Having 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…
that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.
I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish
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?
Are there any examples of this actually working? I keep seeing this fantasy repeated but have not seen a plausible explanation for how they wouldn't be contibuting to the pile of negative examples which are just as valuable if not more.
its fantasy scale ai's value prop was catching people like this
It’s just advertisement/SEO. It’s basically guaranteed, just not the way you think
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?
I'd say it's devolved aggressively at least on mobile. Between the firehose of modal bullshit I didn't ask for, sub-optimal pathfinding, and annoying prompts from waze legacy features there's a ton of unwanted friction added to the process.
It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
No kidding. When I zoom in on a few square miles around my house and ask to see restaurants, it shows only a few of them even though there is plenty of space -- it isn't like it has to prune some to make it readable. I zoom in and some appear that weren't there before ... why? There was room to display it before I zoomed in. Gaaah!
Not to mention that zooming in will make some listings disappear
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.
Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done. Statistics really is a bitch.
I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
Id say it improved until about 2016, since then the additions have generally made the software worse. More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes. Thats just the start
"needlessly verbose navigation instructions"
You ever try to navigate the highway systems in either DC or Houston with verbal instructions enabled? It sounds like someone is having a stroke.
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.
> We'll also see wreckage coming to highly paid actors in the near future.
How is that going to work? People going to see a movie advertised as starring a well-known actor will be lured to see a movie starring unknown AI models?
> AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less. AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a differe…
I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it. It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so…
I don’t think it’s psychosis if the ground level people are using it effectively. That’s just the reality of having / wanting good tools.
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 ?
Yes, if you don’t believe the board ever exercises effective restraint or holds effective responsibility.
Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.