I'm not sure how this matters compared to the other platform companies. Kindle has such a small niche market and the Kindle "platform" hardly registers any impact.

From there, the natural executive question becomes: "How do I make as much of my engineering organization as possible fit into that 30%?"

Meta employees being upset about being tracked is the height of irony.

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

Facebook has been around for 20+ years now. The youthful exuberance of Web 2.0 has given way to the exuberance of an even greater more disruptive AI era.

The problem is, it leads to blind imitation. And it's obvious who he's imitating.

It's Elon Musk. From Zuck's perspective, all he ever did was figure out how to monetize a PhP web app - something my buddy in high school could create for our M.U.N. club. Zuck spends millions on VR glasses, low income high schools, 100,000 software engineers, and all he has is the same webapp + some monopolistic acquisitions and a loving wife and child.

Elon is a total dick to everyone, impregnates his executives, gets high on ketamine, does the Nazi salute on live television, but, importantly, launched more satellites into space than any country on Earth. For less than the price of a shitty VR webapp that 20 people used, Elon will solve Global Warming and bring humans into the outer reaches of the solar system. The duality of man.

If Elon started pissing his pants in public or flinging poo at his enemies, Zuckerberg would start doing the same thing.

I'm not going to defend Meta's recent practices but any expectation of privacy when using an employer's device is forfeit. I thought this was basic common sense?

[1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...

> Quotas are handed down to managers for the splits of the workforce to be put in each ‘bucket’, and the internal politics gets heated as managers try to get their reports into higher buckets.

Curious, why can't the management assigns budgets (or resources in general) to individual teams? That is, it is the managers who are responsible for the resources that their teams get, and the budget is tied to the importance of the "team" that each manager owns. In that way, all the performance review will be local to each team. As a manager, I'd be responsible for the output and importance of my team, and I answer to my manager because they will allocate the budget (or resources in general). Recursively, my team members will answer to me and I don't have to justify who gets rewarded by how much to my peers, except that there will be some form of check and balances.

How Meta manages their perf review seems to set up their managers to be ineffective.

Holy shit, talking about perverse incentives!

Getting the right people on the bus is the most difficult task on the world.

And then these people end up in places that cannot utilize their full potential. Everyone is worse off.

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 was a blog post talking about how we should stop idolizing these companies because they're not doing anything groundbreaking or innovating. But now we're doing just that: expecting an ad company to ... do groundbreaking engineering?

Say what you will. Zuckerberg for all that we make fun of him is an insanely successful software guy and businessman. Being good at software is easier, but being strong at both is rare, and he's a multi-billionaire from it. The dude is wildly successful and no matter how much we hate on him or his orgs for it, the people love it. And the advertisers love it. People love Meta's products and even folks in AI governance and safety fields get the Meta glasses and actively use them.

He's built a company that's pretty much self sustaining and you don't need 1000s of engineers for that. Maybe that fact is hitting too close to home?

It was a 10% cut but it hit SWE pretty hard, looking at partner teams it was around 15-20%. Another 10% were "drafted" to this bullshit data labeling org.

On partner teams, attrition seems to be 10-20% over the last couple months (in addition to prior layoff numbers), maybe higher. Will probably go up again after the next vest. Right now it seems like internal comms has shifted where they're begging people to not leave and saying how they will try to improve things.

There have been several reorgs recently. Doesn't seem like anyone knows what the fuck is happening. Teams are significantly smaller than what they were before and it seems like consolidation should be happening, but leadership is in this weird state of paralysis where they're just leaving shit in the current half-reorged state and not doing anything.

So tl;dr, right now it's the biggest dumpster fire I've ever seen in my life. Feels like I'm watching the Titanic sink

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)

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.

no are there bootstrapped / funded startups by Meta alumni hitting the shelve every week.

I see it more as a part of this common, historical trend among humans and other animals: - core, leadership figures with power, like to push their views and beliefs on others and people will just oddly follow it like in lock step and in tribal hypnosis. - I believe we are seeing this. - I believe we are seeing this from the world's leaders in lockstep, to extract unprecedented resources and take additional power; and protect themselves at the expense of everyone else

It seems to me to match similar trends we've had in major periods of instability and revolution throughout human history. WW2, even WW1, showed this by the bourgeoise class. I think enough of them were able to hide and get away with it, and we are seeing a repeat of that by the next generations of their families. Theres my conspiracy theory of the day!

However, I recently borrowed a Quest 2, mainly to play Half-Life: Alyx, and once I got over using that fucking awful Windows app to set it all up properly, I’ve been pretty blown away by how good the thing is for the price. Granted, I’m basically just using it to launch into SteamVR, but it’s a solid bit of hardware. Maybe that’s just the result of the work Carmack and his team did there and acquisition of talent after Oculus?

Just thought I’d be fair and give a perspective that they seem to have made at least one thing that’s pretty damn good.

“[Ll]esus take the wheel”

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'm sure meta learned their lesson

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

Note that word isn't joint to tupping unless you're from Tasmania.

