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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#131

Post by kevincrane »

lelanthran wrote: post #127
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.

Almost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#132

Post by giantrobot »

tennfown wrote: post #26
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?

> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly? Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere. Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

> Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

Also the genocides.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#133

Post by embedding-shape »

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…

> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there

I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#134

Post by hparadiz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #111
jlengrand wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#135

Post by mplanchard »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #107
jlengrand wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).

At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.

Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#136

Post by davebren »

monster_truck wrote: post #15
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…

The belief that engineers are not doing anything for x amount of time that could be better spent on other immediately measurable things is as old as the profession itself. Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small,…

One of the funniest things is how hard it was to get approval for a $100 software license but now people are being encouraged to burn thousands on tokens.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#137

Post by microflash »

At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#138

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Silicon Valley strikes again?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS-qZO9uCQ

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#139

Post by pcan77 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #130
nine_k wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#140

Post by Anon1096 »

shimman wrote: post #112
jlengrand wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you really think the guy branding thousands of people working at Meta as basically pedophiles can really be said to care about "solidarity"? I certainly wouldn't consider someone a peer if they randomly go and call me a pedophile because of where I work. I'm sure 95% of people working there have 0 relation to the algorithm decisions and definitely have no particular fixation on giving teenage girls depression.
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