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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

#521

Post by archagon »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #54
layer8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efficiency gains are more important than people not having to spend their working life with soul-crushing tasks? I don’t quite follow.

The assumption is that orders of magnitude more people will benefit from the efficiency gains, like it was the case in agriculture automation or factory work automation. In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost o…

All this skips the fundamental question: can this job be done by a machine? Or does the job just have a vaguely machine-doable look, particularly to those outside the trenches?

Because the latter is how you get the software engineering equivalent of collapsing bridges, en masse.

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

#522

Post by omgitspavel »

financltravsty wrote: post #473
omgitspavel wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade+ is plenty of time to spend a few weeks brushing up on CS basics. There is really only a handful of algorithms and data sctructues and none of them are rocket science. And what's the alternative? Quizzing people on some random C# framework methods? The "I don't use algos in a day to day job" argument has been around forever, but nobody making it ever proposes a better filter.

Strong no hire for Staff+ signal from this post. Meta's leetcode gambit includes leetcode Hards and Mediums which aren't just "remember your hash maps and trees!" They're incredibly hard to brute force under time pressure if you haven't practiced similar problems before. Now do that for every interview -- exhausting. Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you…

But there is a system design interview, for staff+ there should be even two system design rounds if I remember correctly.

When I interviewed at faang I was only once asked a leetcode hard question. Mediums in 99% of cases are manageable with just "remembering your hash maps and trees".

I'm in no way saying there aren't people who ask hard questions, but most of the times it is not the case. Also, how would you check that the person can code and solve problems with only checking their past system design experience?

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

#524

Post by teeray »

pinkgolem wrote: post #268
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I often send out the LLM version

The problem is that you lose your voice and adopt one that your audience knows all too well (and knows it isn’t yours). It makes your audience feel like you aren’t listening to them (even though you are!), because they feel like they’re talking to an LLM.

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

#525

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Henchman21 wrote: post #510
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why people have this idea, but it doesn't work. A culture of "don't have anything bad to leak" quickly and inevitably leads to "keep your mouth shut so there's nothing bad to leak".

You're saying it is impossible for good people to exist. I can't accept that?

It's impossible for someone to be so good that nothing they say would ever look bad when leaked out of context. Sometimes you have to make hard tradeoffs, or hypothetically evaluate something to understand whether it's bad or not.

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

#526

Post by ychnd »

akomtu wrote: post #240
superfrank wrote: post #144

Earlier 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…

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.

That sounds just like Microsoft, Facebook or Oracle products (in some circles). What I'm trying to say it is classic strategy done many times before with various tools (and I hate the perpetrators every time).

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

#527

Post by whateveracct »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #330
whateveracct wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 years at a toxic workplace is tough

I’d rather be poor

there's a middle ground

i make good money but not FAANG. like quarter million a year + equity that is sometimes liquid for more.

i do it remote and for a company that isn't so brutally antagonistic as meta. remote also means i don't commute, don't get trapped in an office for 40+ hrs/week, and can spend more time during the workday on my personal life than work itself.

so i make less money in an absolute sense, but i am not in any pain or being surveilled or being bullied to work hard.

and honestly i make more money per hour worked than a meta employee. so lower salary, higher effective hourly wage.

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

#528

Post by Forgeties79 »

anon84873628 wrote: post #497
watwut wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot more then 3d printing going into that.

Yes, but would they have been able to develop the production capacity for resistance without it? Certainly seems like the advantages of 3D printing came in clutch exactly when they were needed.

I think you’re missing the thrust of my comment and the responses. Nobody is saying 3-D printers are worthless, but if you remember what it was like when they were first emerging into the mainstream, you would think we would all have one in our living rooms by now just spitting out everything we need constantly. We would all be building our own furniture and repairing every niche thing in our house with them. We’d all be on some magical network sharing files with each other. We’d have a massive surge in printed guns.

Everything was theorized and it all was a variation of “nothing will be the same for anyone ever again,” not “some specific areas will be really different.”

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

#529

Post by saltyoldman »

codemog wrote: post #167
saltyoldman wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

What magical AI are you using? That’s not my experience at all.

I use cursor on auto mode almost all the time. I switch to Opus 4.7 when I need I know it will go off the rails. But generally Auto mode "just works".

For my personal work on my own projects, Codex 5.5 because it's cheap at $20 / month and I get in about 10 prompts during my work day (would be more like 40 if I was not focused on work though)

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

#530

Post by whattheheckheck »

cactacea wrote: post #512
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.

That is pretty much my existence at $MAJOR_TECH_COMPANY now. Inexperienced security engineers running bots against my codebase and sending me pages long tickets with their "findings". There might be a couple of interesting nuggets here and there but by and large the reports are just noise. This churn is actively taking away from my ability to actually respond to customer-impacting issues because "security is always o…

You basically have to open up a channel for them to contribute if they want to play that game
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