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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#531

Post by vovavili »

rcbdev wrote: post #480
aeturnum wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Legislating costly support for a free and accessible service is how that service stops being free and accessible.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#532

Post by embedding-shape »

esafak wrote: post #335
pcan77 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.

Meta assigned hundreds of engineers to work PyTorch. That is only going to happen at a handful of companies. You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it. "We’ve committed hundreds of engineers to the framework ..." https://ai.meta.com/blog/pytorch-foundation/

> You are very much in debt to Meta if you use it

What kind of mindset is this, telling people to feel like they're indebted to a nameless for-profit corporation? That's bananas.

Send the responsible people who actually created the projects and wrote the code a thankful email if you feel like it, no one is indebted to any companies here because they use FOSS software, especially not companies like Meta who take from the world more than they give.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#533

Post by lurkerforawhile »

vovavili wrote: post #531
rcbdev wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Legislating costly support for a free and accessible service is how that service stops being free and accessible.

they have four trillion dollars buddy they'll be okay.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#534

Post by rcbdev »

vovavili wrote: post #531
rcbdev wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Legislating costly support for a free and accessible service is how that service stops being free and accessible.

You need to legislate effectively.

This is something U.S.-Americans often do not (want to) understand. The misconception often is that just because their legislative efforts are an ineffective, lobby-ridden crapshoot, that the free market is automatically the best answer to everything.

You can affect really good and positive change through lawmaking, the entire point of it is to regulate and intervene when the wellbeing of the populous and fair competition is in jeopardy.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#535

Post by ath92 »

galkk wrote: post #505
svachalek wrote: post #251

Earlier 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.

Dremel/big query Spanner Borg Chrome None of those were acquisitions

Waymo too

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#536

Post by pixel_popping »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #268

There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age. Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era. The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating. It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how…

What's wrong with Ketamine? Everybody (or at least population majority I'd bet) have consumed hardcore drugs like Alcohol, Cocaine, Ketamine and so-on, what does it have to do with anything?

Haven't you tried?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#537

Post by ralferoo »

iamacyborg wrote: post #496
da_chicken wrote: post #388

Earlier 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…

Google Maps have an address API some companies use when filling out addresses for shipments. Despite my building existing for over 10 years, putting in “flat number, building name” into that system will be rewritten to “house number, building name road” which is an address on a he other side of town (and London ain’t exactly small). I’ve had multiple orders go missing as a result.

This is why we have postcodes.

More concretely, a postcode is usually specific to between 7 and 30 dwellings, in the usual case it's about 15 houses.

Contrary to common belief, they're not always on the same street, but in the vast majority of cases (like maybe 99%) house number + postcode is sufficient. Definitely flat number + building name/number + postcode should get your stuff there.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#538

Post by abustamam »

surajrmal wrote: post #495
svachalek wrote: post #251

Earlier 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…

> making existing ones continue to work well

Say what you will about MS, but the fact that Windows was backward compatible for so long (it may still be, I haven't kept up) is damn good engineering.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#539

Post by boelboel »

vovavili wrote: post #530
somedude895 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has bad governance, same with many other big businesses in the tech related sector partially because of the extremely generous position founders were in during the 00s and interest rates. In industries with lower margins like chemical/material industry you don't get away with this because managers in these industries are way better at telling value from non-value. There's been activist investors ( e.g. Christopher Hohn) who tried getting Google to run a tighter ship but with the dual stock setup there's not much which can be done.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#540

Post by stanac »

_heimdall wrote: post #410
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.

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.

> Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea

We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage.

At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.

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