Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am worth 1/billion of his net worth and every morning when I wake up I feel like I am getting punched in the stomach.
I hope you have more than several dozen dollars :)
Toss a coin to your witcher
Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
231–240 of 403 posts
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#232A contact of mine who works for Meta says that this has been coming for a long time and no-one is surprised. They're also rescinding internship offers (now THAT'S shitty) and freezing hiring. Absurdly, I'm told that the company is still planning on going ahead with booked job interviews, even when they won't be able to make an offer due to the hiring freeze. If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wa…
> If you have an interview scheduled with FB I suggest not wasting your time
Good luck with your interview!
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#233The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller. (The AI work i…
This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…
There's adverse selection at play in FAANG hiring, but I think it goes like this : any ambitious engineer would wants to "make a dent in the universe" is never going to spend months studying LC, system design, or whatever to get into these places. Not only do they prefer building actual projects on evening and weekends ; but they know their time at FAANG would be wasted anyway. In 2022, few people go to big tech because they really want to build things.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#234The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller. (The AI work i…
It's really something to take heart and think about. "We only hire the best!" And yet the best are apparently not good enough. I don't think they have enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis that their hiring criteria is a joke.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. A lot of people got a free lunch in the past couple of years because FAANG hiring (And the rest of the tech sector) went absolutely bonkers.
Salaries here in India shot up 100-200%. 35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience. All the while their companies remained unprofitable. Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.
>>35 year old engineers were making more money than leading heart surgeons with 35 years of work experience.
Indian here and can confirm.
This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India.
Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars.
Software on the other does demand training on bleeding edge tech almost every few months. We also tend to put lot of smart work[mathematically inclined work] than doctors.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#236The FAANG paradox : these companies all have this performance-intensive culture with the gruelling interview, "perf cycles", promotion processes, OKRs, etc... to ensure all engineers function at the top of their capacity. At the same time, their new public facing products have been mostly underwhelming over the last decade. It seems most of the innovation occurred back when FAANGs were 10-100x smaller. (The AI work i…
This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…
This comes up a lot in the international test score comparisons. You have places like Singapore, Japan and China that dominate the league tables as in the kids get the best test scores, but that does not translate into American style economic creativity. Now maybe all of the American style economic creativity is driven by high IQ immigrants but I don't think that is true.
Has anyone studied this? It is constantly referenced.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could also mean creating an inhospitable environment for work, like demotion, allocating drudge work, removing responsibilities, etc. Right - it's actually far worse than outright firing or laying off people. As in, genuinely harmful to people from a psychological (and hence physical) point of view. All so the company can save a few dollars, and hit certain quarterly targets a bit sooner. That's why there's a name…
Being psychologically stressed out at work is not in and of itself hostile work environment. Read the US law section in the link you posted. The employee actions have to violate preestablished rights or part of thr employee's contract. Not merely ramping up work expectations and duties to keep your job.
What if you are asked to do superhuman efforts, surely there is some limit no? Read this absolutely massive document and architect an implementation by tomorrow. Get it right! DOE doesn't accept mistakes!
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
This I think is a bit like the "IQ selection" phenomenon, where if we suppose IQ actually measures (say,) test-taking ability rather than some complex notion of intelligence... then we find places that try to filter on IQ (law schools, med schools, FAANG) end up selecting for uncreative kinds of intelligence. As a bold, perhaps wrong hypothesis, this might be in play here. We have the very best leet-coders, but the v…
Probably if you filter by raw IQ (either yours or others definition) you would get a lot of imaginative people as most intellectual faculties are positively correlated with each others. On the other hand if it turns out that you are actually filtering by "willingness to take years of testing" then you might get different results
Exactly, I'd have no problem taking an IQ test for a role, and usually test high on those. Leet code grinding and interview "preparation" I just have no time and willingness for.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#239It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform). Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers. Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess: - 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketin…
I worked on FB briefly. It turns out that platform does vastly more than I had imagined, and maybe you too.
Re: Facebook reportedly laying off thousands of employees
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.
That’s beyond question and if you are asking it you’re fooling yourself. You can take a look at the output of their engineers as an example (React, Native, Cassandra). We are talking billions. Your run of the mill software company isn’t building this kind of tech. You can hate on Meta all you want. But let’s not deny the facts.
Could the fact that they have higher salaries have anything to do with it? Offer higher salaries and you'll attract stronger talent, regardless of the leetcode hoops they have to jump through.