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 your organization gets destroyed. I hope you reflect on the damage you've caused the world.

I've held a short list of organizations I wouldn't ever work for, for a long while. Meta is on that list, but so are most of the big tech companies you see in the various anagrams.

It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

I started doing this, but so many companies are bad that it's pretty career-limiting. Ultimately every company is, or one day will be, solely focused on "maximize shareholder value forever" as their one and only imperative. You just have to find the least bad ones.

I would love to learn if people have structured approaches for identifying companies that are in that "least bad" band, but yeah, I agree that as long as we have a system based on extreme wealth inequality, it's going to be pretty difficult to find moral work. At the end of the day most of us are working to make billionaires richer--in the best case we do that by genuinely creating value, but frequently it's about taking money away from some middle or lower class person (however indirectly).

>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organization out there which need talented engineers?

A company's impact on the world isn't a good/bad binary, it comes in degrees. In the case of Meta, they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda (or at least that's my feed, and what appears to be the general consensus on the Internet), and they are clearly very close with the far-right Trump administration. Never mind "ordinary" bad things like pushing ads, building addictive ad tech, etc.

> they are _aggressively_ promoting far-right wing propaganda

In my feed, they are aggressively pushing an approximately equal mix of woke and far-right propaganda. It just depends on what the Meta model decided you and your friends are into.

Truth be told, the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React.

I won't color any large entity uniformly bad at all times and aspects.

> the Meta engineering organization created PyTorch and React

People created PyTorch and React, they happen to be working at Meta at the time.

Maybe it's unlikely they'd create those working elsewhere, but I think it's much more unlikely that someone else at Meta would have created the same thing without those people there.

Totally agree. And who cares, the internet, computers and web apps worked before and will work after those go away. It's not like React is some irreplaceable genius invention, it's just a framework like Ember, Angular, etc etc. The people who made them are no doubt amazing, but what I'm saying is we're not "in debt" to Meta for these tools at all.

> 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.

One day, when there is no job for you, you will look back on this moment and chide your past self.

There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

Regardless of what their hiring process screens for, it's safe to say that people able to pass screening for Meta are able to get work elsewhere. It is never an engineers only option, although it may be the only one in a certain luxurious compensation tier.

And while it's true that many organizations carry dirty laundry, especially as they scale into larger organizations with fingers in more pies, Meta's business model is specifically to maximize engagement by any means available so that it can sell their eyeballs to the most lucrative advertising opportunities.

In Facebook's early days and as Whatsapp continues to do, their products may incidentally provided a useful societal function for earnestly connecting people in the way that those people wanted to be connected. But there's no way to look at it through the lens of a socially responsible business -- a qualitative difference from an organization simply not having "clean hands".

> There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.

I imagine the stupid enterprise business software I make is way less bad than "our algo is making teenage girls kill themselves".

If you were remote and LCOL or MCOL you've also made significant inroads towards retirement after just a couple years at Meta.

Like, you can go be a middle school teacher and probably be fine if you stuffed the sack while the stuffing was good.

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.

> Zuck would have promoted far more interesting internal experiment to full blown products. That just doesn’t seem to happen there

I don't understand this either, there are so many clearly advantageous ideas and experiments to be be carried out, that can make discussions better, thinking clearer and help people actually connect. But instead they're only thinking about how to optimize the ad-machine in the end, so depressing to see.

>Threads ... rage bait

The advertisements within Instagram for Threads almost always seem to be fairly thinly disguised engagement & rage bait. Every time it gets me, I feel an increasing desire to move away from the whole ecosystem.

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.

> The only thing they value is money and giving teenage girls depression.

You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?

You really think them and only them are the people capable of doing whatever technical things are causing the problems you perceive?

"Someone else would be willing to ruin this, so I may as well ruin it and get paid for it" is not a direction everyone wants to, or even is willing to go.

Where do you draw the line?

You're a TVC in the kitchen at Meta? All you do is give girls depression?

You work at a business that buys ads on Meta? Is all you do is give girls depression? Even if you work in a non-profit branch specifically to do out-reach for kids or something??

How far separated from Meta do you have to be to not be reduced to doing nothing but giving girls depression?

Obviously it’s a spectrum, no? Anyone contributing to the edifice is in some way furthering its core mission (giving girls depression, or utterly destroying society, depending on who you ask).

