Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

Post by desolate_muffin » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 11:27 PM UTC

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…

Post by to11mtm » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #310

throw-the-towel wrote: post #257

I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.

> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.

Post by esafak » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 11:29 PM UTC

pcan77 wrote: post #139

embedding-shape wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Post by typeofhuman » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 11:33 PM UTC

wildredkraut wrote: post #334

Well, who cares if they do. I wouldn't miss Meta if they disappear tomorrow.

Post by hintymad » Tue, Jun 16, 2026, 11:36 PM UTC

javawizard wrote: post #305

hintymad wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways. I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.

> This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance I think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)