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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#171

Post by davidw »

nine_k wrote: post #117
jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React. I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

Organizations that are overall bad can have people who have done some good things, or at least technically impressive things.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#172

Post by bigstrat2003 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86
shimman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should…

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

"Someone else would do it if I don't" is not, and never has been, a valid argument for whether something is moral to do. If you want to argue that it's morally permissible to work at Facebook, you need to argue that on its own merits, not by appealing to fallacies.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#173

Post by nine_k »

embedding-shape wrote: post #130
nine_k wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React. I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time. Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.

> People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.

Exactly. The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.

And the bad things that some people did at Facebook / Meta are also due to their own choices, not by the virtue / sin of working for a particular org.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#174

Post by aantix »

throwarayes wrote: post #76
jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments. Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram. Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy. If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have pro…

Never understood why Facebook hasn't implemented the 'Explain this post' type feature that you see on X (@grok).

Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#175

Post by PaulHoule »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #155
PaulHoule wrote: post #144

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…

Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?

Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band!

Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations.

I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO.

I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds!

https://aframe.io/

I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered

https://react-hook-form.com/

which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#176

Post by jmaw »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #155
PaulHoule wrote: post #144

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…

Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?

Or Angular, if caring about Google

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#177

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86
shimman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should…

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

But your honor! If I didn't sell heroin, someone else would!

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#178

Post by fzeroracer »

thepryz wrote: post #166
jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options. I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.

There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.

The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#179

Post by lo_zamoyski »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #86
shimman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too. These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should…

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression. You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't? You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

> You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?

Putting Meta aside as I do not have a sufficiently deep view of the total scope of work at Meta and its relation to its misdeeds, I never understood how anyone found this fallacious line of reasoning convincing.

So what if someone else would do it? The point is that you are morally responsible for your actions and your actions alone.

It horrifies me completely to realize that so many people would excuse their own gravely immoral actions on the incomprehensible grounds that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Where is the logic? It is such a severely morally and psychologically crippled way of thinking. Yes, if I don't shoot the innocent civilian in the head, then SS-Schütze Schmidt will do it anyway, so I might as well do it. Incredible.

Morality is not some calculus that is concerned about whether certain events occur or about optimizing some sum total of events. It is about how you, personally, use your agency. That's it!

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#180

Post by vinni2 »

monster_truck wrote: post #19
vinni2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they collude and hatch a plan to sabotage the LLM training.

Are there any examples of this actually working? I keep seeing this fantasy repeated but have not seen a plausible explanation for how they wouldn't be contibuting to the pile of negative examples which are just as valuable if not more.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/data-poisoning/ Data poisoning.
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