  Shtupping comes from Yiddish, while tupping comes from an old English/Scots agricultural term relating to rams.

Good for you, but this is not the counter example to the wager that the parent proposed. It would be "I worked for a no-name company in a developing country and still turned down interviews from Meta".

As for BMWs, thats the idea - you can buy an M car with that salary and everyone who can't afford an M car is gonna wanna be your friend.

social media boards don't go creating slides and mission statements that mentions those second order effects.

most go something like: "Connecting people and souls through the technologies that empower every day life."

rather than

"Let's get Susie to jump off a bridge for yuks."

I don’t disagree that there are many evil companies and one should try to be selective in who they work for. But life, in my experience, exists in shades of gray and it’s foolish to judge others without understanding their circumstances and the path that lead them to where they are today.

Oh, you think that the arbitrary line your draw in your own life determines the standard for being moral? Well, welcome to the club with the rest of us. Its easy to make an argument that shifts the blame away from Meta - they offer a product that is completely optional, its up to the individual person whether to use it or not, so working for Meta is not immoral. Thats a line someone could draw in their own life, and there isn't a single argument you can make based in any sort of grounded framework for them being wrong.

Exactly. The fact that they worked on Meta's (then Facebook's) payroll does not make what they've done, or themselves, automatically as bad as some other things some other people at Facebook / Meta did.

And the bad things that some people did at Facebook / Meta are also due to their own choices, not by the virtue / sin of working for a particular org.

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

It’s really sad that you don’t comprehend basic morality, but unfortunately not much can be done in cases like this.

The will for change must come from within, but if you ever do find yourself feeling empathy or even sympathy for other humans I promise there are lots of resources available to help you learn and understand more about living like a responsible human. All it takes is asking for help.

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

Putting Meta aside as I do not have a sufficiently deep view of the total scope of work at Meta and its relation to its misdeeds, I never understood how anyone found this fallacious line of reasoning convincing.

So what if someone else would do it? The point is that you are morally responsible for your actions and your actions alone.

It horrifies me completely to realize that so many people would excuse their own gravely immoral actions on the incomprehensible grounds that if they didn't do it, someone else would. Where is the logic? It is such a severely morally and psychologically crippled way of thinking. Yes, if I don't shoot the innocent civilian in the head, then SS-Schütze Schmidt will do it anyway, so I might as well do it. Incredible.

Morality is not some calculus that is concerned about whether certain events occur or about optimizing some sum total of events. It is about how you, personally, use your agency. That's it!

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

Are we talking about Lumen or something?

You don't need to work tens of thousands of jobs anyways, just 1 (maybe 2 or 3).

It's interesting how easy it is to define exactly how evil Facebook is and categorize each worker on an evil spectrum based on job title alone.

Who would have thought life was that simple!

If you worked as an accountant for Epstein after 2006, then yeah you may not be exactly a pedophile but you have shown you're okay with not only working with pedophiles but having a pedophile actively enrich you.

Very few people on this planet are willing to actually do this. Those are Meta are willing to do exactly this.

Also solidarity is a two way street and acting as if the literal 1% of earners in the nation will suddenly develop empathy is foolish. I have solidarity for actual workers trying to better society; not for those that exacerbate the climate crisis, help minorities get cancer through data center expansions, personally profit off of scamming seniors, are okay with allowing a genocide on their watch, do nothing to help prevent the erosion of democracy, and have directly caused many suicides/self harm/deaths of despair.

They have to commit to a lifetime of repenting and self-flagellation isn't going to cut it. It's not the middle ages.

Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.

Better than you heard me, given that's not what I said.

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?

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?

Maybe we should tackle the "wealth is transcendence" psychosis first.

If it goes as bad as it might, it will affect many more people than just technologists. Most people's one and only experience with AI will be when it fails to deliver and wipes out their 401(k). That scenario, I think, would leave a pretty bad smell around AI.

If otoh the industry does find a way to make it print, or if I'm just totally wrong, this won't happen. I hope that's the case.

Which is absurd, because sales is linear whereas engineering is sublinear.

True number is much closer to 75% than 50%.

basically a soft layoff

Their bonuses depend on it. They'll have to play ball unless they have other jobs lined up, are ready to retire early, or prepared to be on the shitlist for the next round of layoffs due to "underperformance"

This describes basically every FAANG / MANGA company. Or even past that, any company that hit it big with a cash cow and now needs to come up with something new to satisfy shareholders.

In Meta's case, they have 3B MAU, they absolutely hire from the same tier of developers, and (pre-layoffs/economic downturn) they throw 10x more of them than they need at a problem. They even outcomp Google. The number of employees is more because employee growth was an indicator for company growth and only once that became a liability against the stock price it stopped.

Meta is just a newer company than Google.

> Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids.

I am married to a Meta engineer and have mentored folks that have gone to work there. This might be the case if you work for a product that drives their cash cow of ads, but if you are doing anything that doesn't fit within that narrow bucket ... let's just say our viewpoints diverge significantly.

