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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#581

Post by inigyou »

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.

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...

The only universal address input is a freeform text box. Optionally with a country, which should also be a freeform text box because countries get created and destroyed and you won't remember to update it. City or district is probably okay - as a freeform text box - addresses without one can write (no district). But street addresses are different everywhere and must be freeform unless you're the government of that region.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#582

Post by inigyou »

annzabelle wrote: post #462
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 put a town label near my parents' house that is a name that was on some old maps in the 1910s, but fell completely out of use before the current suburb was built in the 70s and 80s. I had never heard it once in my life until I was in my early 20s and met a transplant who had picked up the name from Google Maps. I attempted to report it as inaccurate (USGS has had it as being out of use for decades) multip…

Google puts the "Warsaw-Berlin Urstromtal" (glacial valley?) right in the middle of the river near the Friedrichstraße train station.

You can be browsing the area and suddenly, yep, there's a glacial valley there in the middle of the river. According to Google.

This is a large-scale geographical feature that crosses most of Germany and Poland. But actually it's in the river next to Friedrichstraße station.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#583

Post by closeparen »

gwbas1c wrote: post #264
closeparen wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, do not buy a house or start a family within 2 hours of any of their supported work locations.

You can sell your house and roll the equity over to another one in a cheaper area. Depending on how you do it, you might even move into one with no loan or a tiny loan.

If you personally are being rotated out of FAANG, sure. If FAANG isn't hiring, good luck.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#584

Post by surajrmal »

apejcic wrote: post #514
surajrmal wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate. 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, ev…

Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one wants to be part of. There is a lifecycle to product development and different phases require different tradeoffs. You sound like you align with the builder phase and that's great.

I will also note that most civil engineering is about maintaining existing structures and roadways, not building new ones.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#585

Post by KaiserPro »

KaiserPro wrote: post #104
throwarayes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features. Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

> Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped That's the thing right So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in…

I should be clear "Reporting to a worse leader" the leadership at FAIR was good

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#586

Post by a3f8c2d »

If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#587

Post by snapcaster »

gwbas1c wrote: post #266

Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."

what's your point here considering you were wrong? in the last 16 years they've been one of the most profitable companies in the history of the earth

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#588

Post by miyoji »

LPisGood wrote: post #475
storus wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it isn't, and the fact that software engineers think this despite being incredibly stupid about 99.5% of knowledge work is why everyone else hates software engineers.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#589

Post by inigyou »

storus wrote: post #428
echelon wrote: post #361

Earlier 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.

Explain to me how automating CS automates waiters and chefs.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#590

Post by tennfown »

inigyou wrote: post #589
storus wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Explain to me how automating CS automates waiters and chefs.

Most will be replaced by the Soylent green factory after waiters and chefs become a niche luxury for those who did not find themselves economically crushed.
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