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Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

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Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#171

Post by UncleMeat »

moomoo11 wrote: post #111
yibg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you just replacing the word manager with the word "team lead"? What in your view is the difference between the responsibilities of a manager vs a team lead if the team still reports to the team lead?

In my mind the team lead wouldn’t have reports. The whole team is responsible for carrying out the business objective, and the team lead is the best IC on the team to guide the other ICs to the end. the director level (it could be multiple people) receive leadership objectives for the quarter or year. Their only job is to take their resources/battalion and divvy the work up into small atomic fire teams. Obviously the…

This is... just management.

You've got middle managers (directors) who link teams with leadership priorities. You've got line managers (tech leads) who are in charge of ensuring that work gets done.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#172

Post by brutus1213 »

blensor wrote: post #146
bsaul wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i really feel like metaverse is only a dream to people with extreme social anxiety. Which may represent a large share of software developers, but only a minority of the general population.

I don't believe this describes only software developers. Disclaimer: we are the devs behind VRWorkout In the fitness space there is a huge group of people who would like to go to the gym but don't because of social anxiety. And VR fitness is already one of the major pillars for the headset manufacturers ( Meta, Pico and HTC ). So the social anxiety issue may very well be a driving factor overall

But that's why I have Peloton and other gym equipment at home.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#173

Post by brutus1213 »

bitL wrote: post #86
typon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAIR has been one of the best AI labs in the world, with one of the godfathers of AI leading it. What do you mean by "bet on the wrong horse?"

Meta AI employees will privately tell you Google, Open AI and a bunch of others are much more advanced than them. For some reason Google can't capitalize on it and it can't be because "AI is not in their DNA"...

Interesting comment. Curious who you see to be the winning horses, or at least candidates. OpenAI is certainly something special. Not sure who else I'd add to the list. AirBnB has a really strong culture of experimentation and infra for it. Their product is boring though. From your perspective, is it about culture, product, people, something else?

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#174

Post by scrollaway »

Nextgrid wrote: post #166
piva00 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bots are even more insidious than before, I deleted my account and now only use it to follow breaking news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I constantly get errors, videos not loading, glitches on the page. Not sure what you mean "running fine", I'm dreading opening Twitter links because it got so frustrating... It's attrition, it's slowly degrading. It's definitely breaking, in my experience.

> Bots are even more insidious than before Not sure if that's actually caused by the recent changes as opposed to confirmation bias or merely the renewed attention that Twitter recently got. I wouldn't comment on their moderation being better or worse since the acquisition considering they were already at zero as they couldn't even regex-out very obvious crypto scam tweets in reply to high-profile accounts. > I'm dre…

Twitter shedded a lot of its real users due to the takeover itself and the decisions that ensued. It’s simple maths that there would be more bots now.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#175

Post by lancesells »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #126
ehnto wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have the enthusiasm I don't think, and I believe that is where it falls flat. The technology is not currently something that everyone wants and definitely not something everyone needs. VR is not good at general computing yet, and the form factor and way you engage with it means people won't be using it in the same way they use TVs, game consoles or smart phones. Mass adoption takes apealing to the lowest c…

you realize every single thing you said would have been true when talking about the first smartphones? The iPhone in 2007 was not a good general computing device, and people were made fun of for looking like dorks because they stared constantly at their screens. And yet here we are, in a future where smartphones diligently satisfy all of consumer's needs and zoning out by looking at your black slab is normalized.

There's a pretty big difference. The iPhone came out and was a success the first year and just grew from there.

The Oculus has been out since ~2016 or so. I don't think it's a rocketship ready to take off with the right hardware or software. I'm sure there's profit to be made, better days to come, etc., but it's not going to be a smartphone.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#176

Post by blensor »

brutus1213 wrote: post #172
blensor wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe this describes only software developers. Disclaimer: we are the devs behind VRWorkout In the fitness space there is a huge group of people who would like to go to the gym but don't because of social anxiety. And VR fitness is already one of the major pillars for the headset manufacturers ( Meta, Pico and HTC ). So the social anxiety issue may very well be a driving factor overall

But that's why I have Peloton and other gym equipment at home.

