Is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#381

Post by hamdingers » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:04 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #361

torben-friis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are. The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.

It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx. At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners…

> every PM is soon going to be able to do your work

This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#382

Post by gr_norm » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

ActorNightly wrote: post #356

gr_norm wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tired and reductivist reasoning deployed only by those rationalizing wrongs, and immediately recognizable by nearly everybody as such. My kids could tell you what's wrong with this thinking. I believe that working a job where I would knowingly contribute to mass mental illness (including but not limited to inducing teenage depression and body image issues leading to suicide), the destruction of liberal democr…

I hope you realize that you have addressed nothing in my post, you are just squirming on some irrelevant stuff. Once you find a solid counter argument to "its a product that people are free not to use", then we can have a conversation.

Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults.

Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#383

Post by fzeroracer » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

thepryz wrote: post #342

fzeroracer wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time. The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at…

Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of. I don’t disagree that there are many evil companies and one should try to be selective in who they work for. But life, in my experience,…

>Easy to say, harder to stand behind when you’re savings are depleted, you have a mortgage and a family to care for, and maybe you’re on a work visa about to be kicked out of the only country your kids have ever known only to return to a country they don’t even speak the language of.

Would these material conditions change if the person involved was responsible for making bombs used in a genocide? Or if they were working for the Torture Nexus company? Or responsible for money laundering and other illegal activities?

Life certainly has many shades and while I can be sympathetic to certain conditions here we're talking about a highly educated group of individuals who have multiple options to choose from. They've made their choice (or a series of choices) to end up where they are and that does not render them immune to criticism.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#384

Post by spamizbad » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.

This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#385

Post by arkis22 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

monkpit wrote: post #318

matheusmoreira wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.

Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).

Based on existing corporate hierarchy it would probably be the board of directors. There would be some sort of collaboration service where managers/agents push up problems and solutions to the board and they vote yes or no

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#386

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

brokencode wrote: post #306

PaulHoule wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band! Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations. I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the intern…

But Kubernetes is solving a much messier and more complicated problem than React. There are numerous similar web frameworks to React in different languages that have been created as basically hobby projects. Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.

Somewhat.

Kubernetes has the basic flaw that it has more scalability than 99.99% of companies need and you could serve almost all the market with a system that supports shared data structures (like IBM's Sysplex) and is more opinionated. An architecture which is less scalable could serve almost all of the systems on the planet and would be easier to work with.

I'll grant that there is essential complexity there, but Kube was built by people who didn't have fear of accidental complexity so it has a lot of it. Look at the whole "YAML sucks" thing which is partially a YAML thing (coulda chose something different) and also a function of the system they are trying to configure with YAML.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#387

Post by lokar » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #384

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to…

Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#388

Post by da_chicken » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #289

svachalek wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.

You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?

My best friend bought a house. She noticed within the first month that the name of the road she lived on was misspelled in Google Maps. Specifically, it's a slightly unusual spelling of the road name. Like "Chickorie" vs "Chickory". It's particularly annoying because there's a road the next town over with the traditional spelling. It doesn't even share address numbers, but Google Maps still frequently misdirects people.

It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well.

It's still wrong.

She bought her house in 2015.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#389

Post by chuckadams » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #386

brokencode wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Kubernetes is solving a much messier and more complicated problem than React. There are numerous similar web frameworks to React in different languages that have been created as basically hobby projects. Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.

Somewhat. Kubernetes has the basic flaw that it has more scalability than 99.99% of companies need and you could serve almost all the market with a system that supports shared data structures (like IBM's Sysplex) and is more opinionated. An architecture which is less scalable could serve almost all of the systems on the planet and would be easier to work with. I'll grant that there is essential complexity there, but…

Kubernetes' YAML problem stems from its CLI tooling, and yes it was an atrocious choice once templating came in and visited horrors like helm on us. Internally, the the k8s api speaks only JSON, and you can already stuff whatever json you like in a yaml file.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#390

Post by spamizbad » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

lokar wrote: post #387

spamizbad wrote: post #384

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to…

Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.

To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.