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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#451

Post by siraris »

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.

So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames.

I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#452

Post by lmm »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #397
chuckadams wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Yeah and they migrated away from it for good reason.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#453

Post by danny_codes »

swatcoder wrote: post #56
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…

> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain. Like their peer com…

It's a bold move cotton.

I doubt it'll pay off. Let's face it, the average FB engineer is no better than the average Polish engineer, and the Polish guy is 20x cheaper. If you wanted cost-effective labeling you'd send it to Poland. Or better, Chile.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#454

Post by bobro »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #326
rickypp wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation

I believe that the initial idea there was to refer to notable landmarks and these company signs are readable from a distance. But yes, they could serve well as ad space.

So you think they weren’t getting paid for this? You think they just freely mention corporate food companies purely for users benefit?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#455

Post by mannanj »

He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy".

I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals: - core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis. - I believe we are seeing this. - I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else

It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#456

Post by ipaddr »

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?

It does less than before and it blocks more things and has more spam. Now you have to pay for map embedding on a website. Let's go back 20 years

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#457

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#458

Post by kens »

On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.

For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#459

Post by winrid »

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 the end of the day it's a battle of competence of who runs your company.

Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while.

But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably.

I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#460

Post by jatins »

AJRF wrote: post #332

I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore. The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers. Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad…

> The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers

Besides top 2 AI labs, don't they outpay everyone?

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