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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#391

Post by PaulHoule »

gulugawa wrote: post #213
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…

How do you decide to use useContext, useReducer, useState, or a third party management tool to manage state? (I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).

My main complaint is that React doesn't handle highly dynamic situations. Think of how tools like photoshop or programming IDEs have tons of views and windows and property sheets and stuff and manage to update the right parts of the UI when things change. React on the other hand makes a structural link between the component tree and how state propagates.

Specifically I wrote a bunch of React components for making little biosignals applications that can (say) show two people's heartrate from bluetooth LE and show my breathing based on a strap i am wearing and another person's breathing based on a $20 radar from China.

I can pretty easily snap together the components and the system that feeds the state to the components by writing code. It works great, it's not that hard to do, it looks great.

But: I really wish I could make something where I could drag and drop display and data acquisition and processing components like LabView. Actually I know a lot about how to do the dynamic processing (Hint: read the Dragon book, not On Lisp) but React doesn't support dynamically assembled components... But I know Javascript systems can because I was writing them 2005-2010 back when browsers didn't have async and all the great affordances they offer now.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#392

Post by dlt713705 »

arkis22 wrote: post #385
monkpit wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can't the board of directors be replaced by a board of AI ?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#393

Post by awinter-py »

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?

odds of a given street being labeled on gmaps for android still feels like 50/50 unless you get the zoom exactly right

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#394

Post by Grombobulous »

arkis22 wrote: post #385
monkpit wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The grandparent comment of yours mentioned Delamain from Cyberpunk 2077. In that fictional scenario, the company purchased an AI which gradually took over its workforce: maintenance robots, drivers, etc. All that was left was the owners/board of directors, essentially.

What ended up happening was that the AI ended up tricking the board of directors by buying back the company for itself.

You find this out by poking around the abandoned offices of the company and read the emails on the computers. The whole reason you interact with Delamain is that it is basically using your human help to do some tasks that it can't do as an AI (fairly compensated, Delamain actually seems like a pretty stand up AI, and the strange legal status of the company is ignored by authorities because so many people depend on the service).

That scenario is starting to seem highly plausible as long as someone is sets up something badly enough.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#395

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

brokencode wrote: post #303
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…

Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing. Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.

Turns out they have no product vision beyond selling personally-identifiable information to advertisers. I hold them quite a bit in contempt so I would relish in their failure.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#396

Post by majormajor »

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…

> 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.

Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?

All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.

> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.

In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!

"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#397

Post by Atotalnoob »

chuckadams wrote: post #389
PaulHoule wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does helm get all the hate?

I like helm. Helm has so much to offer and it’s not complicated.

It’s basically like handlebars/ mustache using golang.

Handlebars/mustache was what early angular/react used for templating.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#398

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

raincole wrote: post #377
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.

I’m starting to classify great business minds as “earners” vs. “extractors” to help counter the braindead take that anyone who accumulates wealth is worthy of praise. Zuck is an incredible extractor: he does not create value, he exploits gray areas in the social contract of society like an oil baron vacuuming up oil wells using deceit and chicanery.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#399

Post by majormajor »

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.

Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds.

The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.

So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.

And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.

(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#400

Post by lokar »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #313
compiler-guy wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies. It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.…

Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.

Someone from Google can quickly enlighten us. Look up the current tenure to be at 50% in percent, for Eng.

I think it was about 2 years 10ish years ago, but that was during rapid growth. Now that overall growth is down it is useful for this.

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