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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#521

Post by jbs789 »

intended wrote: post #501
siraris wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much real productivity gains do you think people saw. I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?

If the company is going down in flames I’d say that’s a loss in productivity.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#522

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

ralph84 wrote: post #465
majormajor wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%…

The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.

Nah, in Facebooks case it was more that they scaled engineering as they scaled sales.

Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#523

Post by telchior »

andreareina wrote: post #485
tasty_freeze wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear.

I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.

Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#524

Post by somedude895 »

ironman1478 wrote: post #70

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…

Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#525

Post by petesergeant »

PaulHoule wrote: post #148
busterarm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.

That's because they don't want you to use the web application

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#526

Post by neonstatic »

cletus wrote: post #435
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

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…

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…

> I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.

That makes sense from a consumer point of view. I don't use FB much. In fact, I recently logged on a few times after a few years of a break. It's terrible. You can't even get conversation history anymore. You can talk to someone via the app on your phone, open Facebook in the browser on your computer and not see the messages there. Makes me wonder why is Meta still around?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#527

Post by sensanaty »

siraris wrote: post #451
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 wo…

Same exact story for me in my prior company that I left lol. In my exit interview I said "I love literally every single person in the company, except for $PERSON because $PERSON has lost their fucking mind and is going to kill this company with their psychotic AI push". I was the 30th dev to leave in 2 months, in a company that had ~40-50 devs to begin with.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#528

Post by oleggromov »

jghn wrote: post #73
pavel_lishin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over. Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial…

As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for tha…

Fully agreed. I'm curious to learn though how your approach changed in particular.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#529

Post by petesergeant »

cletus wrote: post #435
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

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…

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…

> IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now

As a user, Instagram is about the only part of the Meta empire that doesn't suck

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#530

Post by vovavili »

somedude895 wrote: post #524
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

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…

Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately th…

That's the unfortunate outcome of running a business at scale.
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