Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 193 posts

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#181

Post by rubicon33 »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #132
rubicon33 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a strong advocate for VR since 2016. Over the last 6+ years I've managed to convince family and friends to all jump in and pickup VR, mostly the Quest 2. What I can say is, the vast majority of them don't use their headset at all anymore. It sits on a shelf collecting dust, out of batteries, only to be picked up on the extremely rare occasion where they want to try it out again, and then after about 30-45 m…

Damn, hits home. I would've been one of your friends or family I think. I was immediately excited about VR back in the mid 2010s. And over the past years I've done a bit of reading and have had various fun discussions with friends about the use-cases of VR today, and in 5 or 15 years from now, that all made sense to me. I really held off as long as I could for both the tech and the content base to develop, to jump in…

You actually fit the bill - almost exactly - to a friend of mine who returned his Quest 2 just a few weeks ago. He was so excited for it to arrive that he took the day off of work just to be sure he was there to receive the package.

He spend a total of about 2 hours in it before deciding it was not for him. Frankly, I respect his decision because that's better than leaving it on the shelf for months and months like most of my other friends.

I agree with you that someday VR may reach a point where the barrier-to-entry is low enough to captivate the general public. If you ask me, comfort is the #1 issue. People's issues range from nausea, to face discomfort, to (if im being honest) straight up laziness and/or disability. Some people would rather binge netflix on a couch for 3 hours than stand up in a room physically moving around.

If Meta can't fix the comfort issues, I pretty much never see VR breaking out of it's niche following. It's got to somehow get to a level where it's as comfortable and convenient as sitting on a couch. Long, long way to go.

Anyways, my top VR experiences is an easy list to assemble. I use my VR for games so... not sure there will be an intersection with your interests since you mention museums and such, but here it is:

• Half Life Alyx

• Beat Saber

• Walk About Mini Golf

• Dirt Rally 2.0 (with physical pedals, shifter, wheel)

• Ghosts of Tabor (Early Access)

• Vertigo 1 / 2

• Into the Radius (STALKER clone in VR)

• POPULATION:ONE (Battle Royale, kinda like Fortnite)

• Edge of Nowhere (Excellent third-person game)

• Demo (Table top RPG)

• STORMLAND

• Lone Echo 1 & 2

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#182

Post by jjeaff »

neel8986 wrote: post #115
jjeaff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to look like a visionary leader when people will rewrite history for you. Facebook was famously late to mobile and almost missed the boat. Luckily, they had the resources to plow into catching up around 2012.

I am talking about jumping to create a family of mobile apps that dominate the data day to day usage of mobile. They lost their chance of owning a mobile OS which they are suffering till now

Yes, that is what I was talking about. They were late creating a mobile presence for Facebook. Then of course, Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquisitions. Definitely good acquisitions, but pretty obvious ones. They luckily had plenty of money at the time to plow into the already successful Insta and WhatsApp mobile apps.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#183

Post by jjeaff »

basch wrote: post #150
matthewdgreen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palm, Blackberry and Windows PocketPC blazed the trail. iOS and Android were relatively latecomers that arrived with a more competitive product (iOS because it was much better than the previous generation, and Android because it borrowed the ideas from iOS and was free.)

capacitive touch and momentum scrolling were the differentiating factors. Windows CE 4 was way ahead of iphoneOS 1, 5 years earlier.

I've never thought of momentum scrolling as a paradigm shift. But now that I think about it, it is a pretty amazing feature.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#184

Post by jjeaff »

nix0n wrote: post #118
tensor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it really Microsoft that killed Windows phone? Or was it simply just too late. By the time it was really available I'm not sure there was actually a chance for a third platform to survive.

If it's the delay that killed it, that's really still an unforced error. They had Windows CE in the 90s, and Windows Mobile in the 2000s. They were in a good place to be able to release a smartphone in time.

They were too early, and then too late. CE and Mobile just never had devices with enough processing power or good enough hardware UI to make them viable and enticing for developers.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#185

Post by purplecircle »

neel8986 wrote: post #12

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sa…

Meta isn't investing billions into VR alone. They're also investing billions into AR, metaverse, etc. Read their filings & earnings report; it's all in there.