Oh for sure, no question about that.

Where VR fitness does shine is the social aspect without the social anxiety.

Doing an intense full body workout with people across the globe and seeing other express their movements without having to show themselves leads to a much more relaxed an fun experience than for example a Zoom workout.

I am fully aware that this is not for everyone, that's why it's good to have options. I for one wouldn't even have the space or money to put up a peloton bike but I can temporarily allocate 2 square meters between our living room and kitchen for my calisthenics exercises in VR. And by using mixed reality I can even shrink that a bit further.

It's probably a bit hard to explain with only words so here is a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WGOZlFXjQU

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#177

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #11

I would not invest in Meta's metaverse future. It feels like Windows Mobile. Meta has the early start, money, captive audience and enthusiasm, but they don't have the hardware/software edge (that Apple coincidentally also has this time around) to really make the idea work. The headsets are not going to revolutionize much running Facebook games on budget Qualcomm SoCs, and Facebook cant buy an Unreal Engine or an M2 P…

The progress of AI/ML/ChatGPT will squash any notion of VR for Enterprise. If I was running a 500 person call center for a health insurance company, I'd be looking more into research around AI/ML/ChatGPT to reduce costs vs. VR/AR. Getting a private hosted ChatGPT instance/network, train it on medical claims/insurance use cases and facts, feed it statistics about cases and see if it can handle use cases for processing simpler claims. Give it the same oversight you would a call center employee where people are inspecting the results. That has a ROI of possibly increasing claim processing/reducing claim processors by letting humans handle more complex cases that require actual intelligence. The same process could be applied to any industry that has a lot of text data and doesn't change very quickly.

VR in the Enterprise just isn't good business sense. The ROI isn't going to be there for an enterprise use case with typical office workers/professionals. As ruthless as it sounds, eliminating the need for people with AI handling easier/simpler tasks is a much better investment that scales than purchasing, supporting and training people on VR hardware for some "productivity" benefit that really can't be defined right now.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#178

Post by gitfan86 »

gruez wrote: post #47
htag wrote: post #4

I imagine Meta has a harder time recruiting then their peer companies, because of their reputation and the moral hazard. I wonder how much investment it will take them to get staff levels back to where they are now. It really feels like they are peaking as a company.

> and the moral hazard What’s the moral hazard? For reference, moral hazard doesn’t mean “working at an immoral company”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

He probably meant a stain on your reputation. The implication is that you have bad morals if you work for Zuck.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#179

Post by cableshaft »

lancesells wrote: post #175
AstixAndBelix wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realize every single thing you said would have been true when talking about the first smartphones? The iPhone in 2007 was not a good general computing device, and people were made fun of for looking like dorks because they stared constantly at their screens. And yet here we are, in a future where smartphones diligently satisfy all of consumer's needs and zoning out by looking at your black slab is normalized.

There's a pretty big difference. The iPhone came out and was a success the first year and just grew from there. The Oculus has been out since ~2016 or so. I don't think it's a rocketship ready to take off with the right hardware or software. I'm sure there's profit to be made, better days to come, etc., but it's not going to be a smartphone.

The Oculus Quest 2 released at the same time as Xbox Series S/X and PS5. It's sold 15 million units, while the Xbox has sold 20 million and the PS5 has sold 30 million.

While it's less than those two, it's still a very respectable number and incredibly high considering it doesn't have any of the major studios releasing their AAA games on it.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#180

Post by eska »

vrosas wrote: post #87
mrphoebs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is certainly scope for a more intelligent and nuanced discussion to be had here than what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers. Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and som…

I can’t wait to meet one of these mythical force multiplying engineering managers one day. Over the last decade as a senior engineer my experience has been that a mediocre engineer will begin to compensate for their shortcomings by becoming more involved in project management, usually spending most of the engineering time in jira land. Then their manager, who likely did the same damn thing, says “hey you look like ma…

Force multiplying managers are managers that remove red rape which was put up by.. other managers.
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