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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#591

Post by [deleted] »

surajrmal wrote: post #584
apejcic wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Considering the large increases in revenues bug tech extracts year over year, the maintenance and small improvements are not necessarily completely disregarding the business side of things. You cannot keep sustained performance without proper practices. Too much short term thinking like you see in startups leads to loss of confidence that new changes won't break existing customers, or hellish on call that no one want…

[deleted]

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#592

Post by lokar »

galkk wrote: post #505
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.

Dremel/big query Spanner Borg Chrome None of those were acquisitions

And they solved real, hard problems the company was facing for which there were no good external solutions.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#593

Post by MRaid »

I feel that most of the Procedures that they took to push AI are inherently wrong i,e full time data labelling relocation won't be appreciated by anyone why not part time ?? also Measuring token usage is weird. It is true that exectives are so hyped on AI but these procedures are shortsighted and poorely thought of

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#594

Post by Citizen_Lame »

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?

I would say Google Maps regressed, over bloated, showing ads or at least unrelated results. Mysterious hang-ups, where app refuses to work every once in a while.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#595

Post by alex1138 »

chvid wrote: post #62

Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come. But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data? It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.

"Strong businesses"

Like the feeds not showing any posts, like a login wall on everything, like... god. Any Zuckerberg products

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#596

Post by alex1138 »

thraway3837 wrote: post #366

Um. What's there to engineer at Meta? They are an ad-tech company. I thought the HN crowd would make fun of them for this. For years. But now I guess AI coding is easier to pick on than advertisements? There's nothing at Meta that other companies (engineers) haven't already solved. It's not impossible to load to millions of pictures per second and have them displayed to billions of users. Just the other day, there wa…

How about proper account support? Not getting banned while the racist page you report 'doesn't violate community standards'? How about being able to actually see people's posts in the feed?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#597

Post by [deleted] »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #257

I think the gloating in this thread is very misguided. Meta is evil, sure, but that's not the point. The point is that this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals. My last workplace absolutely did a jump in toxicity when the CEO got obsessed with AI, instituted token leaderboards, told us all to drop all non-AI work for a time, etc. We were no Meta.

[deleted]

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#598

Post by classified »

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…

A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Zuck is a shit CEO and he has shittier lieutenants which makes sense because having anyone competent under him would make him look bad, comparatively.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#599

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #568
siraris wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I worked for a year and a half at an AI startup that was way ahead of the curve on leveraging LLM's and other generative models. Like way ahead. I lost my job there months ago, but I can tell you that the AI psychosis is real and I watched it before a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac. Multiple people who had wo…

Can someone explain to me the symptoms of AI psychosis that you have witnessed? Because I know several 2nd hand stories of people going through this but I haven't seen it myself up close. I am curious about it because this is gonna be the new widespread-social-ill of the next decade

I work with one guy who's just completely lost the ability consensus-build ideas with human beings. When he reaches consensus with his AI assistants on a design, analysis, plan of action, etc., he's extremely resistant to considering any other options or accepting any other input. When people do push back, he makes insinuations that they had better get with the times or AI is going to replace them. An AI native developer, of course, would not ask annoying questions like "what is the purpose of this change" or "how do you know this will make things better"; this is a time for action, don't you see?

Fortunately for me, he's not senior enough to make my life miserable. But if he ran our engineering org I have no doubt he'd inflict many of the same problems the source article describes on us. Reassigning software engineers to data labeling has all the hallmarks of an idea that came through this process; any human manager would immediately identify the obvious, showstopping problems with it, but to an AI whose experience of the world is exclusively mediated through written text it's not so obvious.

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