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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#371

Post by jcgrillo »

to11mtm wrote: post #333
jcgrillo wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

IDK, I think overall it will be more like the 'SAAS' and 'Low Code' waves than the 'Blockchain' fever dreams I've heard in my career. Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.

It seems at this rate to avoid a large tech crash in the near future we need to start seeing real, transformative value being delivered by AI. Like, the promises are coming due. From where I sit, I don't see that happening. That's bad news.

If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI.

If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#373

Post by throwaway894345 »

bradlys wrote: post #246
throwaway894345 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Man, are people on HN still this unaware of how personalization algorithms work at all?

They don't _have_ to propagandize for one particular pole by default.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#374

Post by shimman »

Anon1096 wrote: post #140
shimman wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Material outcomes are the only thing that matters, not personal wants or wishes.

If you worked as an accountant for Epstein after 2006, then yeah you may not be exactly a pedophile but you have shown you're okay with not only working with pedophiles but having a pedophile actively enrich you.

Very few people on this planet are willing to actually do this. Those are Meta are willing to do exactly this.

Also solidarity is a two way street and acting as if the literal 1% of earners in the nation will suddenly develop empathy is foolish. I have solidarity for actual workers trying to better society; not for those that exacerbate the climate crisis, help minorities get cancer through data center expansions, personally profit off of scamming seniors, are okay with allowing a genocide on their watch, do nothing to help prevent the erosion of democracy, and have directly caused many suicides/self harm/deaths of despair.

They have to commit to a lifetime of repenting and self-flagellation isn't going to cut it. It's not the middle ages.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#375

Post by spacechild1 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #144

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…

> I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers

How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#376

Post by softwaredoug »

gwbas1c wrote: post #267

I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize. If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television. I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and wil…

Well probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#377

Post by raincole »

jmuguy wrote: post #100

I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising th…

You can call Zuck evil or greedy. But being bad at running a business surely isn't one of his traits. Meta's net earning grew so much in the past decade that it, ironically, has the sanest P/E ratio trend out of all big US techs.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#378

Post by imglorp »

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…

They are literally doing the apocryphal corporate dystopian maneuver: training their replacements.

They won't be doing it for long.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#379

Post by Ifkaluva »

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…

Those percentages seem in line with what I have heard. Not company-wide, MSL was exempted, of course, and probably a few other golden geese here and there.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#380

Post by PaulHoule »

gitonup wrote: post #280
PaulHoule wrote: post #144

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…

> If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday. Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer? React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?

They aren't directly competitive (you wouldn't pick one or the other as product) but they are the premier open source projects of the two companies in terms of industry impact and they both reflect the engineering culture. (e.g. I am picking one as an exemplar for other software... like I want to make something like React instead of make something like Kube)

With just a little bit of hyperbole:

The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products. Google's systems are highly scalable, I grant that, but they have the first mover disadvantage that their foundations are first-generation and not based on experience and still slowing them down... but the market can't discipline them.

Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids. They benefit from huge scale and monopoly profits but Zuck is keeping more in his pocket than he would be if he did things like Google.

The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs. That is, a system like what Hazelcast was before it became an analytics play could support clusters of 30 or so big nodes (two racks) and there are probably just a few 100 systems in the worlds that really need to get bigger than that.

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