to monitor clicks. Unless you just mean they're authoring the monitoring software with LLM assistance (which is probably right).

LLM generates context based on what's on the screen and associates it with the action taken by the user. It is less "point of time" but more "charting the flow"

For example. page content of a PR with open comments, next action is to focus on the first comment. when a new PR with no open comments is shown the approve/push button is the next action. That starts a re-enforcement loop.

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

#293

Post by Mars008 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

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…

I've seen manager obviously reading copilot's advises as his own thoughts on meetings.

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

#294

Post by teaearlgraycold » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #285

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

I have picked up a project that helps out a nonprofit and it’s making a nice financial impact. And then there are artistic projects that I hope positively impact others.

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

#295

Post by adastra22 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #279

pinkgolem wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. Please don’t do this. You probably aren’t aware of how bad this can land. It’s not just about containing your original thoughts, it’s about the verbosity, repetitiveness, and absurdity of it all. Grammarly is a much better tool for these kinds of purposes, and it actually guides and teaches you to improve your writing…

Grammarly the honeypot?

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

#296

Post by adastra22 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:44 AM UTC

Mars008 wrote: post #293

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…

I've seen manager obviously reading copilot's advises as his own thoughts on meetings.

copilot?!

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

#297

Post by analog31 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:47 AM UTC

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…

In an ideal workplace, one could sit down with the colleague and have her experience untangling the slop, perhaps by a process akin to pair programming.

Sometimes I wonder if we're letting people graduate from school with no real grasp of the purpose of written communication. School strips writing of purpose, and creates artificial purposes such as using AI to combine words in order for AI to assign it a good grade. Even before the AI era, most human generated text was not worth reading.

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

#298

Post by uzername » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #274

munificent wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No surprise. People like being more productive when they reap some of the benefits of that increased productivity. If you're expected to be 10x more productive but don't get a raise, all you're doing is stuffing money in some executive's pocket while your job security goes down.

I'm being heavily consulted to advise management on culture change towards AI. And my number one message is this: make the number one, first and potentially only beneficiary of AI use the individual staff members themselves. If they have more time now, DO NOT start filling that with more work for them to do. If they do more all by themselves accept it as a bonus (experience says this is overwhelming what will happen…

I would love to hear more about your advice and the coaching you are giving to management. We also have a strong push to prove evidence of climbing productivity with clearly state future staffing goals. I would like to advocate for this, at even partially, enhancement and quality of life improvement for IC folks.

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

#299

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

Forgeties79 wrote: post #169

zzzeek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't "preventable" though. How would you prevent what's been happening ? Pass a law making GPUs illegal ? Just ..."convince" everyone that the machine that can write working software, business letters and render good enough banner and print advertising for nearly free is evil and just don't use it (ask Emily Bender how that's going)? There is no realistic way from stopping any of this from happening. Need a diff…

I proposed literally none of those solutions or even suggested them.

The issue is that you seem to be proposing nothing but platitudes and when called on it, did not elaborate but high tailed to the cloak of misunderstood defender of sense and sensibility.

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

#300

Post by cadamsdotcom » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:59 AM UTC

Uber burning its whole AI budget in 4 months instead of 12, companies everywhere pressing employees to use AI whether or not it makes sense..

My cofounder and I get to “only” pay $200/mo to build our product while the hyperscalers burning tokens like crazy stave off price rises for people like us - thanks Zuck!