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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#111

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jlengrand wrote: post #110
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line? You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression? You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something?? How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?

Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.

Nice dodge.

I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."

It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...

Want to answer the actual question?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#112

Post by shimman »

jlengrand wrote: post #106
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

In case you care, what you're doing is called causal impotence https://philpapers.org/rec/NORTIO-18 . Then you can also search why it does matter.

Very interesting, never heard the term before but are there more philosophical concepts tying in the ideas of solidarity and labor movements?

Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#113

Post by [deleted] »

tracker1 wrote: post #65
bluefirebrand wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if a much larger proportion of big business and politics boiled down to this Yeah there's lots of ethics rules and stuff about it but we've seen how little the upper class cares about that Whenever a big business deal goes down, I tend to assume someone's getting sex or money out of the deal Frankly there's already just so much corruption that we know about and it seems unlikely we know about…

Hey, the VP is driving a new Ferrari... right after a new 8 figure deal.. weird.

[deleted]

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#115

Post by freejazz »

ryandrake wrote: post #99
98codes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams. It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.

Meta's problem isn't that they "maximize shareholder value" it's how they decided to go about doing it.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#116

Post by freejazz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86
shimman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should…

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

>You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?

What does that have to do with any person's individual morals?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#117

Post by nine_k »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React.

I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#118

Post by throwarayes »

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.

Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.

Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#119

Post by nitwit005 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #64
chvid wrote: post #62

Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come. But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data? It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over. Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial…

It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want.

There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#120

Post by asdff »

swatcoder wrote: post #87
pavel_lishin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over. Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial…

> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them. It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a st…

It has always been this way though. Who is really qualified to evaluate something but another engineer? Perhaps the first record of a slop product is the Complaint to Ea-nāṣir from 1750 BC.
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