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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#141

Post by keeda »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

Technology is primarily an accelerator. It just accelerates things, both good and bad, that were already in motion or at least already possible. Which is why things like healthcare got better but things like wealth inequality got worse.

What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain.

What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were always going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule.

For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth.

Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#142

Post by munificent »

softwaredoug wrote: post #91

I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.

No surprise. People like being more productive when they reap some of the benefits of that increased productivity. If you're expected to be 10x more productive but don't get a raise, all you're doing is stuffing money in some executive's pocket while your job security goes down.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#143

Post by foota »

j-bos wrote: post #92
softwaredoug wrote: post #91

I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.

Been feeling that energy too, trying so hard to stay at my current big co job for the health insurance. But the draw is pulling me hard.

I've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#144

Post by superfrank »

bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

My company did something similar (dashboard to track tokens). It was made available to managers about two weeks before it was available to everyone, so I got to see all my reports' usage before they knew they were being tracked.

The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it.

On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools.

I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#145

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #129
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it hereditary when parent is a dumb jock who creates a ridiculously bad environment in terms of 'nurture' aspect? I am not sure you thought your argument fully through.

Yes, and science explicitly allows him to continue procreating where otherwise he would have not been able to (he was in an accident because he was stupid). It’s explicitly saying the darwinian winnowing of the weaker (dumber) members of the species has been interfered with.

Fair point. I re-read your argument and I accept it.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#146

Post by tremon »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #119
tremon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because intelligence is mostly genetically-determined None of the points of Idiocracy depend on whether intelligence is by nature or by nurture. The premise of the movie stays exactly the same if you replace those two minutes of backstory with a dysfunctional education system, the return of child labour, an increase in teen pregnancies, and anti-intellectualism in general.

I think the opening scene makes the hereditary position very clear, I don’t know how anyone could interpret that as not marking the case of ‘nature’ determining intelligence. Edit; sorry, either I misread your comment or it was changed. On the premise that ignoring the intro a nurture based idiocracy could be possible, I would suggest it’s the thoroughness and extent of dumbing down that wouldn’t be possible if it wa…

smart people are born into dumb families pretty regularly

Are you implying widespread infidelity here, or are you making the case that something besides "nature" may be determining intelligence?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#147

Post by echelon »

abalashov wrote: post #128
softwaredoug wrote: post #91

I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.

I work by myself and feel no joy in using AI.

I work for myself and I absolutely love AI.

I'm able to get 3x the work done. Greenfield stuff appears almost immediately.

My job is providing value to customers, not worshipping at the cathedral of software that will last forever. Nothing lasts forever.

Start treating software as ephemeral. It'll click.

This doesn't mean write low quality, unmaintainable software. It just means focus on getting stuff to your customer.

Writing in super typesafe languages with the highest level of strictness helps a lot. My AI stack is Rust and Typescript.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#148

Post by [deleted] »

ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

[deleted]

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#149

Post by tremon »

worik wrote: post #139
pdonis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all Here's the problem: you can't. First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force. Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone e…

> Here's the problem: you can't. It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True. But we can have a value system we share that benefits us all. We can work together to improve our welfare as a whole. > Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. That is untrue. We must have webs of trust, and within those webs there are power hierarchies. The trick is that those hierarchies must…

It is not possible to "enforce" a "value system". True.

I think that organized religion wants to say a few words here.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#150

Post by bdangubic »

foota wrote: post #143
j-bos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been feeling that energy too, trying so hard to stay at my current big co job for the health insurance. But the draw is pulling me hard.

I've generally assumed that AI would make developers get lower compensation because of the lowered quantity of developers required for the same output, but this raises the possibility of it actually increasing if more developers end up doing their own things instead of entering the broader labor market :)

the problem is that very few to none SWEs “doing their own thing” will ever make a penny out if it. whatever they do, if it actually makes a little traction, will be cloned and copied in a week by someone else. this whole idea that “we’ll see a 1-person billion dollar startup” is as silly as it gets
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