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Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

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Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#51

Post by danans »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #5
maxwellito wrote: post #4

I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?

I'm not a Meta engineer, but if I had to offer a guess, the answer would be money.

Money is a proxy for other things. In the places where meta has offices, the cost of living (housing, childcare, healthcare, etc etc) is so high that working for a company that pays like Meta can be the only way many can afford it all.

It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.

Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.

However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.

Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#52

Post by alex1138 »

ninininino wrote: post #23
glaslong wrote: post #8

Currently at Meta. This place has always been a bit ruthless in the 8+ years I've been around to observe. But the article is accurate. Never seen people this universally fed up. I thought tech was too cushy for it to happen, but there's serious collective action posting out in the open all over the place. It's also never been more cutthroat, backstabby, scope-grabby, political, and uncertain. There seems to be a flyw…

Is Zuck just too...neurodivergent or lacking in social awareness or low EQ or whatever the case may be to understand morale? Or just so cut-throat/trusting that people who don't currently work there want the META paycheck badly enough that even if morale is horrible they can just backfill departures?

"Dumb fucks"

Arguably hacking Crimson reporters when they tried investigating him for activities at Harvard

Buying Whatsapp so he can have a monopoly

Copying Snapchat multiple times

I mean, I can go on

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#53

Post by revscat »

mrhottakes wrote: post #42
sklargh wrote: post #16

Meta is a normal high-comp company (for now) now. This is what it’s like to work at any mature F500 outside of privileged organizations and teams.

Extremely untrue. Meta is significantly worse than your average F500.

[dead]

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#54

Post by hylaride »

kranke155 wrote: post #6
maxwellito wrote: post #4

I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?

People who work at Meta, the ones I met in London, didn’t seem too far removed from people working in the financial industry. They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after…

I've known many people that worked at FB/Meta, though most of them served between 2010-2020. The scale they deal with does lead to some very interesting tech challenges that can be very satisfying. Most of them eventually moved on, and my impression is that the culture really has changed post-covid.

I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#55

Post by renegade-otter »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #3

This is why companies don't announce layoffs before they know who will be impacted, as frustrating as it can be. My morale would be in the gutter too if I had to spend a month wondering whether I'm the unlucky 1 in 10.

I don't think that matters at Meta. They purposefully create this "survival of the fittest" environment, making sure they squeeze every ounce of work (and soul) from you.

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#56

Post by sillysaurusx »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #19
maxwellito wrote: post #4

I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?

I work at Meta. 1) Work with top minds in ML 2) Money But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.

Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?

Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.

Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.

Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?

Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#58

Post by jalev »

analog8374 wrote: post #15
kranke155 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who work at Meta, the ones I met in London, didn’t seem too far removed from people working in the financial industry. They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after…

"Desk and bank account" makes for a very small world. Have we shrunk? Are we dwarfs now?

It's the material reality of what people live through. When one is entirely alienated from the product of their own labour, what do they care for the mission and culture of a company who will fire me at an irrational whim? Better to have a vibrant life outside of work to keep oneself sane.

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#59

Post by jopolous »

maxwellito wrote: post #4

I have a genuine question for Meta engineers: what were you hoping to gain by working at this company? What motivated you, and what were your aspirations?

I work at Meta (for now…)

I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.

So my motivations were: - Working on something I care about - Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company

My aspirations: - Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky

I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.

My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.

I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth

I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers

Re: Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale

#60

Post by 3451298 »

scylla wrote: post #28
rwak12 wrote: post #7

How will the people here who continuously rationalize AI rationalize this? A substantial number of the cheerleaders are financially invested in AI of course, but there are useful idiots, too. You are destroying a profession that was fun and profitable. Don't come with your Luddite and " a subset of us did it to others as well" talking points. Adding numbers wasn't fun, spreadsheets by hand weren't fun. But you are ac…

How will the people who continuously rationalize cars justify that they are destroying a profession - horse carriage driver - that was fun and profitable ? How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable? If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have prog…

Professionally driving a horse carriage wasn't fun. Noise, boredom, unloading things manually if it was a carriage for goods. It was probably a moderately horrible job.

Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.

Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.

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