Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/why-is-meta-destroying-its-engineering

by throwarayes • 1 month ago

668 604 1 month ago

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

simonw• 1 month ago

Anyone at Meta able to confirm or expand on the details in this?

fabian2k• 1 month ago

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.

djeastm• 1 month ago

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.

CyLith• 1 month ago

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.

vinni22• 1 month ago

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

kxxx2• 1 month ago

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.

tayo42• 1 month ago

since they were "intelligent" enough to pass the Meta interviews.

I haven't interviewed with them in almost 10 years. But aren't they doing the same interview everyone else does?

monster_truck2• 1 month ago

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.

davebren• 1 month ago

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.

drawnwren• 1 month ago

see also: we're all developing on min spec Macbook Pros while being encouraged to burn > max spec Macbook Pros cost in tokens/month while still waiting for builds to compile.

conradfr• 1 month ago

It's only until Cold Harbor is completed.

bickfordb• 1 month ago

Then all the engineers will get to rejoin their outies.

panzagl2• 1 month ago

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.

InsideOutSanta• 1 month ago

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.)

HDThoreaun• 1 month ago

Because you can just get rid of all those people and do the data labeling tasks for 1/4 the cost?

xnx2• 1 month ago

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.

layer83• 1 month ago

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.

swatcoder3• 1 month ago

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.

danny_codes• 1 month ago

It's a bold move cotton.

I doubt it'll pay off. Let's face it, the average FB engineer is no better than the average Polish engineer, and the Polish guy is 20x cheaper. If you wanted cost-effective labeling you'd send it to Poland. Or better, Chile.

bredren• 1 month ago

Yes, this is not labeling what is an apple and what is a pear. "Annotation" does not do this work justice.

For a coding agent, for example, there is *very detailed* analysis of the turns and ranking of different portions of the conversation.

Adherence or deviation from specific rules matters. Writing quality matters. Expertise in the topic under discussion matters. Having intuition for the tone and beat of a good conversation matters.

Scoring a 15-20 turn conversation can easily take two and a half hours.

Clicking submit does not mean the author is done. Many annotations will be turned back to them by a reviewer to touch up in some way.

This work can be far more mentally taxing than programming, is measured much more by completions more of a timed exercise than SWE.

FWIW, Meta employees would probably make great coding agent conversation annotators. But it is absolutely not SWE and they won't enjoy it (for long).

mancerayder• 1 month ago

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?

karel-3d2• 1 month ago

Yes

maxnevermind• 1 month ago

Plot twist: we already are through the usage of AI lab's API.

jordanb• 1 month ago

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.

dlev_pika3• 1 month ago

I like the part when he “took full responsibility” for HIS Metaverse mistake, and fired everybody else lmao

Gavin from Silicon Valley did it first

senordevnyc2• 1 month ago

It seems really dumb to tell them that. I assume they’re all feeding garbage to the models now.

Apocryphon• 1 month ago

Silicon Valley strikes again?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obS-qZO9uCQ

dylan6043• 1 month ago

I still use the phrase "not a hot dog" to describe things that only does one thing while described as having a lot more capabilities

ifwinterco• 1 month ago

From the article it sounds like what they're actually doing is reviewing LLM-generated code, for that you do need good software engineers.

Although it goes without saying that good software engineers won't enjoy doing this very much

jasonwatkinspdx• 1 month ago

I can't give you exact numbers, but this is line with what I'm hearing through the grapevine. Lots of senior managers being converted back to ICs as well.

A lot of people are going to leave as soon as they hit their next vest.

smrtinsert6• 1 month ago

This reads like a way to get engineers to quit while they work on something "useful". After losing Yann, I doubt its going to end up being useful.

