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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#191

Post by hintymad »

throwarayes wrote: post #118

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last. Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income. Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

> If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S

This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.

I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#192

Post by dylan604 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #63
peanut-walrus wrote: post #23

Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

You need a set of good lead engineers in monetisation who can hide the fraud well enough from the rest of the company

Wouldn't you be better served by hiring competent accountants for that? An engineer would screw this up and get the decimal in the wrong place.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#193

Post by mplanchard »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #145
mplanchard wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask). At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads,…

> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere Not exactly... > devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff... So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing rela…

My answer already addresses this? I didn’t say every engineer works on those things. I said it’s a spectrum, with the people working on those things at one end. I also already answered that they all contribute to the edifice, with different levels of moral culpability, which it’s up to them to hash out how they feel about.

Meta’s business is enabled by (practically) everyone who works for them, otherwise they wouldn’t pay them to work there. The storage compression algorithms are enabled by and contribute to the mission of the company.

If you’re comfortable knowing that your job is paid for by destroying society, and that your work makes that destruction a little more efficient, that’s fine. Storage algorithms are pretty low on the spectrum, and at least they may have some other uses if open sourced. For me, I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want to contribute even in a small way to what Meta does. But others obviously can and do feel differently.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#194

Post by curt15 »

ben_w wrote: post #182
slibhb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating. When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious: The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the…

See Sarah Wynn-Williams' book and congressional testimony for more.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#195

Post by HelloNurse »

everdrive wrote: post #125
98codes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams. It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward. Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

The "amazing" organizations seem amazingly evil.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#196

Post by rozap »

PaulHoule wrote: post #148
busterarm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook. They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.

My experience is a bit different. They constantly update it and make it more unusable. At this point it's totally broken. Occasionally I open it, it loads for 30 seconds, I have a notification icon for a post I saw a month ago, then my feed shows the same picture of a guy I follow driving his rally car, which was posted several months ago, then I log off. It's truly bizarre what they've managed to do.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#197

Post by Hamuko »

serf wrote: post #162
Hamuko wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".

yeah except that isn't how it's presented. social media boards don't go creating slides and mission statements that mentions those second order effects. most go something like: "Connecting people and souls through the technologies that empower every day life." rather than "Let's get Susie to jump off a bridge for yuks."

>“Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the researchers said in a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

>“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

>Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

I don’t know, seems like they do go around creating slides that mention them.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#198

Post by slibhb »

ben_w wrote: post #182
slibhb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating. When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious: The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the…

You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee. It's just absurd, a clueless way of thinking about moral responsibility.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#199

Post by robocat »

fusslo wrote: post #33
tennfown wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly? Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere. Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

the ceo of a former company I was at demanded a rebrand like 6 months after our internal rebrand. Cost ~500k-800k USD. Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)

> Schtupping

Note that word isn't joint to tupping unless you're from Tasmania.

  Shtupping comes from Yiddish, while tupping comes from an old English/Scots agricultural term relating to rams.
I wonder what "commission" the VP received.
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