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Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#71

Post by throwarayes »

KaiserPro wrote: post #54

Former meta bellend here: Zuck only cares about features, or new features. He probably likes power too, but I'm less certain than that. To curry favour with Zuck all you need to do is make a new feature, ideally using AI/AR. The problem is, zuckerberg trusts no-one, so he is surrounded by familiar faces that act as his inner court. The problem for meta and the rest of the world, is that most of them are utter brainle…

Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped

So there’s really not a lot of growth areas for them? Their biggest growth seems to have been acquisitions, not new features.

Maybe data labeling is like RTO - an intentional way to force attrition.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#72

Post by ceejayoz »

mth1234 wrote: post #68
ceejayoz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that both kneecapped their previously quite open APIs, too.

Can’t really win here. If Facebook doesn’t have open APIs, it gets accused of being a walled garden and hoarding data. If it builds those APIs and lets third parties act with the same permissions as the authenticated user that gave permission to that third party, it gets Cambridge Analytica.

The changes I'm referring to are much later than the CA scandal.

In the last few years, they've locked third-party apps out of publishing to Facebook Groups, closed down the bug ticket system, and gave every indication of having abandoned any efforts at improving the ecosystem.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#73

Post by jghn »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #64
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.

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over. Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial…

As an engineer, this realization was eye opening for me and had a massive impact to my approach. So few of those things that we're trained to approach with care and caution *really* matter at the end of the day. Sure, my engineering sensibilities and professional pride keep me honest to some extent. But the money inflow is what really matters, and engineering quality is just one very small piece of the puzzle for that.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#75

Post by HardlyCognizant »

monster_truck wrote: post #19
vinni2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they collude and hatch a plan to sabotage the LLM training.

Are there any examples of this actually working? I keep seeing this fantasy repeated but have not seen a plausible explanation for how they wouldn't be contibuting to the pile of negative examples which are just as valuable if not more.

Poison pilling skills is a thing, though finding evidence for it is difficult given the crux is an absence of information. The baseline instruction and training is given to the model by the expert, but edge cases are willfully neglected. The degree of neglect generally determines how detectable it is, but if all the SMEs are in on it a lot of them will probably persist. Effectiveness and impact are obviously relative to the system and the edge case. Not particularly different from the fallout previously seen during the offshoring era.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#76

Post by throwarayes »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

I think it says more about Metas inability to create new products or make investments.

Look at their big growth areas. They acquired instagram and WhatsApp. Threads seems successful(?) but is an extension of instagram.

Mostly they’ve just gotten better at weaponizing rage bait. Which I’d argue, long term, will be a losing strategy.

If this were a healthy culture, with all the people working there, Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#78

Post by shimman »

jazzpush2 wrote: post #69

This sounds bad to say, but it's difficult to feel bad for any meta engineers who lost their jobs. You undoubtedly had other options, yet you chose to work for one of the most well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organizations on the planet. Former employees will deflect and make the comparison to United Fruit workers, despite the obvious difference in employee-optionality and influence. You made your bed. I hope you…

They won't reflect, these people literally have no morales. The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.

edit: sorry but if you purposely to chose to work at Meta after 2016 you clearly have zero morals and are fine with working at a company that not only willingly exacerbated a genocide but knowingly profited off of it too.

These workers can't be condemned enough, some of these devs should be in prison too.

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#79

Post by throwarayes »

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.

Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.

Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.

Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?

Re: Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

#80

Post by tonfa »

CyLith wrote: post #10
djeastm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources Would it? It seems like they can spend a few months extracting intelligence and "taste" from their engineers then get years worth of it back from the AI.

I wouldn't trust any engineers I know of with their "taste". At best it's a highly skewed view of the world. At worst, it's outright opposite to genpop.

I assume taste was meant in term of coding. "taste" is still often the lacking trait that LLMs have when it comes to code design.
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