TrackerFF• 1 month ago

Have you heard about the various startups that specialize in expert data labeling, like Mercor? They can pay $100-$200/hr for highly specialized work, who knows how much they charge their clients. Translated to an annual wage, that's definitely in the SF/SV engineer range

As others have commented, some of the training is very specialized.

asdff3• 1 month ago

Have you heard about working for mercor? You aren't working full time for them or sniffing anywhere close to a proper annual wage.

desolate_muffin• 1 month ago

My partner works there as an engineer. The org they work in had loads of people transferred to the "AAI" org doing data labelling. I find it almost unbelievable as well, but it is true.

smrtinsert6• 1 month ago

It's 100% unbelievable and hysterical that its true. Have they done the simple math on how much labeled data they need to make a model of value?

ablation• 1 month ago

This is starting to feel like a Peter Watts short story.

imglorp• 1 month ago

They are literally doing the apocryphal corporate dystopian maneuver: training their replacements.

They won't be doing it for long.

swader9994• 1 month ago

Coffin building

Ifkaluva• 1 month ago

Those percentages seem in line with what I have heard. Not company-wide, MSL was exempted, of course, and probably a few other golden geese here and there.

jopolous2• 1 month ago

I totally agree, it sounds unbelievable… Problem is, I’m on one of these core infrastructure teams, and for my team at least we lost between 50-75% of our engineers to the AI org. Most of the other infra teams I collaborate with have a similar story

_dark_matter_• 1 month ago

Your team lost 50-75%? Is that an approximation, or do you just not know? Can't you just count who left to get the actual ratio?

loeg• 1 month ago

Not 30-50%.

bossyTeacher2• 1 month ago

using them for data labeling would be a waste of resources

Is work such as changing the styling of a button on the Instagram app any more useful than that?

Mining work was unglamorous and dangerous but was needed. Labeling work is the mining of the AI era.

bevekspldnw• 1 month ago

”I built the Torment Nexus and I’ll got was a few million dollars and this lousy job.”

pram• 1 month ago

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.

_rsg3• 1 month ago

[deleted]

jefurii• 1 month ago

The elves are leaving Middle Earth..

klipklop2• 1 month ago

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.

RobertDeNiro• 1 month ago

At some point the layoff is probably the preferred outcome.

klipklop2• 1 month ago

Looks like the Facebook employee got scared. They always keep quiet…

kadhirvelm• 1 month ago

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

peanut-walrus• 1 month ago

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?

tennfown2• 1 month ago

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.

fusslo• 1 month ago

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)

giantrobot2• 1 month ago

Oh, and enabling human traffickers.

Also the genocides.

solid_fuel6• 1 month ago

How now, that’s not fair. They also make a lot of money giving teenagers depression and selling them beauty products and chatbot companions.

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

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

dylan6043• 1 month ago

Wouldn't you be better served by hiring competent accountants for that? An engineer would screw this up and get the decimal in the wrong place.

throwarayes5• 1 month ago

Facebook is for preying on the elderly. Instagram for the rest of us.

naturalmovement• 1 month ago

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.

frangonf• 1 month ago

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?

TheOtherHobbes• 1 month ago

Maybe.

marcosdumay• 1 month ago

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.

mrweasel• 1 month ago

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.

operatingthetan• 1 month ago

“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!

kxxx2• 1 month ago

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

vanuatu4• 1 month ago

"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?)

layer83• 1 month ago

Because coding appears to be the most monetizable use of AI, for some time to come.

laweijfmvo2• 1 month ago

but who’s going to pay Meta for it?

stephbook• 1 month ago

It's also not like Meta could train it for content moderation, translation or judicial expertise even if it wanted to. They have software engineers idling, not translators.

dansquizsoft• 1 month ago

But Meta's had so much success in this area by copying the leading lans already!

xnx2• 1 month ago

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.

ceejayoz2• 1 month ago

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

mth1234• 1 month ago

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.

josefritzishere• 1 month ago

The AI death march is destroying so many companies. You'd think some CEOs would break away from the herd by now.

daniban• 1 month ago

I think Tim Cook tried to...

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

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.)

throwarayes5• 1 month ago

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.

KaiserPro4• 1 month ago

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

swader9994• 1 month ago

'The problem is'...

Problem? This is the best news I've heard in a while.

bottlepalm• 1 month ago

This should be top comment. Organizations reflect their leadership and Zuck is a mess.

jdalgetty• 1 month ago

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.

chvid• 1 month ago

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.

pavel_lishin• 1 month ago

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.

jghn2• 1 month ago

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.

swatcoder3• 1 month ago

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.

nitwit005• 1 month ago

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.

