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…
That wasn't my experience at all, I found the orgs I was in (infra) to have great culture.
I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize. If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television. I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and wil…
Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business. You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday. Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It…
How do you decide to use useContext, useReducer, useState, or a third party management tool to manage state? (I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).
useState for local state or useContext (+ useReducer if it's complicated) for shared state is the "built-in" way that should be good enough for most things.
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…
One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.
Gotcha so basically what you are saying is that its not the parents responsibility to raise their kids, the society should be structured so that everything that the kid has access to be under tight legal control, from tv shows, to prodcuts they see in stores, to celebrities being legally required to speak and act a certain way, and so on. TLDR, if you can do that much mental gymastics, you can probably do the same to…
I wouldn't normally reply again, but please try and take my arguments in the good faith and appeal to the heart and humanity that they were given. I think you're quite capable of reading what I've written and responding to it coherently; consequently, I also think you must be aware that you haven't done this in the heat of the disagreement. It's only if we're charitable, not cynical, about this stuff that the world m…
Your good faith arguments are not good faith. You are basically saying it feels right to be against Meta, therefore your arguments are correct. World doesn't work like that.
I was going to say, isn't React something to hold against Meta? Being intimately familiar with it, I don't consider it a positive contribution to the world.
I work in film, not software engineering, but I've heard lots of shade thrown on React for a long time, mostly for this reason- messy code. The question I have is, does React somehow encourage or enable code that is messier than in other frameworks? Why is it so popular if it's so widely hated? There's something I'm missing here.
Facebook spent a lot of effort marketing React, and there are widespread misunderstandings about React that made it popular. One of the most hyped features of React was a "virtual DOM" that supposedly improved rendering speed, but actually did not significantly improve performance.
Rendering a UI should be quite fast, even for a complex web app. Noticeable slowness in the UI is due to poorly optimized rendering, or logic that has nothing to do with rendering.
Nowadays, it is considered a default choice for a UI framework.
I'm referring to the 2016 genocide in Myanmar: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/amnesty-report-finds-... https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... In short: > Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar. Scholars, reporters, and United Nations investigators agree that the social media giant played a role in an explosion of ethnic conflict in 2017 that led to the death and displacement of…
The difficulty isn't in making the moral assessment, it's in searching through tens of thousands of employers and understanding their business models.
How can you take a job without knowing what the company does? Are we talking about Lumen or something? You don't need to work tens of thousands of jobs anyways, just 1 (maybe 2 or 3).
Jesus dude, I don’t want to wade through thousands of shitty companies to find the companies worth applying to.
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…
The funny (not-so-funny?) thing is that reading this if I didn't know better, I'd figure we worked at the same company and I'm sure that most people reading this have a similar story. That's the sad state of the tech industry right now. The reins are controlled by a few at the top that seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to believing whatever AI slop is presented to them, whether it comes from AI or from their underlings.
It'll sure be interesting to see where this goes in the next year or so. The companies that have flamed out due to C* AI Psychosis. I'm sure the next set of "startup leadership" books will be around "how to avoid AI psychosis" and/or "how to use AI psychosis for fun and profit!"