> The problem with React is that mediocre developers can use it to build big things that are too big for them to handle. The problem with Kubernetes is that above-average developers can use it to build small things they can't handle. And the scalability of Kube is more than almost all of the industry needs.

The problem with the Chrysler 300 is that bad drivers run over people. What does that say about the engineering culture at Chrysler?

Look, I agree that most cloud stuff is overkill, but I have a hard time indicting Google's entire engineering culture over a project they released into the wild 12 years ago that just happens to not fit your use case and that theoretical "above-average" developers wouldn't be able to tell that.

Is your action framework open source? I'd be interested in taking a look at it.

I think it was about 2 years 10ish years ago, but that was during rapid growth. Now that overall growth is down it is useful for this.

You mean every person in the world who doesn't actively work on the stuff doing the tracking? This isn't selection bias, selection bias is thinking those are the abnormals.

Okay, this is America so fair enough. We can’t reasonably generalize in this context.

Everyone on the planet is saying this. Every new hire orientation likely states this.

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.

Say what you will about MS, but the fact that Windows was backward compatible for so long (it may still be, I haven't kept up) is damn good engineering.

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, even if that means the solution is scrappy and unpolished today, so long as it solves an important problem cheaply and effectively.

In large organizations, accountability for actual value delivery is so diluted across the org chart that it practically disappears.

Leaders gravitate toward building bloated "internal platforms" that offer little external utility. Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact. It becomes a systemic shield, allowing the old guard to justify their headcount without delivering new value.

Software engineering is uniquely plagued by this. Civil engineers understand their objective: build a bridge that safely carries traffic within a specific budget. They don't invent a novel, hyper-complex suspension architecture when a standard short-span bridge will do the job.

Cold Harbor is a reference to the TV show Severance.

Without going into any real spoilers it was the code name of a data classification project so mysterious that the people working on it weren't allowed to know what they were working on (and yes, the project in the show was probably named after the battle in the Civil War).

The Meta connection is that there are some humorous parallels between that project and a project involving people tagging data to train technology to replace themselves, and just the overall creepy dystopian vibe of both the fictional and real-world companies (and founders) involved.

I’ve met too many meta members who have stories about their direct reports or peers who had a crashout because they got Exceeds Expectations and a mid 5 figure raise instead of Greatly Exceeds Expectations with a higher 5 figure raise not because of the money but because of not getting the top score.

I’m pretty sure zuck is being a rational sociopath and realizing he can use the PSC system to get these people to widely work against their best interests due to their ego.

Of course Kubernetes is going to be way less fun to use. The problem of managing servers and distributed applications at scale is inherently not fun once you get into the nitty gritty details.

Which I understand people believe, but at least consider the possibility of the CEO being fired (and staying fired) by the board.

Hah, it would be easier to replace the PM with the engineer. Synthesize customer requests? "Competitor research" via google search? Some half-imaginary projection of how a given feature will affect usage rates?

All of those are dead-simple to do with a model and are often un-falsifiable enough that if they're a bit wrong, it won't be noticed. Whereas a PM struggling to figure out how to debug something running in product or to keep the agent from making a destructive change while doing so would be MUCH more noticed.

> I can't believe how many of you are absolutely certain you're going to be working in software in ten years. Let alone five.

In that future, almost every other role goes away faster+harder. Even the vaunted entrepreneur: "just start your own thing and solve customer problems directly" isn't needed when the customer solves their own problems!

"I'll be fine since I'm a good enough engineer" may be wrong, but "the engineers are gonna be fucked but me/the PM/the CEO/whoever else" is even less plausible.

This is the kind of comedy I can only get on Hacker News

From the evidence so far, this isn’t true, see the reports above from people inside Meta and other companies heavily leaning on LLM use.

Perhaps you’re suffering from AI psychosis and the imminent singularity is just a dream?

what else do you expect people to do? give up and preemptively go back to university for massive debt and become a doctor? get into long haul trucking? Programming is and was a great job for a middle class lifestyle, needing only smarts and nothing else. No connections, social skills, even location wouldn't hold you back that much.

No, a lot of people will ride the train all the way down.

Sure you might be able to have PMs deal with the easy stuff for a short while.

But will the company that can hire more competent people pull ahead? Probably.

I can tell you one thing: I haven't worked with a PM for like 5 years.

I like helm. Helm has so much to offer and it’s not complicated.

It’s basically like handlebars/ mustache using golang.

Handlebars/mustache was what early angular/react used for templating.

I also question your claim that “everyone hates software engineers,” because I find they’re reasonably well liked in general. Perhaps you’re assuming what I meant was something like “if someone is good at software engineering then they’re smarter than all other knowledge workers,” which is blatantly not true (and indeed, not my point).

It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well.

It's still wrong.

She bought her house in 2015.

For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.

That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.

More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes.

Thats just the start

I would claim it has indeed become worse.

Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.

It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.

Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.

I had a Keyhole account long before Google was in the business, and it worked about like Google Earth does now.

Lmao

What happened? I also use Wise.

I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.

Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.