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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#491

Post by throwaway27448 »

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?

It's rather baffling how little they've improved it in certainly the last 15 years. Waze is certainly the better consumer product, even if it relies on similar (the same?) backend software. Apple Maps has caught up and passed it in terms of usable software, even if the actual map quality is worse in some places.

For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#493

Post by meroes »

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?

My house and street and surrounding streets still aren’t on Google Maps after a month post closing (new development). It’s on Apple Maps and Uber; Amazon and FedEx deliver.

Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.

It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#494

Post by vineyardmike »

echelon wrote: post #420
casualscience wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

brain was grown in house and likely deserves as much or more credit than open ai for the current llm boom

They literally would have kept the entire thing to themselves and never productized it. Think about how much investment capital and human capital OpenAI poured onto this by having their big "hello world" with ChatGPT.

They literally had a productionized transformer model (translate) which was the inspiration for all of this. The famous paper was written about a productionized ML Model.

They also had a productionized LLM in search (known as 'mums') before the whole "AI Chatbot" craze.

They also had a chat-tuned LLM chatbot (LaMDA) in testing internally. It was shown off over a year before ChatGPT was created (2021)... and later released as an app (AI test kitchen) before ChatGPT was announced.

ChatGPT may have been the big industry moment, but Google was releasing LLMs to production before OpenAI.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#495

Post by surajrmal »

svachalek wrote: post #251
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are u…

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.

Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem.

There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a solution because it's easy and popular but not necessarily a good fit for your specific requirements, etc. Many of these practices are popular unfortunately. That's not to say others don't have great ideas, just don't copy them blindly.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#496

Post by iamacyborg »

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…

Google Maps have an address API some companies use when filling out addresses for shipments.

Despite my building existing for over 10 years, putting in “flat number, building name” into that system will be rewritten to “house number, building name road” which is an address on a he other side of town (and London ain’t exactly small).

I’ve had multiple orders go missing as a result.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#497

Post by abstractcontrol »

echelon wrote: post #361
torben-friis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are. The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.

It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state. This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx. At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring. They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners…

Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#498

Post by overfeed »

layer8 wrote: post #52
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it, because it makes a kind of sense. Post-training has a huge impact on how well LLMs perform, and labeled data is what determines the effectiveness of post-training. This is why companies like Anthropic are so worried about distillation. So if you have access to a large number of highly skilled people, and you really don't absolutely need them to do other things, why wouldn't you force data labeling tasks…

From the article: > Forced data labeling with 4,500+ engineers is to generate high-quality RLHF I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments where the now-data labelers don’t actually want to do that kind of work. It’s crazy to think that Meta leadership believed that it makes sense.

> I doubt that you get high quality from forced reassignments

Their bonuses depend on it. They'll have to play ball unless they have other jobs lined up, are ready to retire early, or prepared to be on the shitlist for the next round of layoffs due to "underperformance"

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#499

Post by dmurray »

annzabelle wrote: post #462
da_chicken wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google Maps put a town label near my parents' house that is a name that was on some old maps in the 1910s, but fell completely out of use before the current suburb was built in the 70s and 80s. I had never heard it once in my life until I was in my early 20s and met a transplant who had picked up the name from Google Maps. I attempted to report it as inaccurate (USGS has had it as being out of use for decades) multip…

Most of the neighbourhood names in my large European city were like this on Google Maps. Either old names or hyperspecific landmark/street names that I had never heard being used as synecdoche for the area.

This was definitely true 4-5 years ago. I looked now and it's mostly better at most levels of zoom.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#500

Post by aylmao »

newobj wrote: post #338
ironman1478 wrote: post #70

Having worked at meta, something I noticed is that the orgs that were well run were ones that were bought. WhatsApp, reality, insta, etc. I worked in an org that was not associated with those products and was purely homegrown and it was awful. Things got done but horribly inefficiently due to over hiring and extreme requirement and schedule shifts. I believe that the cultures that were developed outside of Meta are u…

that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.

+1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example.

Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.

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