VirusNewbie2• 1 month ago

One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success

So, let's see, the top tech companies in revenue are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and some of the fastest growing ones are OpenAI and Anthropic.

Do you know what all these have in common? They give extremely high compensation even compared to other large companies (microsoft is a bit of an exception here).

So you think they just do this out of the goodness of their hearts, that these kind CEOs who would lay off tons of people on a whim, don't think engineering matters, but are paying 300k, 400k, 600k, 800k to software engineers?

vanuatu4• 1 month ago

Computer use

throwarayes5• 1 month ago

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?

ajb• 1 month ago

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

dzonga2• 1 month ago

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.

maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.

which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.

I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.

alex11382• 1 month ago

"Strong businesses"

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

Groxx• 1 month ago

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.

horns4lyfe• 1 month ago

And that’s why they love visa workers

jazzpush24• 1 month ago

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.

throwarayes5• 1 month ago

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.

ribosometronome• 1 month ago

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.

embedding-shape4• 1 month ago

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.

aantix• 1 month ago

Never understood why Facebook hasn't implemented the 'Explain this post' type feature that you see on X (@grok).

Facebook seems to be the most misinformed audience - an LLM fact checker would be a great addition.

shimman3• 1 month ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo6• 1 month ago

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?

ModernMech3• 1 month ago

giving teenage girls depression.

FYI there's nothing that said the depression Facebook intentionally causes in teenagers is limited to just girls.

98codes2• 1 month ago

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.

ryandrake2• 1 month ago

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.

throwaway8943456• 1 month ago

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.

everdrive• 1 month ago

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" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

bossyTeacher2• 1 month ago

You don't become a Big Tech company by being ethical. It's like trying to become a world champion boxer by refusing to punch. Not happening.

The reality is that most of these self described rational and super intelligent devs who see themselves as good people refuse to accept that joining big tech and joining an ethical company are mutually exclusive by definition. Hence all the companies saying "We make the world a better place by doing x". Everyone knows it's not true. But it helps swallow the fantasy and selling your ethics for a big fat pay check every month.

nine_k2• 1 month ago

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.

embedding-shape4• 1 month ago

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.

davidw• 1 month ago

Organizations that are overall bad can have people who have done some good things, or at least technically impressive things.

callmeal• 1 month ago

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

Oh yes, I would color Meta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_emotional_manipulatio...

"Company over country!" -- Mark Zuckerberg https://www.yahoo.com/news/book-zuckerberg-called-company-ov...

gulugawa7• 1 month ago

I agree that Meta is not uniformly bad, but I would not consider React to be a great tool. Every React project I worked on has turned into an unmaintainable pile of spaghetti.

lelanthran• 1 month ago

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.

kevincrane• 1 month ago

Almost all organizations have hands cleaner than Meta lol

Hamuko2• 1 month ago

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

swatcoder3• 1 month ago

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".

duped• 1 month ago

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.

serf2• 1 month ago

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

people say this as if having principles will leave you jobless inevitably, but there is so much evidence to the contrary that this rings more hollow the older I get.

I agree with your overall concept of empathy towards others, I disagree with the premise that all organizations are unethical and that there isn't room for the morally principal'd and employed in this world.

contrarily I believe that a morally principal'd and skilled engineer is so rare in this world that there are a few organizations that would snap up every single one they could find if the network was there to find them.

neutronicus• 1 month ago

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.

jacques_chester3• 1 month ago

As I learned while burning through all my savings in the 2023-2024 timeframe: You are free to have principles, but principles aren't free.

I am ashamed I worked there.

ActorNightly7• 1 month ago

If you worked at Meta and couldn't find a job for a year, its not because of Meta.

pokstad• 1 month ago

That’s a choice. This isn’t a story about someone poor who needs to work at McDonalds to make ends meet to feed their family. We are talking about the top earners in the world who made a decision to make more money than working at a competitor (Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc) where they would still be in the top 1% of earners.

slibhb6• 1 month ago

The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.

When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

techblueberry• 1 month ago

The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.

True, none of us are innocent.