At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere, devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc. At the other end is, let’s say, the cleaning staff. Meta would suffer if either group outright refused to work for them, but their mission is affected more by the engineers, they are harder to replace, they have many more options in terms of alternative employment, and they have greater knowledge of the impact of the business. Thus, they bear (much) higher relative moral responsibility. Compare to the cleaning staff, who, because of their relative lack of standing, agency (they likely work for some other company that Meta contracts with), or other options, bear negligible moral responsibility, even though their absence would likely make Meta’s offices uninhabitable.

Everyone working there is somewhere on that spectrum. They can make their own judgements about the degree to which they bear any moral culpability, but it’s not unfair to say that someone working on open source at Facebook still contributes to the overall mission by oss-washing facebook’s reputation, promulgating the brand into the engineering consciousness, etc., even if they are not directly contributing to giving girls depression.

> At one end of the spectrum you have very talented, smart engineers who could easily get a job anywhere

Not exactly...

> devoting their lives to targeting ads, surveillance, brain-hacking the masses with the algorithm in order to sell more ads, etc.

Nice try, but most of engineering at Meta has almost as much to do with this as the food staff...

So the question remains - if you're an engineer working on nothing related to any of that - most of Meta - why is your work reduced to "destroying girls lives" but the TVC's working in the kitchen are not?

Why are people working at GM, who have a large ad spend on Meta, not destroying girls lives? But the people working on storage compression algorithms to save on hardware costs are??

Why is the TVC not bad, but the person working on decorating the offices is?

Your obsession about teenage girls is worrying

EDIT: my bad, I read you wrong and didn't realize you didn't bring up the whole tenage girl thing. Sorry for that.

Nice dodge.

I'm directly addressing OP's original comment that "all anyone at Meta does is give girls depression."

It's almost as if it's not that reductive... even though you just made the same reduction...

Want to answer the actual question?

I remember before FB was a thing and sharing photos with your friends was a huge pain in the ass. We had dozens of different websites in this days from MySpace to some weird ones that you've never heard of before. They all did the same thing as FB even to the point of having a very similar UI. The whole "damage to the world" thing is lost on me. I was in college when FB came out and we all were eagerly trying to get an invite to the site. You could only sign up with an EDU email at the beginning. Before Facebook there were magazines for teenagers that set the same exact standards and had the same exact issues.

Very interesting, never heard the term before but are there more philosophical concepts tying in the ideas of solidarity and labor movements?

Thanks for sharing the paper. Going to read it tonight, the abstract is very interesting.

Do you really think the guy branding thousands of people working at Meta as basically pedophiles can really be said to care about "solidarity"? I certainly wouldn't consider someone a peer if they randomly go and call me a pedophile because of where I work. I'm sure 95% of people working there have 0 relation to the algorithm decisions and definitely have no particular fixation on giving teenage girls depression.

Someone else isn’t a 1:1 replacement, when people refuse to work for you you’re stuck offering higher wages and or taking worse employees.

How well a job is compensated on average very much depends on how willing and able the average person is to do it.

>You really think if they didn't work there, someone else wouldn't?

What does that have to do with any person's individual morals?

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.

Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.

Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

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 used to launder the image that meta as a whole has a good engineering culture.

I had a friend who worked for Instagram post-acquisition left and came back to a team in Facebook.

They had always sung the praises of Instagram's culture but said they didn't recognize the company that they came back to. Literally night and day between the best and worst place they'd worked.

Instagram hasn't updated its web application in years -- leaving out the filters which I don't use, unfunded Mastodon has an easier, faster and more reliable interface to upload photos.

Turns out you don't actually need top-tier engineering talent if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

> if your only business is selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly?

Don’t forget failed, mentally ill, manic rebrands that cost billions and go nowhere.

Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

the ceo of a former company I was at demanded a rebrand like 6 months after our internal rebrand. Cost ~500k-800k USD.

Turned out he was schtupping the vp of the design company (his wife told the admin assistant during the divorce)

I wouldn't be surprised if a much larger proportion of big business and politics boiled down to this

Yeah there's lots of ethics rules and stuff about it but we've seen how little the upper class cares about that

Whenever a big business deal goes down, I tend to assume someone's getting sex or money out of the deal

Frankly there's already just so much corruption that we know about and it seems unlikely we know about all of it or even most of it

A friend of mine has actually posited a variation of this as way to predict the outcomes of legal cases

Or alternatively, it takes some time to destroy a codebase that was created over decades to a point in that it scares the end-users.

Or they got people so addicted/dependent on their social-media crack that they can't quit, regardless of how bad and dangerous the product becomes.

