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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

#421

Post by dinkumthinkum »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #332
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% understand the appeal of freedom from external pressures that retirement offers. But at the same time all the (many) people I know that retired early mostly just goof off and struggle to complete any of their many projects. And don’t get me wrong, I love goofing off. Been doing plenty of it. But given my inevitable death I have to appreciate a little external pressure forcing me to do good work.

Idk external pressure is mostly forcing me to participate in the corporate hellscape - would love to leave this and goof off as a goat farmer somewhere. Let’s face it - most businesses don’t produce anything meaningful and just exist to realise the infinite growth fallacy of capitalism

What is the infinite growth fallacy? Are you familiar with the concept of dividends?

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

#422

Post by vasco »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #404
vasco wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If I wanted to receive copy paste from a bot I wouldn't message you, why are you trying to sneak this in?" You reminded me of American colleagues that lie and say things are good when they are bad lol. Unable to be straight to the point. You're upset at the waste of time yet you thank them?

Just curious: would you consider yourself autistic?

No, just like to work with eastern Europeans and got used to their communication. Now this stuff just jumps out at me.

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

#423

Post by eloisius »

gumby271 wrote: post #123
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

I've run into a similar thing where I'll be cc'd on support tickets with one of our customer support agents and they'll then reply to me with what is clearly an ai summary of the single email from the customer that I can already read. I do think they're trying to be helpful, but it's hard to not feel like they think I'm a child or an idiot. Back in the day we agreed that Googling something for someone was rude (letme…

I think it’s related to the same kind of psychology responsible for road rage. When we use a tool enough, we start to perceive it as an extension of ourselves, for better or worse. I think people that use AI to do all their writing or revision have legitimately lost the sense that it’s the output of a tool. They feel like they are helping and don’t see the different between personally writing a message for you or copying the output of Claude to you.

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

#424

Post by kortilla »

noisy_boy wrote: post #416
loeg wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, Apple famously doesn’t want stuff leaked even if it would be good.

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

#425

Post by Conscat »

xigoi wrote: post #411
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That feels reductive. It's actionable to get OCI, renounce US citizenship, and become Indian after a decade. It's just not very practical for most people. I know many people who don't work their dream job, but switching to a favorable company isn't currently practical for them.

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

#426

Post by noisy_boy »

zerreh50 wrote: post #66
bachmeier wrote: post #12

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make…

It will get really funny when they start imposing an exact number of tokens as a quota, where too little means you are an outdated luddite and too much is inefficient and wastes money

Keep squeezing that window everytime you need to fire some more people.

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

#428

Post by kelnos »

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…

> Interesting wording, because he's not the owner. What he owns is enough voting rights that nobody can challenge his decisions.

So he's the owner, for the definition that matters for GP's argument.

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

#430

Post by kelnos »

voidfunc wrote: post #336
somewhatgoated wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather be poor

Id rather not. Ive never known poverty in my life and I will do _anything_ to avoid it.

Fortunately there are many other options than "work at Meta" or "be poor".
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