Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
511–520 of 655 posts
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#512Having 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 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.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#513Earlier 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…
Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?
Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.
I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.
When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#514Earlier 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.
Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem. There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a s…
Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, even if that means the solution is scrappy and unpolished today, so long as it solves an important problem cheaply and effectively.
In large organizations, accountability for actual value delivery is so diluted across the org chart that it practically disappears.
Leaders gravitate toward building bloated "internal platforms" that offer little external utility. Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact. It becomes a systemic shield, allowing the old guard to justify their headcount without delivering new value.
Software engineering is uniquely plagued by this. Civil engineers understand their objective: build a bridge that safely carries traffic within a specific budget. They don't invent a novel, hyper-complex suspension architecture when a standard short-span bridge will do the job.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
Maps thinks it's fine to do a u-turn on the Sydney harbour bridge.
I've switched to OsmAnd for driving because it'll give a sensible main road following route.
Google Maps reliably sends me down residential roads and adds a whole bunch of turns and then winds up with idiot ideas like "turn right into this two way 4 lane road we tried to slightly avoid".
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#516However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus?
Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#517Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#518Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
My anecdote is worth just as much as yours. I moved cross-country in early 2016 (for work at Google) and noticed when we closed on our house that the next street over was mis-pronounced by Google Maps. I reported it and it was fixed within a week.
you moved there --to work at google; you reported it --while you worked at google. What is different hmmmm