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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#441

Post by laweijfmvo »

menloshark wrote: post #424

From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen. It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org. On partner teams, attrition seems to…

it’s worth paying attention to what the stock price was 4 years ago for the next year or so

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#442

Post by stackghost »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #289
svachalek wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar experience at Google, they were so convinced they were the only good engineering company in the world and had to protect themselves from all the wrong-thinkers outside and yet the only progress they made was via acquisitions.

You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?

I'd say it's much worse than it used to be.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#443

Post by fragmede »

lobf wrote: post #407
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say, isn't React something to hold against Meta? Being intimately familiar with it, I don't consider it a positive contribution to the world.

I work in film, not software engineering, but I've heard lots of shade thrown on React for a long time, mostly for this reason- messy code. The question I have is, does React somehow encourage or enable code that is messier than in other frameworks? Why is it so popular if it's so widely hated? There's something I'm missing here.

It's got a number of really nice Quality of Life (QoL) features, but who's going to go into the Internet and be positive about something? At best you'd be called a shill or astroturfing. If it's the younger crowd they'll be sure you call you cringe. So why would you hear anything positive about React. Or life in general when you can just be negative? That has a number of broader implications for society that aren't get to get solved here.

As far as React goes, it's composable, which means I can create a and then put a inside that, and then later on in a wizard, I can put the and it's totally fine. This means I don't have to write the same fucking code, ever. If the people im working with know their shit, as the progtammer, I never have to see the css/stylistic code/elements unless I go looking in another file for them. No shit the CSS is a distraction when I'm trying to write a code that is not CSS. It's all JavaScript. This is a good thing, but people that grew up hearing that JavaScript sucks have never challenged that successfully, so having React forced upon them just sticks in their craw. This is a good thing because JavaScript runs on bother the server and the client/your laptop, so as the programmer, you don't have to switch contexts as your work on the app. Before this current bout of "you will all lose your job to AI" there's always been waves of newcomers too the field that "didn't know what they were doing", and that we were supposed to shun them for it. (And that JavaScript was was only for noob designers.) So you have to balance everything you hear with that sort of negativity. If everyone your age minus 10 was here to take your job and will work for $200k less a year, and they started learning react the year it came out, same as you, how do you think FilmNews forum would sound? The film industry banded together to ban AI script writing and other tools, so we'll have to see how that pans out. React is fine. Any large app is just going to be messy. And proprietary. Open Source is great, but the number of success stories are few, and not at all replicable. (If someone has a project with one that isn't "sell support", I'm all ears.)

The fact that people bitch about it is a good thing. It's when they don't that Facebook needs to worry about things. (Oh yeah also it's from Facebook, and that's not exactly an industry neutral employer. As we see here. If someone told you they work at Meta, what, are you not going to sleep with them? Two million dollars of RSUs buys a lot of not giving a shit. What are we going to vote to underfund the bus they already don't take, that we also don't take?)

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#444

Post by defrost »

Animats wrote: post #434
JacobAsmuth wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?

Google bought Google Earth from Keyhole. I had a Keyhole account long before Google was in the business, and it worked about like Google Earth does now.

Keyhole dates back to 2001 and draws on several precursors, eg: ERMapper (Perth, Western Australia) which offered similar functionality in the 1990s - in addition to computational process pipelines for, say, warping and geomosaicing inputs, multi spectral filtering (adding and subtracting weighted bands to sharpen certain features, etc).

ER Mapper was the first software I dog fooded that transferred images without the dial up scan line by scan line top down process that existed to that point in time.

The same discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and variation techniques occurred to several entities at much the same time .. some US patent pettiness killed a lot of development for a couple of years from 1999 forward:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#445

Post by Ferret7446 »

da_chicken wrote: post #388
JacobAsmuth wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?

My best friend bought a house. She noticed within the first month that the name of the road she lived on was misspelled in Google Maps. Specifically, it's a slightly unusual spelling of the road name. Like "Chickorie" vs "Chickory". It's particularly annoying because there's a road the next town over with the traditional spelling. It doesn't even share address numbers, but Google Maps still frequently misdirects peop…

Usually street data comes from an official source. You probably should have reported the issue to the local government rather than Google. (Just because the name is correct on some government material doesn't mean it's correct everywhere.)

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#446

Post by maxnevermind »

mancerayder wrote: post #58
fabian2k wrote: post #4

> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more. This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total…

Isn't that Scale AI investment in a company that does labeling? what are we missing? Are we all going to be labelers soon too?

Plot twist: we already are through the usage of AI lab's API.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#447

Post by mwambua »

ux4 wrote: post #432

Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface: > I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left. > On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure. This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo wa…

It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#448

Post by gitonup »

PaulHoule wrote: post #380
gitonup wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday. Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer? React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?

They aren't directly competitive (you wouldn't pick one or the other as product) but they are the premier open source projects of the two companies in terms of industry impact and they both reflect the engineering culture. (e.g. I am picking one as an exemplar for other software... like I want to make something like React instead of make something like Kube) With just a little bit of hyperbole: The culture of Google…

> The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products.

This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.

In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.

Meta is just a newer company than Google.

> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.

I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.

> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.

The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?

Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#449

Post by tagyro »

criddell wrote: post #346
tagyro wrote: post #212

Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0]. Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go. Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move. Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1]. Meanwhile, @Meta is…

> Why are you still working there? Probably for the same reasons you go to work everyday.

Definitely not.

I work to put food in the table.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#450

Post by jatins »

spamizbad wrote: post #390
lokar wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.

To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.

Yes, but hiring someone with no experience running an AI lab to run your AI lab is a terrible decision for CEO to make in the first place.
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