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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#141

Post by Hamuko »

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.

I imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#142

Post by swatcoder »

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.

Regardless of what their hiring process screens for, it's safe to say that people able to pass screening for Meta are able to get work elsewhere. It is never an engineers only option, although it may be the only one in a certain luxurious compensation tier.

And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.

In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#143

Post by mikaeluman »

It makes sense that you need the best engineers to do the labelling. But the story very much sounds like a panic move.

"Things are going so fast and we need to catch up. Yesterday."

But you still have humans working for you. I doubt these label people are putting in their best efforts...

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#144

Post by PaulHoule »

Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.

Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)

As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#145

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

mplanchard wrote: post #135
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?

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,…

> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere

Not exactly...

> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.

Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...

So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?

Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??

Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#146

Post by jltsiren »

asdff wrote: post #120
swatcoder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not always. I think it's an inherent failure mode of markets when everyone is playing by the same rules.

You could simply invoke Goodhart's law: If the purpose of a business is to make money, its ability to make money is not a good measure of the value it creates. Except when there are competitors playing under different rules. Then capitalists need to make better products and services than their non-capitalist competitors to be able to make money in countries that can buy from either side.

During the Cold War, the planned economies of the communist block provided the necessary competition. When that competition disappeared, financialization gradually took over. Now there is China, which seems to be a command economy that uses markets as a tool and prioritizes the real economy over finances. Maybe it will provide enough competition to force capitalists behave again.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#147

Post by panzagl »

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.

I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#148

Post by PaulHoule »

busterarm wrote: post #89
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are u…

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#149

Post by otekengineering »

because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE

software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing

the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#150

Post by duped »

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.

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

There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.

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