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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

#481

Post by somewhatgoated »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #421
somewhatgoated wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The infinite growth fallacy is the belief that industrial economies can expand exponentially forever (rising GDP, consumption, and population) on a planet with finite resources.

What do dividends have to do with it?

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

#482

Post by shimman »

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.

I'm sorry but if you can work at Meta you can work at any other company in the US. You're clearly making a choice. Lets not forget "I'm just following orders" wasn't a valid excuse.

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

#483

Post by shimman »

kortilla wrote: post #424
noisy_boy wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple isn't good, it's just materialistic. Let's not conflate the two, especially since both have no issues working with authoritarians of all strips.

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

#484

Post by toast0 »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #386
toast0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I retired early and ended up going back to work part time. I didn't complete many of my projects, but that's not why I went back. Most of my projects were things I wanted to play with, not things I expected to finish. Working part time is nice because of external pressure, b…

Are you a dev? What does part time look like?

Yes, I write software. The company is 100% remote with an annual team meetup and an annual company meetup, but I only go to the team one.

4 days a week, online at 9-10 am, offline 2-3 pm most days. Sometimes I'm working a sticky problem and stay online later. Or if I start a deploy in late afternoon, I'll stick around to finish it, etc.

Still on group chats, may or may not mute them on my day off.

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

#485

Post by Forgeties79 »

somewhatgoated wrote: post #340
jimbokun wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of time I will just say “Gemini/Claude is telling me…” just like I would for a Google search result. Sometimes helpful to use the common wisdom embedded in the LLMs as a starting point for the discussion.

As soon as I read this phrase my eyes glaze over and I skip everything that comes after it. If I want the LLM answer I freaking ask it myself

I also don’t get why people keep saying “who cares so long as it’s correct?”

That’s a huge assumption! And I care a lot, because I want to know a person looked at the result and decided it was correct. If you don’t do that, you’re dumping that work on to me and ignoring that I asked you for a reason.

Anyone can open up ChatGPT and ask for a quick answer. What on earth makes people think I want them to just do that for me when I ask them a question?

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

#486

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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"

"What goes around comes around"

"You reap what you sow"

Karma (not the HN kind)

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

#487

Post by giancarlostoro »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #413
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

Maybe he should pay himself in order to have some motivation to do better… ;)

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

#488

Post by drawfloat »

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.

That’s not how the real world works. You will be kicked out of the workplace and rightly so.

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

#489

Post by sleight42 »

asveikau wrote: post #174
loeg wrote: post #170

Mark hates leakers, so it is kind of intensely funny that the NYT seems to have a direct line to probably dozens of ICs. Ultimately, it's hard to keep secrets shared with 70,000 employees.

Years ago when following what Zuckerberg did occupied more space in my brain, it struck me that he can "hate leakers" but not look inward and change his behavior in a way that doesn't upset people and make them want to leak. He is a very reactionary guy, and not a "how can I be the change" or "what did I do to cause this" kind of guy. I thought of this during his various scandals at the end of the 2010s. Everything w…

He's wealthy enough that he doesn't have to care. Sadly, he's one of many, most, who demonstrate what happens what you have unbelievable wealth: you do whatever you want to whoever you want without feeling remorse.

And why not? What does he have to fear? He controls the stock. He's not going to lose his company. He's not going to lose his wealth.

He's all but invulnerable as long as he doesn't do wrong (enough) by whatever government he lives under and sucks up enough that he can get away with the rest.

This is not an excuse. This is disgust. He, and most billionaires, are rotten bastards. It's not whether they're awful, it's how awful.

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

#490

Post by heresie-dabord »

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…

> helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.

Only 30 minutes? You have it good! ^_^

This person is creating more work for an FTE who now has both a) the original job, and b) the additional load of purging corruption from the inputs for (a). This is happening at scale.

Your tolerance for this depends on how close to capacity you are for (a). It's a tale as old as corporate time, well-documented by Office Space and Dilbert.

Work is Work. Pantomime is Pantomime , whether it's with "frontier" or low-tier LoLMs.

> There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.

What is acceptable right now is to believe that corrupting the inputs to the work of serious FTEs is somehow beneficial. You are expected to sing the revised words of the corporate anthem with your customary passion and obedience. Layoffs will continue until the morale of data centres has improved.

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