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Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

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Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#181

Post by lumost »

rvba wrote: post #26
lumost wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the case across most Big Tech. If not for compensation, why would you choose to work in a large organization? Tech productivity peaks somewhere around 500-2k engineers in an org, by the time you hit 10-50k different groups look like different companies in terms of coordination tax.

It is not so easy to get a (first) job in FAANG. They sieve out a lot of bad programmers during their recruitment process. Probably some recruiters beleive that if you managed to get to a FAANG and stay for 2-3 years, then you are competent enough for many other jobs. So in theory working there opens doors. It used to be similar in finance, where getting that internship at Mckinsey/Bain/BCG or in BIG4 (deloitte, ey,…

aye - it definitely signals rigor. However it is worth questioning whether Google at 30k employees has the same signaling effect as Google at 186k employees. Either the number of highly qualified engineers has increased by 4x - or the bar has lowered over time.

I'd imagine that 4 years from now having OpenAI on your resume will be a much better signal than Google, if only for the reason that there are only 400 people who can claim OpenAI as their background.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#182

Post by cableshaft »

robryan wrote: post #125
gretch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you watch kids interact with technology today, you’ll see that there’s already several thriving metaverses in the form of Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. These services no longer function as games in the traditional sense where there’s an objective you complete to win or lose. I mean yes there’s some of that in there still, but you’ll also see they mainly function as digital hangout places where avatars just goof…

Maybe if Facebook was building their own Roblox or similar people might get behind that. It seems to be all in on VR though.

They're trying with Horizon Worlds. The creator tools in it are kinda neat, if limited, but otherwise it feels too sterile to be all that interesting, especially to kids.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#183

Post by eska »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #109
moomoo11 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole management heavy culture needs to F off. 9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usuall…

I am so tired of hearing devs complain about managers and anyone else who doesn't think that everything revolves around the dev. There are a lot of poor, mediocre or bad devs as well as bad managers. The solution to these problems is not to arbitrarily get rid of most of the practitioners. There is frequently a lack of humility and self awareness in dev culture I'm afraid to say. It was one of the things that made me…

IMO the hostility comes from the fact that a bad manager makes all devs in his team, even the good ones, underperform as a whole. A bad dev is simply.. one bad dev. One bad dev causes less damage than an incompetent manager.

It’s also immediately clear when a dev is bad, but managers will weasel out of their responsibility and blame the devs, despite constantly changing requirements, asking for the impossible, not providing the necessary information and resources, etc. a dev doesn’t sabotage a manager’s work like that.

Most managers also aren’t professionally qualified for their position. An education in accounting doesn’t make somebody a manager, just like computer science doesn’t make a dev a team leader.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#184

Post by eska »

yodsanklai wrote: post #162
moomoo11 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole management heavy culture needs to F off. 9/10 people who wants to be a manager are awful as software engineers and they know this is the only way they can stay in the game. Out of those who do become engineering managers it seems all they do is talk a bunch of nonsense and add tremendous levels of roadblocks because they suck at understanding the actual technical problems and I’ll be honest. They’re usuall…

> Get rid of eng managers. > Put in a team lead and a few people. What's the difference between a team lead and a manager?

Domain knowledge, e.g. somebody who doesn’t understand programming is actively harmful as a programming lead. At that point they should just cut their pay and call themselves what they are: a secretary

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#185

Post by brucethemoose2 »

bombolo wrote: post #140
robryan wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if Facebook was building their own Roblox or similar people might get behind that. It seems to be all in on VR though.

The BBC was interviewing some Meta employee in India that was claiming VR is going to be absolutely necessary and Indian families should plan to buy VR sets because they will be needed for the education of their children. It felt so detached, and the interviewer was very mellow, only saying that perhaps the cost is a problem, but the Meta guy insisted that it's needed so they have to find the money.

This is a pattern I saw in Google employees as well. Its like they're living on a different planet.

