How to succeed at Meta

A company decides whether it's publicly traded or not. It also decides whether it makes an offer to buy the competition or not. I think people forget just how many entities Google has purchased over the years, and how often the FTC has just let them get away with it.

> A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.

Are we really going to compare a single locally owned bakery with a naturally limited consumer market to a corporation like Google?

Wouldn't you agree that bakery would be a monopoly if it let it's standards slip for a few years, and an ex-employee of that bakery opened a new shop, and the existing bakery just decided to buy them out and then close their business instead of starting to compete with them for customers?

Now multiply that by like 250 times. I hardly think it's uncharitable to call this "strategy" out for what it is.

Per Rao's analysis, the poster isn't the sociopath (Rao's term) that they make themselves out to be. I'd say they would fit better as one of the clueless (Rao's term, again); thinking that they are making an impact and gaming the system. They seem, per my reading of Rao, to just be mercilessly hitting metrics that their sociopath bosses have set out; being the nice little carbon control rods in the nuclear reactor of capitalism. To Zuck, this is great news (again, using Rao's lens)

Personally, it reads as tongue in cheek. But trying to use the lenses of the Gervais Principle is always a dark and fun little exercise.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

For me, TikTok even though they probably don't hire SDEs like FB and there's prob enough people to fill those roles anyways.

I truly think its an awful invention. It's bad for the same reason I feel most social media is bad... just turned all up to 10. You thought people doom scrolling mindless posts in 2014 was bad? Here, have 10 second bits of unscrubbable nonsense for 5 hours a day.

There are too many variables and that line between right and wrong is not well-defined in this matter. Using an extreme version of your logic, you should strip yourself of all currency and material possessions. Yet you're on here, possibly even while you're supposed to be working. Do you think the companies hosting ycombinator.com are clean? Maybe they're using AWS resources. You're using devices from those very companies you despise right? You're probably using electricity from a power company that is exploiting people in some way or maybe you bought solar panels from a company that exploited people to fabricate those panels. You see, that moral line can be shifted all over the place.

I grew up on food-stamps and I was in debt for a very very long time in my adult life. Poverty can be very traumatic (and very motivating to never go into it again). Money is certainly not the only thing that matters in this world and that's not what I said in my post. It is very important in living a sustainable life in America (and elsewhere). A single ER visit can ruin your life-savings for example. I work for a FAANG because I'm uncertain about the future and that scares the hell out of me. I have a family. I have several chronic medical problems. There's a realistic possibility I might be too disabled to work next year or the following year. Layoffs are starting to ramp up. I don't want that money, I need it to ensure my family can survive the problems that are surely to come in the not too distant future. I don't want them to endure the hell that I went through. I don't think I can bare it mentally. So yeah, I'm working at a FAANG for the "TC". I don't give a shit about innovating some new UI library or whatever else people think is cool in tech. I'm not even sure I have that ability if we're being honest. Even if I did, this whole thread is about a post that highlights exactly why it's hard to do that now. I work here so I can survive and that's it.