611–620 of 655 posts
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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?
No I have not
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 wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.
because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE software is now free, at least for the people th…
> because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"
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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.
I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).
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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.
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They literally would have kept the entire thing to themselves and never productized it. Think about how much investment capital and human capital OpenAI poured onto this by having their big "hello world" with ChatGPT.
They literally had a productionized transformer model (translate) which was the inspiration for all of this. The famous paper was written about a productionized ML Model. They also had a productionized LLM in search (known as 'mums') before the whole "AI Chatbot" craze. They also had a chat-tuned LLM chatbot (LaMDA) in testing internally. It was shown off over a year before ChatGPT was created (2021)... and later rel…
Wow thanks for reminding me of this. Remember that leaked story of an engineer claiming it was sentient, even before ChatGPT came out?
If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last. Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income. Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...
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I hope you realize that you have addressed nothing in my post, you are just squirming on some irrelevant stuff. Once you find a solid counter argument to "its a product that people are free not to use", then we can have a conversation.
Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults. Anyway, I think I've said all I poss…
TLDR, if you can do that much mental gymastics, you can probably do the same to justify you taking the Meta job.
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I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years. And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.
The point is that there is a number for everyone to go against their "high level" morals (i.e stuff that is far removed from actually physically harming humans yourself). Anyone who says they don't have one (and not a buddhism follower) is lying. As for BMWs, thats the idea - you can buy an M car with that salary and everyone who can't afford an M car is gonna wanna be your friend.
What a truly sad mindset/worldview that you believe that to be true.
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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.
Even then, outcomes at companies require external factors, like markets and competitors, and often don’t majorly depend on the company’s efforts.