> selling ads to scammers to prey on the elderly

I thought that was YouTube's business model.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to purchase some phony dick pills and diabetes snake oil to go with my fake NASA-designed air conditioner.

Maybe it was needed until recently and today the scale and monopoly is sufficiently well oiled that a couple 1M$/month programmers with some clankers can ship some new buttons and keep it running?

You need a set of good lead engineers in monetisation who can hide the fraud well enough from the rest of the company

because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy. i don't think they'll be able to avoid that outcome, instead they'll die trying. maybe their capital and network will be enough to buy them time to fully pivot to hw, though that's probably less of a moat than i believe it is while wearing the rosy glasses of an EE

software is now free, at least for the people that know the proper incantations required to manifest it into existence. software-only companies have no future. sending old-world SWEs into the undiscovered country results in high costs to the unprepared SWEs and high costs to their financiers who lose control as soon as the boots on the ground realize the wildfire is too close for comfort and new winds are blowing

the only viable way to separate assets from liabilities (payroll) fast enough for large corps to catch up with the growing number of claude-unicorn centaurs, and small herds of them, will be bankruptcy (could be wrong, i'm no lawyer)

Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.

Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)

As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.

> 30-50% of engineers on core teams have been forcefully reassigned to data labeling and RLHF, upsetting folks even more.

This really doesn't sound believable to me, but who knows with all the craziness going on. Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources. And the percentage sounds very high, unless "core teams" is only a small subset of the total developer count.

> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.

The frontier work is on labeling and training expert content, by experts. It's unglamorous work and almost certainly doesn't warrant FAANG pay, but neither did most of the work that most FAANG engineers were already doing. But it does require competent talent from the expert domain.

Like their peer companies, Meta is still sitting on a huge pool of vetted-as-competant workers from the hiring boom and expert AI training is the most ripe business opportunity in a fragile economy where pretty much every comparable opportunity has evaporated.

> Software developers in the US are seriously expensive, using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources.

Zuck basically went to a town hall and explained to his employees that their remaining value to him is as training mules for his AI.

Zuck literally said that he wants folks with higher intelligence on the Applied Intelligence team. And the best way to do that was to move folks internally, since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.

Soooo, yes it is a waste of resources ($$$). But this was the initial intention.

The belief that engineers are not doing anything for x amount of time that could be better spent on other immediately measurable things is as old as the profession itself.

Ironically this vanishes when the tables are turned and we ask for things like better hardware or software. There are plenty of us here with stories of how much effort it took to convince employers that SSDs were worth it when they were new, small, and very expensive.

One of the funniest things is how hard it was to get approval for a $100 software license but now people are being encouraged to burn thousands on tokens.

I don't know what Cold Harbor means in a Meta context, but its interesting that its named after the battle that exemplified Grant's strategy of attrition during the American Civil War. I suspect it means waves of engineers ground down against the defenses of OpenAI/Anthropic in the hopes of eventually finding a crack. Might be best to get out while you can.

>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.

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.

Isn't that Scale AI investment in a company that does labeling? what are we missing? Are we all going to be labelers soon too?

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 on them?

Facebook is also planning a 10% layoff, so this also works as encouragement for people to leave voluntarily.

(Before you downvote me, note that I'm not endorsing this or saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that I believe it's true, because I can see how Facebook's leadership would think it's a good idea.)

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.

Do the skills these people have overlap with the skills needed for a good data labeler? I'm guessing being a domain expert is most valuable as a data labeler.

unironically if those engineers were considered to be 'bloat' its better to have them label data because they are smarter and vetted

basically a soft layoff

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 software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.

> engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

That's because your engineering career coincides with a race to the bottom, where advertising-saturated, FOMO-afflicted consumers demonstrated a preference for accumulating as many cheap/free/subsidized things that they could over a few durable, valuable things that genuinely benefit them.

It wasn't always that way, and if the economy does encounter a strong correction, it could very well change again.

It has always been this way though. Who is really qualified to evaluate something but another engineer? Perhaps the first record of a slop product is the Complaint to Ea-nāṣir from 1750 BC.

Not always. I think it's an inherent failure mode of markets when everyone is playing by the same rules.

You could simply invoke Goodhart's law: If the purpose of a business is to make money, its ability to make money is not a good measure of the value it creates. Except when there are competitors playing under different rules. Then capitalists need to make better products and services than their non-capitalist competitors to be able to make money in countries that can buy from either side.

