Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

sfstandard.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#31

Post by Esophagus4 »

> So what I suspect I’ll feel if I get laid off is an immediate flood of relief and happiness, very quickly followed by the sinking realization that I’m in financial trouble, because I don’t know how long it will take to land another job. Six months should be enough — a couple of years ago, it would’ve been.

If you’re looking for a job with similar pay, sure.

But if you’re willing to accept that maybe you were making over market and your next job will be more of a paycheck reality check, then it should be easier to find work.

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#32

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

A few thoughts on the layoffs:

1) I know from an internal source that impact is known by now (this week) by the local leaders. There's a very specific criteria. This has been "socialized" with some survivors, but not all.

2) The Capex in building AI is what's causing this wave. That's not surprising.

3) The AI buildout caught a lot of companies with their pants down without financial firepower to make investments. People are surprised by new tech paradigms all the time, it's a permissible mistake. What's crazy is, why were these people hired in the 1st place. There would have been no bloodbath if that salary money was sitting in the balance sheet, as a muscle ready to be flexed. Instead, they just ate fat and now it needs to be trimmed.

4) >>> personal sacrifices you are willing to make

This strikes as very hollow. The very last thing anyone thinks about is personal sacrifices, when thinking about working at meta. Unless you are a paladin and you think selling people ads or getting them addicted to apps is some sort of an unholy dark spell, what's there not to like?

5) >>> fresh out of college came to expect six figures, free food, gym memberships, laundry services, and company stock that only went up. It seemed less like a job market and more like winning a particularly nerdy and privileged lottery. That’s not what it feels like anymore.

None of those things actually changed, except of course they expect you to do the work 24/7. Before it may have been 25/4. So the bar has been raised a little, yes, but the people working there still winners of "the nerdy and privileged lottery"

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#33

Post by derwiki »

Simulacra wrote: post #16
taylodl wrote: post #12

Why do people continue to work at Meta? Especially when it's been clear to all for several years now that their plan to Change The World is to make the world a far worse place? Why do people want to be a part of that and remain a part of that?

I think initially it was the challenge, possibilities and money. Now... maybe just the money?

Great money and smart coworkers is what I hear

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#34

Post by dccoolgai »

staticassertion wrote: post #29
dccoolgai wrote: post #17

Imagine trying to hire engineers in 2 years with all of these stories lingering. There was maybe a brief window where "everyone understood" there had to be a correction to the post-pandemic overhiring spree... but we're well past that now. These companies doing this kind of performative cruelty have started their inexorable destruction.

You could have said this every year for so many years about so many companies. If people will work for Palantir, they'll work for Facebook. Facebook could be a lot worse and I think a lot of their employees would stick around. I guess a response at the industry level would be not hiring ex-FB people etc, treating it as a red flag.

You're confusing _evil_ with _cruel_. Palantir is the former, but from what I have heard they treat their employees well. They are attracting exactly the kind of people they want.

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#36

Post by wartywhoa23 »

voidfunc wrote: post #10

Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.

> image posting and message board app.

Such a nice euphemism for data grabbing / social graph building / spying / AI training machine!

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#37

Post by amazingamazing »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #28
sometimelurker wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects

I feel like making a system capable of delivering the amount of data that WhatsApp/instagram deliver to billions of people worldwide would take more than a weekend.

If you have unlimited money to throw on infra it really is not difficult. You could literally implement the entire thing with S3 and Firebase.

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#39

Post by CuriouslyC »

malfist wrote: post #13
voidfunc wrote: post #10

Meta has a lot of overpaid employees for what is basically an image posting and message board app. Im extremely bullish on AI reducing expenses at Meta as an investor with little harm to the business.

Yeah! One of the most profitable companies in the world is just a message board and image host! I could build that in a weekend

That's what it is to the end user. All the magic of Meta is in the dark surveillance and targeting, which is invisible to users.

Re: A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there

#40

Post by wwweston »

sometimelurker wrote: post #18
malfist wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! One of the most profitable companies in the world is just a message board and image host! I could build that in a weekend

Meta is only network effects. You could build that in a weekend, and so could I. or you could just fork Mastodon. What keeps people from leaving is that their friends are still on it: network effects

The curious thing about that is the transformation of the feed — it’s long since stopped being majority friend/follow posts and clearly is the algorithm picking whatever else it can come up with that will engage. This should mean personal network effects aren’t the moat anymore, for FB anyway.
Post reply on HN