491–500 of 507 posts
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Massive difference. You can vest and move on, even if you don’t have liquidity, which most private companies don’t for employees anyway.
Except you can only sell a prescribed amount at an undetermined time. By the earliest possible sell date you have already made 8 figures liquid at Meta.
"During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wang was roommates with his friend Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI."
Two mutli-millionaires being roommates sounds pretty strange/funny/weird to me.
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Microsoft back in the day and today still doesn’t pay top dollar. So you can’t get top talent with 65th percentile pay.
Microsoft used to have a location advantage, the Seattle area was a lot cheaper than the bay area. They've long since lost that advantage.
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Meta buys 900 AI employees here at less than $20M/head. Pretty cheap these days. Any IP the company has is a bonus.
850 people doing data labelling?
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Except you can only sell a prescribed amount at an undetermined time. By the earliest possible sell date you have already made 8 figures liquid at Meta.
Ok, but that’s a trade off anyone who works for a private company makes, and it’s never called an “effective cliff”.
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The corporate politics at Meta is the result of Zuck's own decisions. Even in big tech, Meta is (along with Amazon) rather famous for its highly political and backstabby culture. This is because these two companies have extremely performance-review oriented cultures where results need to be proven every quarter or you're grounds for laying off. Labs known for being innovative all share the same trait of allowing rese…
Interesting that "high-impact" on the one hand, and innovative/successful in the marketplace on the other, should be at odds at Meta. Makes one wonder how they measure impact.
The obvious example was writing eng docs. It was probably the single most helpful things you could do with your time, but there was no way to get credit because we couldn't say exactly how much time your docs might have saved others (the quantifiable impact from your work). That meant that we only ever developed a greater and greater unfilled need for docs, but it only ever got riskier and riskier to your career to try to dive into that work.
People were split on how to handle this. Some said "do the work that most needs doing and the perf review system will work it out long term." Other said, "just play the perf game to win."
I listened to the first group because I'm what you call a "believer." In a tech role I think my responsibility is primarily to users. I was let go (escorted off campus) after bottoming out a stack ranking during a half in which I did a lot of great work for the company that half (I think) but utterly failed to get a good score by the rules of the perf game (specifically I missed the deadline to land a very large PR and so most of my work for the half failed to make the key criteria for perf review: it had to be *landed* impact)
I think I took it graciously, but also I will never think of these companies as a home or a family again.
Largest acquihire ever, beating out oculus/carmack, also done by Zuck. Meta is not afraid to build when competing, so I propose this is interesting.
I agree. Slightly amused at the running from one side of the boat to the other. So we're done with the Metaverse now? (Or maybe the metaverse needs AI bots running around … perhaps scalping tickets or something. In fact I get it though — they're looking for the Next Big Thing — as all big companies are. I even think they're on to it this time. The whole metaverse thing was just so obviously misguided, misspent capita…
* mediated (AR/XR) environments are almost certainly going to be much more popular / used than today, likely in some new device form factors
* Demand for 3D type content and audio and text content will therefore be rising dramatically
Perhaps the least realistic part of Ready Player One was the infinite AAA content floating around; pre gen-AI it was like you’d need 3/4 of the worlds population making digital assets for the other 1/4.
Gen AI changes this, a lot. Avatars, agents, all those are deemed likely to be more compelling as video / imagery gets super cheap to generate as text and audio are now.
The bitter lesson of the AR/XR space is that — hardware is hard. I think it’s a mistake to scoff at something both Apple and Zuck are pouring billions into a priori — even if the markets don’t seem to be working out as expected right now.
I’m writing this on ipadOS beta 26, and the interface tells me that Apple is committing to visionOS type interactions over the next 10 years; the design iconography from the AVP is everywhere now.
Upshot - generative environments, agents and etc. seem likely to me to be big someday — companies with major AR/VR hardware divisions and more data than us don’t seem to be giving up on the space. Practically speaking, a lot of people really want to be able to ‘live’ at least part of the time in a generative reality that they connect to emotionally. I think we’ll see a lot more of it.
All that said, just like there are AI hype waves, and now one that looks like it ‘stuck’, metaverse has these periods. Still an open question if / when one will stick. But I think it’s likely to in the long term.
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What is the big risk here? He has the cash to burn and he has full control of his position. Nothing will happen to him if he wastes a few Billions. He is not some poor single mom who has to decide between fixing her car and paying for kid’s Christmas presents
>What is the big risk here? That this is clearly the wrong person to hire? Maybe Demis or Ilya is worth $15B but Wang? Extremely odd choice...