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Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

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Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#181
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI isn't necessary to completely change things. The change that's occurred in the last 6 months alone is massive. Another couple of big steps like the end of last year and the world is unrecognisable from even a few years ago.

What makes another couple big steps like that inevitable in a short time frame? Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?

Good point!

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement. What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going? What if we all somehow decide that we don’t wa…

What is a globally accepted sentiment found in every nation, tribe, village, and domicile across the globe today?

The prohibition against unjust killing is pretty much universal. What is or isn’t unjust is variable, but all societies have the concept of and prohibition against unjust killing.

It’s true that if AGI is easy for a small group of people to build prohibition isn’t really possible. But if AGI takes a massive data center and billions of dollars, it could be.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#183

I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…

> I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.

In general it seems that companies are pretty bad about this type of logic. It's the same issue with trying to force attrition through "return to office" or similar things as a way of getting the cost cutting without having to pay severance; the people who will walk away are the ones who are have enough money to not need immediate employment (who are more likely to be from the higher-compensated members of the workforce, which in a competently-run company would be the most valuable ones) or who know they're in high enough demand to be able to find something else fairly quickly, so likely the ones who they should be trying hardest to retain. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what they actually want, which is to stop paying people who they don't need.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#184

I wonder when (if ever) the companies realize that demoralizing your workforce (and destroying that sector of the job market) doesn't have only advantages. I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stop…

Yeah, working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out - by the time you know about the layoffs they've probably already made their decisions about who stays and goes anyway. Plus that higher rate of effort might be unsustainable and you end up leaving on your own accord anyway or burning out. Layoffs somewhat change the employment arrangement too for the people that stay: "we pay you the sam…

> working harder to avoid a layoff in a big company doesn't really work out

If this is where you're at in relation to your employer, that doesn't avoid a layoff, it accelerates the next round, whether or not you're in the batch is just a matter of time.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if progress stops it can be avoided..

What is our definition of progress ? We were progressing against world hunger but we decided to shut down efforts against it last year. Is it progress to invest $1T into semi-accurate plagiarism machines trained on stolen data ?

Sadly, a lot of peoples definition of progress is "number go up". The stock market is booming and yet most people are poorer than they were in the past because those numbers and that "progress" is only in the interest of a very small number of people completely disconnected from the society they live in.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#186
I'm gunna say something crazy sounding that might be insensitive but is really obviously true to anyone that thinks about it for a few seconds. Meta throwing away a ton of really good talent is probably better for the world by a large degree. It is better if less very smart people work for them. We do not need more tracking algo's and unsafe uninterpretable AI (search 'meta coconut latent reasoning paper') made by a company that's fine with using the information of when teen girls delete selfies to sell them ads for beauty products. We don't.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#187
post #153

AI has caused a lot of leaders to overreact. Great leaders find a balance between overreacting and waffling. It's often wise to dampen your response a little bit, without dragging your feet.

From what I've read from people with relevant experience, the only way to get a large organization change direction is to issue imperative decrees lacking nuance, because large organization by nature tend to be process heavy and are too incompetent to follow a nuanced direction. If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its mean…

I have a theory of this based mostly in time working in Meta's RL org on VR and Wearables (disclosure)....

There's a fundamental comms issue, I think, where you can only broadly communicate the least common denominator of what every involved person will understand. The "imperative decrees lacking nuance."

This is doubly hard if the thing is New, so it isn't broadly understood by default in the collective professions of the workforce. For example, we had a HECK of a time getting many web+mobile designers to understand 3D for spatial design like the game designers did. And vise versa, the nuances of building reusable UI and interaction frameworks when maintaining a software platform, for the games folks.

It's virtually impossible (no pun intended) to do something both New and Nuanced with a large group of people. You'll spend all the effort trying to get them to mutually understand a shared, nuanced vision on one hand, and constantly scrambling with their different interpretations producing incompatible parts of work, on the other.

I think you can ONLY really manage it with small groups, and it's a big part of why startups will continue running circles around big orgs, even with shared talent pool.

The only organizational structure that I think mitigates it is having strong top down direction, with vision and expertise at basically every level of the hierarchy. Because it's just taking the small group expert model and delegating it down to expanding levels of detail in execution. Apple seems to be wholly structured around this, and has occasionally done it very well.

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#188
post #91
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t he famously trash folks over 30 years back? He has really done nothing innovative outside of ads.

What’s innovative about ads?

Meta’s ad product is incredibly innovative. Just look at the fallout from ATT to see an obvious example

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#189

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

Zuckerberg was never a great strategist. The only good strategic decisions that he was ever made were the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp. Almost everything else was either completely misguided, way too late, or executed so poorly that it could never work. Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they stil…

Instagram and what’s app were two of the best purchases in American history though. It’s hard to overlook how well they worked out

Re: Zuckerberg 'Admits' Meta's Layoffs Were Ineffective

#190

The title is a weird. Ineffective? At doing what? This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg: > trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four mon…

his biggest fear is not being the one to nail the next big thing. it happened with mobile, although that was basically irrelevant in hindsight. he thought it was metaverse, which failed, while in the meantime it was actually the new AI cycle, which he was late on / lost by the time llama 4 flopped. i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the…

The thing is that metas massive consumer user base means that they haven’t lost the ai race I think. They don’t need to run the whole customer acquisition rat race. They’ve already got billions of customers who they can have using models within a month, they just need to keep pushing to create a model people are happy to use. Metas product compliments uniquely well with ai I think so they’re never really out of it until their users leave.
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