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.
Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
301–310 of 566 posts
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#302I 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…
What’s funny to me is your last paragraph. A lot of companies are so gung-ho about “AI ALL the things!” that I’m not sure as a manager if I’d get in trouble for “spotting the AI copy paste” junk. I’m supposed to make sure everyone is using AI as much as possible, after all. So, rejecting someone’s output for being low-effort AI slop and asking for a “less AI” version of it might mark me as a silly old fashioned guy who doesn’t believe in AI.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the right way to look at things now. It might not always have the right track record, but AI built coding is more likely to have all the right permissions in place by default, most likely to copy existing patterns in your codebase, most likely to use the highest performance patterns and on top of all that, the spec will match what was asked of it.
I can't even get LLMs to reliably use tool calls instead of bash, let alone follow existing patterns in a codebase.
Mine are pretty robust and articulate. I tend to write very lengthy instructions and include snippets of code, file paths, struct names, etc.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#304- Renamed a well known brand. - Wasted billions of dollars on cartoonish third grade glitchy and buggy VR world claiming it's the future.
And now he's all in on AI and now models are closed sources. Because.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
Normally, most teams (mine included) are about 10% behind their plan by the end of Q1. This year my team is closer to 10% ahead despite the fact that we're down one engineer due to a small re-org at the end of last year. These projects were planned and estimated before AI was in heavy use and when, at best, most AI focused devs were still using it like smart auto-complete. Essentially, we estimated the projects before AI was heavily used and we're consistently beating those estimates by a good amount which is not how all previous years have gone.
The AI metrics dashboards didn't roll out until mid-March and, while I'm still seeing us beat our estimates from last year, we're not seeing any additional gains. Basically, all of Q1 we had AI and no dashboards and were beating 2025 estimates by X%. For Q2 we had dashboards and extra pressure to use AI and we're still seeing those X% gains, but no additional gains despite higher token usages.
We also have KPIs around completing a certain number of a certain type of Jira ticket that customers can file and we've seen a similar pattern of an sharp increase in tickets completed in Dec-Feb and then the new rate holds, but no additional increase after the company started pushing AI usage.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#306Here'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…
VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless.
But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have?
And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that money not to be wasted? That's not how products are made.
The Metaverse wasn't an organization failure. It was all Zuckenberg's incompetence, Facebook didn't even get the chance to try.
The AI started different, but it's becoming the same thing again.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#307Here'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…
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#308Here'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…
If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior...
The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook though, I'm just an armchair analyst being judgemental from reading some comments.
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#309Earlier 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.
[1] https://jabde.com/2026/02/02/utilizing-llms-as-a-data-decomp...
Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
#310Earlier 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.