I mean, I've been to Palo Alto, and its crazy... but not that crazy.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#186

Post by brucethemoose2 »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #177
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…

Thats an interesting point.

I was gonna argue that AI doesn't exclude VR, but you are right. Employees have only so much energy to expend investigating experimental tech.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#187

Post by mynameisvlad »

taeric wrote: post #75
mynameisvlad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also $150 more than the Quest 2 which has also been out for 2.5 years, I don’t really think it’s going to put any sort of dent into the Quest 2s numbers. There’s about 7 million PS5s sold in the last quarter and about 1 million Quest 2s sold in Q2 last year. I somehow doubt that every one of, or even 1/7th of those PS5 owners will spend the cost of a console on PSVR so I would argue that it’s still very much Met…

Folks I know that have PlayStations completely overlaps people willing to play with VR. Folks I know on Facebook... Not so much. They made a solid move into vr. But vr will be gaming well before it is anything else. To try and break into that market as anything else is just not a likely entry.

What even is this argument? You don’t need a Facebook account for the Quest 2, and what do you think people do with their Quest devices? Put them on and stare deeply into the void? No, they buy it to play games.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#188

Post by brucethemoose2 »

gumby wrote: post #113
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…

While I agree Meta probably won't make it on the metaverse side, I disagree with your reasoning. Famously, Facebook "missed mobile" (were focused on the web) and had to scramble to recover, which they did very well. I see the metaverse efforts as a way to avoid that happening to them again. Which is smart. The point is not to make any money on the hardware; the point is to understand the metaverse so well that when i…

> The point is not to make any money on the hardware; the point is to understand the metaverse so well that when it eventually emerges they will know it better than anyone else and can dominate rather than be squeezed out.

Except they dont understand it...

We already have pseudo-metaverses in Minecraft, Fortnite, and such, and Meta (so far) is entirely missing the point in their own VR game. Its like they are an AI that has literally forgotten what it is like to be a regular human.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#189

Post by mynameisvlad »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #65
mynameisvlad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also $150 more than the Quest 2 which has also been out for 2.5 years, I don’t really think it’s going to put any sort of dent into the Quest 2s numbers. There’s about 7 million PS5s sold in the last quarter and about 1 million Quest 2s sold in Q2 last year. I somehow doubt that every one of, or even 1/7th of those PS5 owners will spend the cost of a console on PSVR so I would argue that it’s still very much Met…

PSVR and the Quest are kinda different markets.

How so? They really are not. The VR market is not really big enough to have devices specialized for one part of VR vs another.

You put either of them on to play games. That’s it. Where’s the market differentiator?

To a common person, they’re not going to see the differences that exist. They will say “oh Timmy wants to play VR” and get whatever option they can to allow Timmy to play VR. Both the Quest and PSVR2 are options for that.

And the Quest has been out longer, has an existing user base 1/7th of a PS5 and doesn’t cost the same price as a new console. All of those very much work in it’s favor.

Re: Another Round of Layoffs at Meta

#190

Post by John23832 »

mrphoebs wrote: post #70
moomoo11 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and I'm a staff+ level engineer who has worked at darling unicorns and big media/tech and made a ton of money. I earned that equity payoff. Now I'm working on my own projects and paying for myself to live in SF, so you're free to have whatever opinion. I know what I'm saying, and out of a dozen plus managers I've worked with over just the last 6 years (re-orgs because they have way too much time on their hands)…

I don't know why you feel the need to give people your background/ability/level to bolster your argument. I'm sure you can string together a coherent argument without the need for an appeal to authority. I'm not calling you a junior engineer, merely observing that the quality of the argument you are making being worthy of a junior engineer's rant. >The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in.…

> I don't know why you feel the need to give people your background/ability/level to bolster your argument. I'm sure you can string together a coherent argument without the need for an appeal to authority. I'm not calling you a junior engineer, merely observing that the quality of the argument you are making being worthy of a junior engineer's rant.

You dispelled them as giving a rant that denotes inexperience. They gave their experience as a counter.

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