Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.
in a way, arent we all?
Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
471–480 of 655 posts
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#472Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are u…
I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google). WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated again…
That's funny about your last line about Messenger. When I was at Facebook in 2020 and 2021 I thought the "Lightspeed" version of Messenger [1] was something of an engineering marvel. Specically the way it was centered around SQLite as the datastore, how the sever side could integrate with it, and how the UI was power by this reactive-style framework written in C. With lots of testing to keep binary size under control and things working reliably. And the DX was not bad for all these constraints. I think CG/SQL [2] is one of the few open source artifacts from this effort.
There were other reasonably nicely engineered things there, like some of the code-as-configuration things in PHP like the ORM and the structured logging. Where you just write and commit code and the databases and data warehouses just get set up automatically.
The choice to have a monolithic web stack at Facebook had some benefits. The latency from landing a diff to being in prod was a couple of hours, not matter what part of the site you touched. And given an arbitrary URL, there was a tool that used static analysis to tell you which file handled that request. Compared to Google where every damn thing is a micro-service with its own variable release schedule and different ways of doing request routing. Trying to figure out where a request goes is combination of dynamic tracing of the RPC trace behind it plus a bunch of grepping through the related code bases.
All that said, I was far away from doing real engineering at Facebook. I accidentally joined a growth team. Which meant our teams remit was churning out all kinds of experiments to see what we could to do to make our team's number go up. I did not find this type of work enjoyable and quit. So I have a narrow perspective.
Also to give these multinational corporations some benefit of the doubt, some of the way they operate is path-dependent. They have hundreds of millions of lines code. So they can get to a point where it makes sense to hire a bunch of compiler engineers to fork PHP and make the Hack language. Whereas a startup would almost certainly never create a new programming language to write their product. To take solutions of this context and apply them to the outside world might not make sense.
[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...
[2]: https://cgsql.dev/
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#473Earlier 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.
From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use.
Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#474I 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?
Yea, they have to as a tax because no sane person will work there anymore.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Computer Science is the science of solving (hard) problems in general. If you automate CS, you trivially automate most of other professions. The only ones that won't budge are the regulated ones like lawyers, MDs and similar that have ways to prevent AI from wrecking their fields. Product/Project PMs are easy pickings. We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
Exactly this, software engineering is “intelligence complete.” If you can solve it, you can solve all knowledge work.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#476Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#477I 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 wo…
what decisions did the CEO do that you would believe is poor? Just conceptually if examples are make you too easily identifiable - iam purely curious.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#478> 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…
Yes, this is not labeling what is an apple and what is a pear. "Annotation" does not do this work justice.
For a coding agent, for example, there is *very detailed* analysis of the turns and ranking of different portions of the conversation.
Adherence or deviation from specific rules matters. Writing quality matters. Expertise in the topic under discussion matters. Having intuition for the tone and beat of a good conversation matters.
Scoring a 15-20 turn conversation can easily take two and a half hours.
Clicking submit does not mean the author is done. Many annotations will be turned back to them by a reviewer to touch up in some way.
This work can be far more mentally taxing than programming, is measured much more by completions more of a timed exercise than SWE.
FWIW, Meta employees would probably make great coding agent conversation annotators. But it is absolutely not SWE and they won't enjoy it (for long).
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#479Earlier 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's a mixed bag at best. The product has had numerous features pushed, but in the US, the navigation feature is objectively worse than 5+ years ago. Too much spoonfeeding of directions to ensure the app is kept on. But the app won't actually tell you the freeway number and direction - which the driver can see on the dozen signs on the road.
Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was som…
This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google.
The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.
Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.