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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

#151

Post by georgeburdell »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #119
rsweeney21 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate. I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.

> I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate. I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit. More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that o…

The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company

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

#152

Post by neilv »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #56
rsweeney21 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure...

You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.

And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.

But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.

Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.

(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)

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

#153

Post by kats »

This Hacker News thread isn't useful at all. It's the same people that comment on every thread stating their opinions overconfidently. It's the same perpetually negative Wired article. These things would be the same no matter what is really going on, and so I can't use it to learn anything.

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

#154

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #40
hirvi74 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think both are worth the harms your company is causing to the rest of the world?

I work in integrity (keeping bad stuff off the platform). My job is to reduce the harm Meta causes. So I'm at peace with myself. I don't think I could work in any other area of Meta though.

Cool. Maybe you can tell me why when I reported a private message that was like "Looking for a super easy part-time job? Earn $100-$10000 per day working from anywhere! [...]" as spam, I got a response that the message didn't go against community standards and no action was being taken.

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

#155

Post by kranke155 »

kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #13
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…

> I’m sure we need people like that Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry? On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job? (I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how…

I think if something happens in the universe, It probably has its function, otherwise it wouldn't exist.

If there was no reason for it to exist, it wouldn't. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's a question of accepting the construct of existence as what is not what I hope it could be under different circumstances.

There's probably an evolutionary reason why we need people who don't get paralyzed by second and third order effects.

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

#156

Post by coldpie »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #128
coldpie wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty different. As much as you might not want to and put effort into avoiding it, sometimes you must make a deal with the devil to live your life or operate your business, simply because the world is what it is. But working for the devil is a choice.

in both cases you're making a deal to enrich "the devil" to enrich yourself could your business simply make less money? could you find other ways to achieve your business goals? could you put in more work for lesser results? these are the same choices you're asking others to make about their employment

I understand what you're saying, but no, I don't agree. These companies have positioned themselves so that it is often unavoidable to do business with them.

If you have a visual arts business you are more-or-less required to have an Instagram account, and maybe even advertise on it. It's where your customers and business partners are and if you want to participate in that space, you're handicapping yourself so severely by not being there that you're probably putting your business's existence at risk. It's a similar story for online businesses with Google ads and SEO, and so on. There's shades of grey in how much one decides to do business with these companies, sure, but it's pretty much unavoidable, because of how these companies worked to create & maintain their monopolies.

That's not similar to choosing to work at those companies. There are zillions of jobs out there aside from working at one of the six most evil companies in the country. No one is choosing Google or Meta as their only option. Anyone working at Meta or Google is doing so by choice.

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

#157

Post by mrguyorama »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #34

I am wondering if Zuckerberg somehow stumbled upon the old Decimation thing on Wikipedia one late evening and decided it was a good idea to try. I don't really understand the rationale otherwise, hiring is hard, and they are not forced to reduce cost now. This seems like a colossal mistake. Not the first of course.

The industry standardized on this as "Stack ranking" like two decades ago.

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

#158

Post by kranke155 »

elorant wrote: post #91
bluecheese452 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the guy who tried to make the metaverse a thing. He has been out of touch for decades now.

He's also the guy who bought Instagram for $1bn and turned into a $70bn behemoth. If that's out of touch then I don't know what the opposite would be.

He did that because it was a solid data driven decision.

Not sure he's shown ability to do anything beyond making solid decisions on which competitors to acquire.

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

#159

Post by kranke155 »

jopolous wrote: post #59
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…

If everyone who works at META is a bit like this, then it will be an overflow of good when y'all find your new place. Thank you for doing your part. Gratefulness

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

#160

Post by Freedom2 »

georgeburdell wrote: post #151
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate. I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit. More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that o…

The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company

Interesting. Could you elaborate on any specifics for this claim?
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