When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

WTF?

bla15e• 1 month ago

it's not a perfect exampe of scape-goating of the goat is still alive

ben_w4• 1 month ago

Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious:

  The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...

cayley_graph5• 1 month ago

I am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand.

That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.

edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.

thepryz2• 1 month ago

Sorry, but your rant comes from a place of naive privilege when you assume meta engineers all had options.

I know a number of people that accepted roles with companies they vowed never to work for after being laid off and unemployed for a year. The reality is that when you look at tech in abroad context, there really are very few ethical and/or noble companies.

fzeroracer2• 1 month ago

There are plenty of options. I for example am one of those unemployed engineers that has been looking for a job for about a year now. Meta recruiters have came to me trying to poach me, and I've said no every time.

The reality is that more engineers need to be able to grow a spine, have longer term thinking and actually stand their ground when it comes to these companies. You could not pay me enough money to work at Meta or Palantir and while it's true there are very few ethical or noble companies, working for Meta is more akin to completely throwing out your ethical compass.

pjmlp2• 1 month ago

You mean like React?

Agreed, what a damage to the world.

gulugawa7• 1 month ago

React is an overcomplicated mess made popular by manufactured consent.

solid_fuel6• 1 month ago

No kidding, the damage react has done to front end engineering will be felt for decades. Bloated, slow applications that don’t conform to system conventions and burn power like crazy have been the norm ever since React caught on.

b212• 1 month ago

What alternatives to React do you propose? I found Angular even worse…

gulugawa7• 1 month ago

As someone who quit their corporate tech job to focus on community building work, I don't think finding better job is that simple.

Nowadays, when I look at job listings, practically all of them are for companies that are ethically compromised in some way. They are overusing generative AI or building products that are having a negative impact on society.

One of the worst examples I saw was a software engineer job posting from my previous employeer that builds cloud-based physical security systems for buildings.The job requires the use of AI. I wouldn't trust a security system that randomly decides to unlock the front door to my house because of a hallucination.

alpha-male-swe• 1 month ago

you shouldnt feel bad for them because they are smart and could get a job at meta (unlike you)

jazzpush24• 1 month ago

I work for a frontier lab, lol.

ActorNightly7• 1 month ago

Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

And you would be stupid not to.

One one hand, you can be that guy that says you declined a Meta job, and be stuck at your current salary level, watching people make more money around you, and realize that even people who are make less than you truly absolutely just DGAF that you declined a Meta job - sure, they will tell you its a good thing, but its not like you get rewarded for it with having more friends or social support, in the end you are just still another person to them.

On another hand, you can make enough money to secure a good life for yourself, create new accounts on social media websites if you want to talk about Meta in a more positive light, and find new friend groups that are easily accessible with having more salaries (just buy a BMW a show up to any BMW meetup and bam, new friends right out of the gate).

The 2024 election should be a clear indicator that people just simply DGAF about each other as much as people think.

spencerflem3• 1 month ago

I mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself.

I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.

spinningslate• 1 month ago

Id honestly wager that at you and most of the people who are agreeing with you in the comments don't make the meta SDE salary, and if offered the 300k/year positions at Meta, even for a limited time, you would absolutely take it

Not OP but I can say with 100% truth and certainty that it wouldn’t matter how much money they offered - I would not work for meta. Some things matter more than money.

cayley_graph5• 1 month ago

Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.

jazzpush24• 1 month ago

I work at a frontier lab and have rejected Meta interviews (for much higher salary) many times over the years.

And BMW meetups are not good ways to meet high-salary people. Likely the exact opposite.

swader9994• 1 month ago

I've been offered to interview at these places several times but always declined. Some on principle but mostly because I didn't want to relocate and I don't want to work for a large company.

ironman14782• 1 month ago

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.

busterarm• 1 month ago

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.

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

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.

svachalek• 1 month ago

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.

JacobAsmuth• 1 month ago

You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?

casualscience• 1 month ago

brain was grown in house and likely deserves as much or more credit than open ai for the current llm boom

surajrmal2• 1 month ago

Good engineering isn't always about building new things, but making existing ones continue to work well. Funding new ideas is generally a hard problem for large organizations and that's not entirely an engineering culture problem.