During the Cold War, the planned economies of the communist block provided the necessary competition. When that competition disappeared, financialization gradually took over. Now there is China, which seems to be a command economy that uses markets as a tool and prioritizes the real economy over finances. Maybe it will provide enough competition to force capitalists behave again.

It's usually just that the core product was built a long time ago, and that's 95% of what customers want.

There's always the option of getting rid of all the engineers working on new stuff, and having a small support staff. Often times, customers would even prefer that.

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.

Ah, but that is the old world, before AI. Given AI, dumb leaders can trash a business at the speed of thought.

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?

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 that people working there apparently thought they weren't going to get burned.

At some point and scale, engineering (and "other" people, really) become a liability than resource. This is where the rot within surfaces through the tainted skin and there's no stopping it. It just gushes and scorches everything—people, goodwill, cultural relevance, and all.

It makes sense that you need the best engineers to do the labelling. But the story very much sounds like a panic move.

"Things are going so fast and we need to catch up. Yesterday."

But you still have humans working for you. I doubt these label people are putting in their best efforts...

"If you log into your personal bank account, does the tool track you? What about when you’re writing a personal email, or responding to a personal call?"

Why would you ever do such a thing on a device controlled by your employer?

I guess there's a whole generation of devs who don't remember the Microsoft antitrust trial, and haven't learned the "anything you do at work may come out in discovery" lesson.

People act surprised when they are tracked on a corporate machine lmao.

Do they go to Apple Store and login it to their personal account on the showcase iphone and yell at the genius employees?

They probably just don’t need them anymore. Obviously they are confident that their AI workers are doing a good enough job, and my feeling is that they aren’t planning on creating any groundbreaking new software anytime soon that requires the same number of human engineers to do the work. I think it’s potentially a canary in the coal mine type of warning for the rest of the industry. If a company like Meta doesn’t think it needs the headcount, then other big companies will likely soon follow.

Because it's safe to do so now, anyone on a visa is immediately in an extremely uncomfortable position if they lose their job. They won't leave. And anyone else who does voluntarily gives up on layoff packages.

See also Twitter when Ol' Musky rolled in.

> my manager has no idea who I am, nor what I’m working on, and I’ve never met them despite me being on the team for nearly two months.

This is the fast track to being next in a round of layoffs. If your manager does not know you, they won’t vouch for you when it comes time to toss people out of the airlock. You are in a vulnerable position.

"It’s literally the gulag" - okay this was a funny comment

its unclear to me why they need their model to be the best at coding (maybe to build an internal technical moat?)

Is Meta the same story as Twitter? Two companies with way more highly paid engineers that are needed to maintain a mature social platform and ad network? Funny how both reorgs were done in about the most expensive way imaginable. Twitter through overpriced acquisition, and Facebook through technological adventurism.

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.

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 brainless dicks.

Cox is utterly useless, he has the cognitive faculties of a flea. the rest of the product council has been ruthless bred for agreeing, rather than making good product decisions. Worse still they are either wilfully blind or just blind to the second order effects that their actions take.

Boz, in person is nice. Boz as a leader is a vapid, lacks insight fails to provide actual direction and lets his ego bruise too often. He was 2 years to late to NFTs, Regularly picked fights with juniors in the comments.

The other elephant in the room is the monetisation department. They are basically the drivers of most of the problems in facebook.

Notification fatigue? yeah probably them,

AI slop to boomers? deffo

Rage bait? yup

Fraud? totally profitable.

There was a concerted effort by engineers to try and make meta better (see sophie Zhang), however as time moved forward those that cared were diluted by those that were just there. They recruited far too agressivly in 2020. we had too many people then, but "there was a plan"

They started firing people in 2022, and never stopped. It was clear that Zuck wanted to be a big man, and doesn't really understand how to run his company (Sandberg is a terrible person, but a good leader, even though shes a monumental hypocrite. He saw her as she is, and assumed thats what the rest of the world saw.)

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.

> Also their AI efforts and metaverse efforts flopped

That's the thing right

So I was research so both metaverse and AI adjacent. FAIR was industry leading, just not in the sexy field of LLM. FAIR was passed around like a joint at a student house, finally landing under Cox for "product". But FAIR is a research org, so it was a bad fit, run by an even worse leader. (why can't you deliver a new industry leading LLM in 5 weeks? or some other stupid shit)

The metaverse flopped because there was no clear leadership over features/user experience/hardware. Hardware has a 2-4 year lead time. This means that you need to plan your features 5 years in advance. The average horizon for any software feature in oculus was like 4 months.

