Is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#121

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

drivebyhooting wrote: post #93

Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.

I always point out the Elysium parallels and usually get trashed for doing it. But, if you look at all trend lines, the whole world is very quickly bifurcating into a two tier society with the few "Haves" safely walled off and protected from the many "Have Nots." You can see the moderately rich doing whatever they can to maneuver themselves in to position and ensure their ticket to the space station when the split happens. The rest of us are going to end up being economically irrelevant.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#122

Post by throwaway894345 » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

98codes wrote: post #88

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…

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.

A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#123

Post by mrweasel » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #102

peanut-walrus wrote: post #23

Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

Or alternatively, it takes some time to destroy a codebase that was created over decades to a point in that it scares the end-users.

Or they got people so addicted/dependent on their social-media crack that they can't quit, regardless of how bad and dangerous the product becomes.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#124

Post by bickfordb » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

conradfr wrote: post #18

fabian2k wrote: post #4

> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more. This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total…

It's only until Cold Harbor is completed.

Then all the engineers will get to rejoin their outies.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#125

Post by everdrive » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

98codes wrote: post #88

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…

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.

>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.

Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#126

Post by throwaway894345 » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

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.

I would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#127

Post by lelanthran » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.

There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#128

Post by ribosometronome » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

throwarayes wrote: post #76

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…

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments. Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram. Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy. If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have pro…

>Threads ... rage bait

The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#129

Post by neutronicus » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

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…

If you were remote and LCOL or MCOL you've also made significant inroads towards retirement after just a couple years at Meta.

Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#130

Post by embedding-shape » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #117

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.

> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React

People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.

Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.