There are a lot of terrible practices out there in the world that you should stay wary of. Too many false positive alerts, flakey tests, not enough tests, not listening to users, taking a solution because it's easy and popular but not necessarily a good fit for your specific requirements, etc. Many of these practices are popular unfortunately. That's not to say others don't have great ideas, just don't copy them blindly.

galkk• 1 month ago

Dremel/big query Spanner Borg Chrome

None of those were acquisitions

throwaw12• 1 month ago

Google Cloud has a solid product, not sure about internal engineering culture.

torben-friis2• 1 month ago

Probably well run compared to the rest of meta, not to the versions of themselves pre acquisition. Whatsapp is worsening by the day.

junior446602• 1 month ago

They introduced desktop version, dark theme and multiple accounts post the acquisition by meta. Hate the ad and social stuff they're shoving down, though.

smrtinsert6• 1 month ago

If its any consolation, it doesn't work. Just from reading about the company and watching its business operating principles and innovation track record, its very clear what is going on inside - at least from someone with experience in the overall tech industry.

toast0• 1 month ago

Having had my employer bought by FB, there were some exceptional teams in FB that were nice to work with, but those weren't really running like regular FB teams, so there you go. I really hoped the FB orgs would change, at least a bit, to reflect the purchased org, but I guess that was my repressed optimism showing up. :P

newobj• 1 month ago

that may have been true in product orgs but the infra and dev infra orgs were pretty strong imho.

ironman14782• 1 month ago

I worked in infra as a firmware engineer and it was something else. Very amateurish

aylmao2• 1 month ago

+1. IMO the company with the strongest web infra/tooling teams for example.

Also very strong teams working on db/data, source control, performance, reliability, pl/compilers, etc.

cletus• 1 month ago

I have to disagree with this as someone who worked at Meta (and Google).

WhatsApp was a textbook example of how not to do an acquisition. The story I heard was when it was acquired, a spreadsheet went around and everyone basically decided what level they were in the (then) FB job ladder and all the engineers said they were E7s (Senior Staff SWE). The way PSC worked, WhatsApp at the time was only ever calibrated against themselves (from what I heard). It had become a fiefdom and, as someone who was on a team that tried to get them to do anything, the experience was awful.

IG was handled better but it was also an almost nonexistent team when acquired, which might well explain it. They stuck with their Django/Python codebase and (IMHO) that was a mistake. The amount of duplication that we had to do for IG specifically was embarrasing. The framework and tooling FB had on the product side was light years ahead of what IG had. IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now. It was good because IG had a clear vision for their app and ultimately (IMHO) management had a different view to "grow". They briefly tried to launch another app (IGTV) that flopped, hard. There were a bunch of UI/UX changes that clearly showed the focus had become simply following celebrities instead of sharing updates (eg where the post/compose buttons moved to).

I mention Google because I saw the same things happen at Google.

Youtube was (and my guess is, still is) its own entity. Culturally, Youtubers don't see themselves as Googlers. They didn't (AFAIK) use Google3 or any of the other stuff most of the rest of Google did. But Youtube itself was perceived very positively, technically, particularly in relation just general encoding/decoding infrastructure as well as Bandaid (where racks are shipped to ISPs to cache videos).

Android was another acquisition that prided itself in not being Google. This was very much fostered by Andy Rubin while he was still there. Obviously Google needed to write Android apps but I got the sense that it was always Google engineers who solved all the problems whereas Android just didn't care. They cared only about shipping Android. Fuchsia was an Android offshoot.

Docs and Maps were both acquisitions but they went fully Google3 and were different orgs but weren't seen as separate. The engineering director of Docs (Fuzzy) had, from what I can recall, a very positive reputation beyond Docs (now Drive).

Doubleclick was also an acqusition but went fully Google and you'll find a lot of people who don't even know it was an acquisition.

I don't know what org you worked in but they all vary. My own experience was that Infra orgs in comparison to Google were primitive and barely above just running random Docker-like (Tupperware) instances with a godawful variant of C++, probably started by someone who had done C++ at Google and had decided they really wanted mutable function parameters and exceptions for no particular reason.

