Is Meta destroying its engineering organization? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#571

Post by andsoitis » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

areoform wrote: post #513

aeturnum wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was som…

These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?" Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will hav…

> I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.

What happened? I also use Wise.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#572

Post by Schlagbohrer » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:26 PM UTC

monkpit wrote: post #318

matheusmoreira wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.

Who controls the prompt? Shareholders? And how do you have confidence that the prompt is being used? Just thinking out loud, it’s an interesting idea (even if it might be terrible and dystopian).

Would be interesting to have a worker-owned coop where the workers vote on the prompt for the AI CEO.

How wild would that be if in 20 years it turns out one of the main jobs destroyed by AI is overpaid CEOs? A man can dream...

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#573

Post by aurareturn » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #267

I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize. If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television. I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and wil…

Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business.

You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#574

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #205

jmuguy wrote: post #100

I do think you have to admire how almost comically insane Zuckerberg is to do stuff like this. If Facebook was being run by someone normal what would happen is it would spend the next 20 years pissing away everything slowly as social media advertising became less and less relevant. But not with Zuckerberg at the helm. He will burn that place to the ground trying to find some way to remain important. Its surprising th…

Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.

They've previously wasted a lot of money on stupid stuff (Facebook phone, metaverse etc etc), but my impression is that they messed with their core business less in the course of doing that. Whereas now, as the article mentioned, it seems like they're just kind of breaking engineering completely.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#575

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #384

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to…

[deleted]

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#576

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:37 PM UTC

apejcic wrote: post #514

surajrmal wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Having led engineering in SF big tech and now building my own startup, I’ve heard this exact argument countless times. I believe it is precisely why large tech companies are losing their ability to innovate. Engineering shouldn't be an academic pursuit of "good engineering" for its own sake. It is fundamentally a business function. The objective is to achieve real world goals and build things people actually want, ev…

I would decouple "build things people want" from "business function". I would put in the former bucket things like: making the computer work smoothly and run apps. I would put in the latter bucket things like: show advertising to the user when the log in. Engineering should always be about the first, or it's bad engineering. The second is far more controversial - business leaders would like you to consider it good engineering to do that, but you get to interpose your own ethics, but you'll probably be fired for having ethics, but that doesn't make it bad engineering.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#577

Post by Schlagbohrer » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

rgavuliak wrote: post #552

Well paid engineers compare their experience to a labour death camp just confirms how out of touch they are.

Hyperbole is fun though. So is complaining.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#578

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

rcbdev wrote: post #480

aeturnum wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was som…

This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google. The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed. Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big…

I think in the EU this is mandated. Every algorithmic profiling decision must come with an explanation and human appeal, under GDPR?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#579

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

vovavili wrote: post #531

rcbdev wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google. The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed. Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big…

Legislating costly support for a free and accessible service is how that service stops being free and accessible.

If you can't afford to run the service without shitting all over everyone, then you can't afford to run the service.

Same argument for the living wage.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#580

Post by inigyou » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

areoform wrote: post #513

aeturnum wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was som…

These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?" Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will hav…

Google just lost a lawsuit by an unnamed big media company in Germany because its AI kept telling people the media company was a scam. This is the only form of feedback that companies like Google actually listen to.