The funny part is, if they actually invested more on investing in VR, they might actually get to AR faster.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#186

Post by purplecircle »

muglug wrote: post #20
neel8986 wrote: post #12

Meta is still a 600B company and large credit goes to Zukerberg. His insight into jumping to mobile at the very beginning, making critical acquisitions, relentlessly going to new geographies, investment in AI all played off. Every major company made mistake including Google ( Google Plus ), Microsoft ( Windows phone ) and apple ( entire 90s ). A company making mistake just means they are still taking risks and not sa…

The problem of VR goes beyond hardware innovation: most people don’t want to completely shut themselves off from the world for hours on end.

the problem isn't in VR per se. the problem is the current iterations of VR hw/sw.

while quest 2 has solved some problems, there are still hurdles to usability. but these hurdles aren't inherent to VR.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#187

Post by srj »

gmerc wrote: post #169
srj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our leadership had no vision beyond doubling down on VR and doing a complete copy and paste of TikTok. Meanwhile our middle managers hired as many people as possible to justify their own promotions, as everyone is too lazy to consider impact beyond # of reports and there's no accountability. Finally, due to the above, we laid off many ICs. I guess that's what he meant?

Lol middle managers. The headcount games were VPs. How do you think headcount was distributed, by middle managers?

In megacap tech you can have VPs that are 4 levels down in the reporting hierarchy. What I meant though was around how headcount is requested. I've seen my share of empire builders and been told to file and pad out HC requests even when I stated we didn't need it.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#188

Post by gmerc »

srj wrote: post #187
gmerc wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol middle managers. The headcount games were VPs. How do you think headcount was distributed, by middle managers?

In megacap tech you can have VPs that are 4 levels down in the reporting hierarchy. What I meant though was around how headcount is requested. I've seen my share of empire builders and been told to file and pad out HC requests even when I stated we didn't need it.

Requests don’t make growth. Don’t redirect responsibility and perpetuate the illusion that poor VPs at the top were deceived.

People love to avert responsibility and many seem to be loving the idea that Zuck somehow was deceived into over hiring by ruthless middle managers but anyone who worked in that place knew Mark is a control freak and absolutely everything in the place was top down.

Top management is being paid too dollars for being responsible given how easy it is to create a narrative of a runaway middle manager situation, it seems to me that most people don’t understand the meta game in the US

The meta game isn’t work hard and make a lot of money. It’s not even about money - it’s about no responsibility and the power to do anything that comes with it.

The US system has created a world where consequences are for normal people. Elon at the time could molest all of Austin Texas, spend the same coin he spent on the flight attendant and still have more money than 99.9% of Americans.

Almost everything is legal for a fee. All top level lieutenants at FB got Exceeds or Greatly Exceeds for their loyalty, everyone else got fired. And even HN loves to propagate the insane idea that the cause of the fuckup was rooted in Middle Management and by ruthless employees who sat around all day.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#189

Post by hnfong »

jjeaff wrote: post #182
neel8986 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about jumping to create a family of mobile apps that dominate the data day to day usage of mobile. They lost their chance of owning a mobile OS which they are suffering till now

Yes, that is what I was talking about. They were late creating a mobile presence for Facebook. Then of course, Instagram and WhatsApp were both acquisitions. Definitely good acquisitions, but pretty obvious ones. They luckily had plenty of money at the time to plow into the already successful Insta and WhatsApp mobile apps.

IIRC the Facebook "mobile app" was originally just a glorified webview that was slow and didn't integrate well with the native experience. It took them a couple years to fix most things.

And their UI (mobile and web) still suck for lesser used features to this day. Not the "doesn't look good" kind of suck, but "they forgot to put in the submit button" kind suck.

Re: A morale crisis after multiple Meta layoffs

#190

Post by hnfong »

jjeaff wrote: post #184
nix0n wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's the delay that killed it, that's really still an unforced error. They had Windows CE in the 90s, and Windows Mobile in the 2000s. They were in a good place to be able to release a smartphone in time.

They were too early, and then too late. CE and Mobile just never had devices with enough processing power or good enough hardware UI to make them viable and enticing for developers.

In retrospect, after understanding more about tech history, I suspect the leadership of Steve Ballmer during the vital period in the late 2000s and Bill Gates' spending less time on Microsoft probably had something to do with this as well.

According to reported stories, Bill used to be really good at understanding how to squeeze the last drop of performance from slow hardware, a vital skill to have in the 1980s, yet subsequently became less important when desktops became fast enough. If they had Bill Gates leading the technical direction of the mobile OSes, the extra focus on speed optimization might have been what would have allowed Microsoft to do better during the smartphone wars.

All speculation though.

Post reply on HN