Because of the huge influx of non game/graphics/hardware engineers the same mistake about "oh lets build a x but for oculus" happened every year. When I left they had contracted a company to re-make unity but for horizon. At the same time they were also making a blender clone, but in react or some stupid shitty idea.

At no point was there a comprehensive plan for what the UX should be like. there were lots of plans that people made, posted about, got many likes. Lots of redesigns of the button, new social features, avatars etc.

Carmak kept on banging on about time to fun, but he never managed to actually make that work. So a social company with a massive social graph, has a product where you can't easily join your friends in a game. (that might of changed, they revoked all my games when I left so I haven't logged in.)

But your point right, in all the years threads is the only new product they have launched, and that only happend by accident.

Meta's SOP is basically have an idea that gets zuck hard, do a small PoC, it shows promise, scale the team from 10 to 3000, and don't deliver anything.

The labelling I don't think is an attrition thing, I think its doing standard facebook shit, throw people at the problem, without thinking about how that would work

Zuck has read one too many sci-fi novels. He is afraid. Afraid that he will be left behind by the AI oligopoly. Afraid that he won’t get to live in Elysium.

I always point out the Elysium parallels and usually get trashed for doing it. But, if you look at all trend lines, the whole world is very quickly bifurcating into a two tier society with the few "Haves" safely walled off and protected from the many "Have Nots." You can see the moderately rich doing whatever they can to maneuver themselves in to position and ensure their ticket to the space station when the split happens. The rest of us are going to end up being economically irrelevant.

This article doesn’t touch on the single most important aspect: recurring layoffs. I think he’s trying to blame AI for most of it but if we’re to guess, it would be the layoffs. Obviously if the layoffs happen so frequently, the morale goes down.

Almost every company is all in on AI so what makes Meta particularly bad?

>“As per The Information, Meta employees used a total of 60.2 trillion AI tokens (!!) in 30 days. If this was charged at Anthropic’s API prices, it would cost $900M. Of course, Meta is likely purchasing tokens at a discount, but that could still come in at $100M+ – in large part from senseless “tokenmaxxing”.”

Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!

That's what happens when you have leaderboards and internal spend rankings/comparisons. This isn't just a Meta thing; many companies are tracking tokens as performance metric but we all know this by now. :D

Man the dichotomy of you have autonomy to now you're a data labeler in a short span of time must be incredibly rough to deal with. How does culture recover after something like that...Anyone have thoughts when this bubble is going to pop? What a bananas time

Sure, the current Torment Nexus buildout might be a bubble. But just think: in 10 years we will already have all this torment infrastructure built, ready to use.

It’s all a spectrum. Meta is up there with those micro loan companies on the evil side of the spectrum when it comes to tech companies.

Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline. We cant all work in the forest like you.

you realize that the majority of engineering positions at meta in fact arent dealing with the knobs and levers of manipulation? do you have no pity for the coal plant worker who supports his family while working for a company that pollutes the environment? Your shallow morals are disgusting.

What an obnoxious comparison. Any engineer good enough to get into Meta has had their pick of tech jobs for the past decade. They could easily live comfortably, but less well paid, working for a myriad of less exploitative tech companies. Your average coal plant worker had no such options.

I have been flamed for saying this in public, and I do not know how it will be received by an HN crowd, but someone who enjoys being a meta employee is a red flag.

Either they are actively a narcissist, actively immoral, not intelligent enough to understand the vibe there, or they're actually unhappy and not being honest enough to tell you they hate it there. I have a hard time envisioning any other possibility. The place actively filters out morally coherent and intelligent people.

Yes I was there.

> Ya god forbid people want to have careers at leading tech companies so they can have a more abundant life built by their skillsets and discipline

This seems like a fancily dressed up "fuck you, got mine"

I dont work at meta by the way. I just dislike the fake moral front that commenter is parading around to make themselves feel better.

> Your shallow morals are disgusting

Something sure seems to have touched a nerve. Maybe next time count to 10 first?

"When we looked inside he saw that what was said of them was true of him as well. So it was either rage or weep; and so he raged."

You can have a fulfilling and rewarding career in tech without working for a monster.

The mental gymnastics people do to justify their decisions are hilarious. Just admit you have no morals and love money.

so meta employees have no morals? lol. gotcha. the world must be very simple to people with black and white thinking.