Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
Maps thinks it's fine to do a u-turn on the Sydney harbour bridge.
Is this like a platform 9 3/4 thing?
Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
301–310 of 655 posts
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
No kidding. When I zoom in on a few square miles around my house and ask to see restaurants, it shows only a few of them even though there is plenty of space -- it isn't like it has to prune some to make it readable. I zoom in and some appear that weren't there before ... why? There was room to display it before I zoomed in. Gaaah!
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#303I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize. If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television. I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and wil…
Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing.
Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#304There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age. Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era. The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating. It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how…
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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#305If 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.
> This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance
I think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?
Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band! Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations. I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the intern…
But Kubernetes is solving a much messier and more complicated problem than React. There are numerous similar web frameworks to React in different languages that have been created as basically hobby projects.
Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#307I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.
The irony is that I’d totally test out replacing the CEO with AI - best bang for buck by a million miles
Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
It’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
I started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
Apple Maps has been better than Google Maps for at least 10 years and nowadays the way that Google Maps improves is often just by copying Apple Maps
I’ve agreed for a long time… Unfortunately though, Apple Maps just added Ads, so expect them to start having the same issues as Google Maps does (like showing big ads for every location whenever you’re moving around at the map).
After Apple Maps being one of my favorite reasons for having an iPhone for the last 7ish years, I’m back to OpenStreetMaps mostly, or still Google to look up business hours. Sad… but having downloaded maps will probably be a good thing long-term
Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
#310I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.
> this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals
That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.