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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

ericlippert.com

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Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#281

Post by bombcar »

zaroth wrote: post #250
ska wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and still not ready for prime time.

The current state of VR is not decades old. It’s like saying automobiles are decades old so EVs are not exciting.

EVs are cool but for the vast majority of people they're just cars that do car things slightly differently.

And VR has been in some form of "cool to play with for awhile and then left on the shelf" for decades now.

It gets better each time, but it's still just a plaything.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#282

Post by a4isms »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #120
a4isms wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed. I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up t…

It's a trope with some truth to it, but it runs out of steam fairly quickly. Was original facebook a painkiller? Instagram? $1000 iPhone? Liver King? I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then, desire can win over pain many times. Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.

It doesn't run out of steam so much as it fits a particular scope better than others. We can bend over backwards to make it fit other scopes, like another commenter points out: FOMO is a headache, and social media could be called the aspirin.

I personally find that metaphors work best as mnemonics. Unless you're in health sciences, products are neither vitamins, nor painkillers. If this metaphor helps us remember to distinguish products that solve urgent and existing problems from products that are investments providing an ROI over time... Good enough for me.

Now about fear and greed. I agree with you. In fact, I do so because when I was in sales and marketing, I read a book that said that the four motivations that mattered were fear, greed, exclusivity, and belonging. The first two are literally what you just mentioned.

That particular simplification doesn't fit every situation any more than Maslow's Hierarchy does, but it's another surprisingly useful lens to use when looking at value propositions.

At the end of the day, all these rules of thumbs and metaphors are tools, if you find one that's useful, add it to your toolbox and figure out when it works and when it doesn't. The more of these you have, the more ways you have of analyzing a situation and coming up with a rough model for how it works.

So I agree with you: Fear and greed are the big sellers in B2B.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#283

Post by alpha_squared »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #252
MattGaiser wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one wants to wear VR goggles I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12?

VR goggles are going to continue getting lighter, smaller, and more comfortable to wear. Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.

Maybe I'm in a bubble, but most people I know who wear glasses don't actually enjoy doing so and would really rather not if they can avoid it. VR would have to be demonstrably superior to any alternative to justify wearing it for that long even if it was as light as a feather.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#284

Post by cgrealy »

kelnos wrote: post #264
ericlippert wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

> Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally. It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it. I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employmen…

> It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.

Not really. People fear change. Engineers at Meta almost certainly have good pay, work with people they like, have a generally comfortable life.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#285

Post by bombcar »

ericlippert wrote: post #263
hkon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were working on signal loss models that had potential to save billions What are signal loss models in this context?

"Signal loss" is the overarching term for all the factors that lead to the company being less able to make good inferences about users. Not just the obvious consideration of "how do we serve an ad that is relevant to the user?" but for any data-driven decision that affects a user's experience. The biggest recent cause of signal loss was Apple changing the rules for apps on their phone, but there are plenty of other c…

Perhaps an example would be - we no longer have location data for users, but we do have time of activity, so we can presume that during daylight hours in the USA most of our activity is coming from there, things like that.

But with more inputs and such.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#286

Post by rightbyte »

ericlippert wrote: post #239
rob74 wrote: post #91

> Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he wa…

I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "…

Oh ... so in dystopian Snow Crash (I read up on it) there is a also dystopian virtual reality named Metaverse. Well, I wonder i Zuck knew about that.

Interesting that the book essentially seems to render the "gig economy" as some dystopian element. Quite good prediction.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#287

Post by bombcar »

nemo44x wrote: post #63
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the perceived value.

> perceived value. I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.

Especially when the "perceived value" is avoiding a loss.

If I come in and cut the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing.

If I come in and fix a problem that was going to raise the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing for about five minutes and then forgotten.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#288

Post by ericlippert »

kalkin wrote: post #104

"Everyone was kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, generous with their time and knowledge, and a genuine pleasure to work with." I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off for any reason and the broader large-organ…

I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues.

Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other teams make better decisions at lower cost, the aim is to look at the whole system and improve the whole thing.

Let me give you an example. Most "this content doesn't belong on FB" decisions are made by ML, but a great many go to human review. Imagine what that job is like. It's emotionally exhausting, it's poorly compensated, burnout is high.

My team had a model in production where we would use Bayesian reasoning to automatically detect when a particular human was likely to have made the correct decision about content classification, and therefore, if two humans disagreed, how to resolve that impasse without getting a third involved. (And in addition we get a lot more information out of the model including bounds on true prevalence of bad content, and so on.)

Does that save the company money? Sure. Millions of dollars a month. (And for the amateur bean counters elsewhere on this page: the data scientist who developed this model is NOT PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH.) But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow.

That's just one example; everything that we did was with an eye towards not merely saving the company money, but improving the ability to make good decisions about the products.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#289

Post by deltarholamda »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #252
MattGaiser wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one wants to wear VR goggles I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12?

VR goggles are going to continue getting lighter, smaller, and more comfortable to wear. Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.

My Apple headphones weigh nothing. Very comfortable.

I don't like having to take them out, or put them in, when I change tasks to where I don't need or want them in my ears.

VR is for immersive experiences. There is a place for that. It will not be in mainstream constant use, unless "mainstream" means to plug in and be fed a false reality for somebody's profit.

Re: The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

#290

Post by ericlippert »

eevilspock wrote: post #107

> Apologies that this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter. A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Not the first time I've made that joke, but it's none the worse for having been used before.
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