I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?
Misidentifying talent
91–100 of 167 posts
Re: Misidentifying talent
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price I don't think the parent is making a strong claim in this direction, moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them. Other companies are also quite profitable or have strong market caps but are also not innovating and prefer to acquire new innovations (Oracle being a prime example).
I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…
> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators?
There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out.
Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development.
They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean salary at Meta is around 500K, it looks like at least half of their workforce is engaged in R&D.
What are they getting for this investment? Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus were all acquisitions. Facebook Messenger came out in 2008.
I get that some of them are working to optimize their advertising revenue stream. Does this require 20-30K+ highly qualified engineers and support FTEs?
Something else is going on. My guess is that it's a form of Parkinson's Law, only with IT engineers instead of British civil servants.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#93Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway? We seem like implementation units. Someone else makes decisions and creates tickets for devs to work on.
> Are developers really counted on for innovation anyway?
Not like in the 'old days'. A Google developer came up with Gmail, rememeber?
It seems like ideas come out of meetings at bigger companies. If a developer has an idea, he needs to create a startup.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…
> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out. Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development. They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean s…
I've been dabbling in AI recently, and I keep seeing FB's name appear all over the place. They were associated with some work that wrote human readable instructions on how to cook something- given only a list of ingredients. I have no idea why they are interested in cooking, but there logo was watermarked on every page of the deck. I've also read how they are building a really big and fast computer cluster to do ML. I don't know what they are doing on it, but they probably doing some R and some D.
So, yeah, I have FB on my list of innovators.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#95Moneyball (book 2003, movie 2011) describes how Oakland Athletes build their baseball team in 2002 based on statistical analysis of player performance. Then around 2008-2009, Houston Rockets, and Golden State Warriors (Oakland) started to apply similar analysis to basketball, and started to find the value of having quickly moving players who throw precisely, to score 3 point shots, even if these players are not as ta…
happening in American Football as well with more aggressive play calling on 4th down and in the red zone due to analytics. There are also teams using tools to calculate "game speed" vs traditional testing to help scouting be more accurate
Re: Misidentifying talent
#96I'm sorry if this is off-topic, but why do people make websites with 250+ characters per line? Like, I can copy the link into Safari and press the "Reader View" button there to make it actually readable but I'm more wondering that if someone puts so much effort into writing content why don't they take the ~1 hour for some very basic CSS to get the default experience to be enjoyable?
Literally the reason why he won't fix it is because typographers were condescending to him: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1228042394727149568
Re: Misidentifying talent
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are we assuming that short term changes in share price I don't think the parent is making a strong claim in this direction, moreso that Facebook/Meta has very few new innovations and prefers to acquire them. Other companies are also quite profitable or have strong market caps but are also not innovating and prefer to acquire new innovations (Oracle being a prime example).
I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…
>>If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators?
These companies have one cash cow business, and they want to hire the best people they can to keep the lights on. These people tend to go around selling their skills to other places who want the same.
That's pretty much all there is to it. Innovation isn't even the goal of middle management in any large people operation. If anything its the opposite, no body wants disruption in established order of things.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happening in golf now too.
How is it applied to golf?
Re: Misidentifying talent
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the comment as being critical of Facebook. "Not being able to innovate" seems like a critical statement, indicating a failure on their part. However, they are an incredibly successful company. If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? Their hiring process should be specifically geared towards hiring the people that will execute the way Facebook wants to execute. Given th…
> If Facebook is successful not innovating, why would they want to hire innovators? There's a larger question that I'm still trying to work out. Meta has something like 71K employees at this point and spends over $21B a year in research and development. They don't give head counts for how many personnel are performing R&D work, but if you assume that most of their R&D costs go to employee salaries and that the mean s…
> I've been dabbling in AI recently, and I keep seeing FB's name appear all over the place. They were associated with some work that wrote human readable instructions on how to cook something- given only a list of ingredients. I have no idea why they are interested in cooking, but there logo was watermarked on every page of the deck. I've also read how they are building a really big and fast computer cluster to do ML. I don't know what they are doing on it, but they probably doing some R and some D. So, yeah, I have FB on my list of innovators.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of innovation going on at Facebook. That's guaranteed to happen when you have as much talent as they do.
Why isn't it translating over to their core business? Why do they have to continue to acquire companies (e.g., Oculus) to have potential areas for growth?
It doesn't make any sense. They would have more significantly success if they simply took half of their engineers, organized them into teams of 3-4 people, and gave each team $1-2M in startup capital VC style. Let's say they can create 2.5K teams. This would cost them $2.5B - $5B, or about than one tenth of what they spent last year in stock repurchases.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful. The devil is as always in the details. At least as far as KPIs go, they can be very useful if they are chosen appropriately and if the senior team members have all bought in to the concept. Example: I used…
I agree with everything you say except the bit where the failure rate is a fantastic KPI. It has room for improvement. > they have a requirement in most areas to be airborne within 30 minutes when called. [...] "percentage of the time where maintenance can't get an aircraft ready to be flying missions in less than 30 minutes". The problem with this KPI is that it's completely arbitrary. Why does it have to be 30 minu…
30 minutes is not arbitrary in the context of search and rescue. When someone has fallen overboard on a Naval vessel in most parts of the world's oceans their survival time is as short as 30 minutes: https://ussartf.org/cold_water_survival.htm
In rare circumstances the water can be much colder than average and this drops below 30 minutes, but for the most part the military operates in waters with survival time no lower than 30 minutes.