Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 566 posts

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

#471

Post by dijksterhuis »

trollbridge wrote: post #466
dijksterhuis wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've already got my agent building a dossier for everyone we interact with. I haven't started training it on their writing style so I can mirror back to them... yet. have you asked these people how they feel about this? have you asked them for permission, for their consent to do this with their communications to you? what you’re doing sounds incredibly creepy . like, meta/facebook kinda of creepy. granted, it’s at…

Well, implicit in the TOS of things like Gmail, etc. is already permission to do this.

does that make it morally okay to do with your colleagues?

like, jfc, these are fucking people were talking about building “dossiers” of. people the person works with where a degree of trust and bonding is necessary. people they probably spend at least a quarter of their waking hours interacting with.

and your defence for it is “well, google does it”.

the best engineers know what not to build. they don’t build every single thing under the sun because they can.

also, don’t you have to explicitly agree to google’s terms for that stuff to use their services?

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

#472

Post by epsteingpt »

smrtinsert wrote: post #439
epsteingpt wrote: post #436

Meta employees as a whole are highly insecure, both from a job security and a 'status' perspective. People jump ship to the latest thing (which was the Metaverse, now is the internal AI lab). There's a massive restructuring going on - layoffs, reorgs - and an even more ruthless performance bar. The internal spying is common across companies. The extent would shock most 'big company' employees. The realization and ang…

From the third party perspective, it feels like gambling to me. I can't imagine being ok with knowing everything keystroke you make is being tracked to train a model, most likely to replace you. I can't imagine ever wanting to work there, thought that for a long time. "It's full of brilliant people". Well, the profession is quite honestly, there are plenty of places to work.

That's changing quickly, and Meta pays extremely well.

Not so easy for 3-4 year kids out of school to make $500K-$600K.

The supergenius quanty ones go to Jane Street and the smart product-y ones jump ship to OpenAI or Anthropic (e.g. Boris) but there just aren't 20,000 high paying roles out there.

Anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves.

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

#473

Post by financltravsty »

omgitspavel wrote: post #402
giancarlostoro wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team matching). There's a reason why the average tenure is I would be surprised if I even got through the interview hellscape that these companies put people through. I'm not interested in talking about algorithms and things that no dev in my entire decade+ time on the industry ever tal…

A decade+ is plenty of time to spend a few weeks brushing up on CS basics. There is really only a handful of algorithms and data sctructues and none of them are rocket science. And what's the alternative? Quizzing people on some random C# framework methods? The "I don't use algos in a day to day job" argument has been around forever, but nobody making it ever proposes a better filter.

Strong no hire for Staff+ signal from this post.

Meta's leetcode gambit includes leetcode Hards and Mediums which aren't just "remember your hash maps and trees!" They're incredibly hard to brute force under time pressure if you haven't practiced similar problems before. Now do that for every interview -- exhausting.

Alternative? Lol? System design. "Walk me through systems you've built." Have a conversation. If you can't then maybe you don't have the skill for interviewing or dare I say the skill to be an engineer.

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

#474

Post by Balgair »

menloshark wrote: post #198

Here's how things play out: Zuck gets some idea, he's surrounded by a bunch of yes men who say "yes, this will definitely change the world", then it turns into this optics game of kissing the ring. You ask yourself "how could they blow 80B on the Metaverse like that", this is how. DON'T JOIN META, no matter how fast the recruiters reply to your messages. No matter how cool the work sounds (the managers lie in team ma…

https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea...

I mean, the book is just over a year old here people. It's not like this is new or out of date stuff.

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

#475

Post by therealpygon »

erentz wrote: post #210
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…

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

[flagged]

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

#476

Post by unD »

pinkgolem wrote: post #268
Avicebron wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My default is that I won't copy and paste anything that's AI generated in communications. I kind of think that's the line. Use whatever you want in the background, but I want to communicate with the synthesis of your thoughts. I think this is a reasonable standard to hold, otherwise, like many before have said...send me the prompt. It's actually more interesting/better I know a coworker is struggling to communicate a…

I mean, i struggle with spelling/wording and ask the LLM to proofread a lot. I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. It's not a bad way to extend your vocabulary & catch spelling mistakes

I'm pretty sure most non-native speakers (one here) do the same. I'm not talking about three-paragraph-long Slack thread, but even a single message where I feel otherwise unable to convey what I need _the way_ I want.

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

#477

Post by mathgladiator »

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

I'm going to raise cattle.

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

#478

Post by mathgladiator »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #256
mathgladiator wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OR join meta, sell your soul, stay for 7 years, then retire and be done with work forever!!!

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.

After early retirement, it took be a solid 3 years to undo the mentality of needing to work. Now, I ride my bike with my wife as we fight her MS. I show up for her and myself.

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

#479

Post by Forgeties79 »

bandrami wrote: post #352
Forgeties79 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is no doubt that some companies are going to radically change their operations because of agentic coding in particular. But the revolution that is being promised, and the investment that has gone along with it, is going to smash against some pretty nasty shoals of reality sooner rather than later

Some are going to radically change their operations, but we have yet to actually see if the ROI on that comes through for them. It will be an interesting thing to watch.

Fair point. My implication (though I completely failed to indicate it lol) is that for some companies it will be a huge, mostly positive change I imagine. But it won’t be the majority of the companies trying to make that happen right now that’s for sure. Unless we want to consider every company deploying a chat bot for user support I guess…though I wouldn’t exactly say that is the massive leap in technology AI is promising
Post reply on HN