461–470 of 655 posts
Getting the right people on the bus is the most difficult task on the world.
And then these people end up in places that cannot utilize their full potential. Everyone is worse off.
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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 peop…
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They’ve largely filtered their employees for people who have a mental breakdown if they don’t get 110% on a 100% scale or get the top of the top rating because they’ve done that their whole life until they got their first job at the tender age of 25-28 after getting their masters or PhD. I’ve met too many meta members who have stories about their direct reports or peers who had a crashout because they got Exceeds Exp…
idk... In their own way these types of people who have blinders on to such a degree that they crashout over such things are also sociopaths... Seems like a side effect of the k shaped economy... our society increasingly doesn't have rewards for normal hardworking people. Given tech has been disrupting blue collar jobs for decades I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Working at Meta already meant you were chasin…
I advocated for people who lost their jobs due to tech disruption to learn how to become software engineer not from a place of superiority but from a place of “this is one of the last places you can be self taught and earn a middle class income”
I am saying this has now hit the tech world and I will hold zuck culpable, although not uniquely since that requires a set of 1, but because he’s in charge of one of the top 10 companies in terms of big tech.
You don’t get to be that rich and that in charge of decisions, without holding responsibility. If you want to claim otherwise, then cool, you shouldn’t complain when we take all the assets you are apparently not responsible for.
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%…
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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?
That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.
> 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…
I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story
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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 peop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.
I wouldn't trust any engineers I know of with their "taste". At best it's a highly skewed view of the world. At worst, it's outright opposite to genpop.