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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#411

Post by xigoi »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #392

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

Being a USA citizen is often not a choice. Being a Metaslop employee is a choice.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#412

Post by gloxkiqcza »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #392

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

> You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president

You actively decide to work for Meta which has been known to dishonestly violate privacy since basically day one [1]. Most US citizens were passively born as one. It’s also much easier to leave a company than to move out of USA.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu...

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#413

Post by HDThoreaun »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #365

Man, is Mark hiring someone to run this dumpster fire? I'll take a pay cut (compared to whoever is doing so now) and give it a vision to aim towards instead of the mindless laps he seems to be running through, I'll leave after a year, and it will likely still produce a better outcome than whatever is going on with it right now. I'm a nobody software developer, but I love tech and hate to see what could otherwise be s…

Mark runs the company himself for no salary. Does come with a private jet and security though

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#414

Post by joe_mamba »

jmyeet wrote: post #134
joe_mamba wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We could live in a world where people only had to work 20 hours a week or even at some point not at all. How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow? Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~8…

Your assertion seems to be that those things haven't had massive productivity gains over time. Cleary they have. Firefighters aren't carrying buckets of water or using a horse-and-cart. No, they use fire engines, helicopters and planes. They use more advanced fire suppressants and protective gear. Medical professionals have better diagnostics, health records, MRIs and other imaging equipment and so on. The medical pr…

You said a lot off-topic rtants, without answering my question directly: How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?

You mentioned a lot of tech improves since the stone age as an argument, but existing staff working 40h already use those tech advancements.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#415

Post by intended »

marcosdumay wrote: post #306
zmmmmm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to judge culture during a period of serial downsizing because it will always be toxic in that context. But what you tell aligns with what I have inferred over a period of many years observing, even during times when they were growing: at a high level, Zuck gives the right signals of a successful tech CEO. He's smart, insightful, talks well (now) and appears decisive and willing to back long term bets into…

> This is incompetent execution of an untested idea. VR will be huge some day. Maybe not as huge as the Metaverse hype, but huge nonetheless. But did you expect Facebook to have any competence on making it? Even if the timing was correct, what differentiator do they have? And then the CEO throws a world-changing amount of money without even an idea (because "a VR world!" isn't an idea). Did you expect any of that mon…

No.

VR is not going to be huge, and it misses the entire point of tech.

Think of something like a Bloomberg terminal. Ugly as sin, and incomprehensible to any one who hasn’t practiced using it. It also gets work done faster, and has a keyboard with multiple keys to get to menus faster.

BB terminals save calories. VR does not.

VR is cool, it is aspirational, but it is not saving experts, let alone the average person, time and energy.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#416

Post by noisy_boy »

loeg wrote: post #213
Henchman21 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can prevent all the leaks by having nothing bad to leak. That is what is being suggested.

I don't think leaking is limited to "bad" things.

Leaking of good things is just good "PR" - people even pay good money for that to "accidentally" happen. Wonder why nobody thinks about actually doing the good thing and not bother with the rest.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#417

Post by ffsm8 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #394
ffsm8 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is the owner though. If zuck wanted, he could solve it. Decimate middle management, downsize at a level of what musk did to Twitter and then _slowly rebuilt_ in order to pay attention to the culture this time, removing anyone that takes part in such behavior... The company would be worth more (because smaller headcount) and likely even ship more, because the culture would be better.. I've never worked at Facebook…

Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions. And also interesting in the sense that, this is what he claimed to actually do a few years ago. He had a "year of efficiency" where he significantly flattened and restructured the org, losing tens of thousands of staff. At that time I even defended him precisely due to this reasoning - if exe…

Again, I'm just an armchair analyst, but in that year of efficiency,his aim was to reduce wastage, removing low performers etc.

That kind of trimming entrenches previous culture even more, which can be desirable - but not in this particular case where the culture itself is the issue.

At that point you can't trim, you need to decimate. The layoffs at that time were several waves of around 10% - unless I misremember? If he instead did two waves with 40% each and slowly rebuilt from scratch, it'd be a different story.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#418

Post by bjohnson225 »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #392

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

> You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

The equivalent would be blaming those who chose the current president. Which would be an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#419

Post by socialcommenter »

senordevnyc wrote: post #257
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that one change requires every user to click on their friends profiles to see updates x 2.1 billion daily users and say 4 family friends checked and it takes 1 second to click that is 291,000 8 hour workdays lost per day to humanity. Around 100,000,000 work days per year humanity looses out on putting to productive use. And I am REALLY underestimating the time lost to this. Facebook is stealing low end 100 million…

How can you steal time from humanity when they freely chose to use your product? You don’t owe people a perfect product that doesn’t “waste” their time when compared to some arbitrary standard of how it should be.

Ethics and morals are not "arbitrary".

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#420

Post by pertymcpert »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #392

"Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, ..." “How do we opt out?” - Meta employee Poetic justice, or "dogfooding"

Most Meta employees do not support invasive features without opt outs in their products. Some try to argue against it. But ultimately there is only person who gets to decide. You might as well blame the entire US population for certain problematic actions of the president.

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