The thing I really respected about FB product orgs generally was that really did ship things quickly. I used to joke that the smallest unit of time at Google was a quarter. God help you if you eneded another team (under a different VP) to do something. You'd have to spend a quarter arguing with them to get them to add it to their OKRs for the following quarter.

At FB the timeline for launching a new thing to a limited audience was measured in weeks. The biggest barrier usually was the weekly build cycle for the blue app. The release cycle for Web was S-tier and (IMHO) the people who worked on the infra for Web were generally god tier. This was another reason why IG doggedly sticking with Python just created problems.

There are many thigns you can criticize Meta for (eg the stupid crypto, the billions wasted on VR) but the Web Foundation and Ent teams were god tier and I'll die on that hill.

Anyway, even back then the ML teams and infra, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked (IMHO). Newsfeed was OK but the recommendations for a lot of things like videos just sucked. All of this was mainly because it all relied on daily offline jobs. And then Tiktok came along and showed everybody (including Youtube) just what a bad job they were doing at recommendations. And don't get me started on the IG Reels dumpster fire.

Oh ok, I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.

MarkSweep• 1 month ago

That's funny about your last line about Messenger. When I was at Facebook in 2020 and 2021 I thought the "Lightspeed" version of Messenger [1] was something of an engineering marvel. Specically the way it was centered around SQLite as the datastore, how the sever side could integrate with it, and how the UI was power by this reactive-style framework written in C. With lots of testing to keep binary size under control and things working reliably. And the DX was not bad for all these constraints. I think CG/SQL [2] is one of the few open source artifacts from this effort.

There were other reasonably nicely engineered things there, like some of the code-as-configuration things in PHP like the ORM and the structured logging. Where you just write and commit code and the databases and data warehouses just get set up automatically.

The choice to have a monolithic web stack at Facebook had some benefits. The latency from landing a diff to being in prod was a couple of hours, not matter what part of the site you touched. And given an arbitrary URL, there was a tool that used static analysis to tell you which file handled that request. Compared to Google where every damn thing is a micro-service with its own variable release schedule and different ways of doing request routing. Trying to figure out where a request goes is combination of dynamic tracing of the RPC trace behind it plus a bunch of grepping through the related code bases.

All that said, I was far away from doing real engineering at Facebook. I accidentally joined a growth team. Which meant our teams remit was churning out all kinds of experiments to see what we could to do to make our team's number go up. I did not find this type of work enjoyable and quit. So I have a narrow perspective.

Also to give these multinational corporations some benefit of the doubt, some of the way they operate is path-dependent. They have hundreds of millions of lines code. So they can get to a point where it makes sense to hire a bunch of compiler engineers to fork PHP and make the Hack language. Whereas a startup would almost certainly never create a new programming language to write their product. To take solutions of this context and apply them to the outside world might not make sense.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2020/03/02/data-infrastructure/me...

[2] https://cgsql.dev/

neonstatic• 1 month ago

I thought of another one: Messenger. I knew some smart people on Messenger but overall the product and the infra were, again, a dumpster fire.

That makes sense from a consumer point of view. I don't use FB much. In fact, I recently logged on a few times after a few years of a break. It's terrible. You can't even get conversation history anymore. You can talk to someone via the app on your phone, open Facebook in the browser on your computer and not see the messages there. Makes me wonder why is Meta still around?

petesergeant2• 1 month ago

IG used to have a very good product focus but I think that's long dead now

As a user, Instagram is about the only part of the Meta empire that doesn't suck

ksec• 1 month ago

Thank you for the insight this actually answer a lot of questions or suspicious I had with Google. Surprised about Android and now Fuchsia makes sense.

I wonder if anyone has worked in Google / Facebook and Shopify and I wonder how they compare.

somedude895• 1 month ago

Meta and Google both are companies that got lucky and managed to carve out a quasi-Monopoly in their space. Sure, they did a lot of things right at first and provided a popular product, but for the past years/decades they've been using their money to buy other companies, adding a veneer of "innovation" to their image, constantly coming up with "cool stuff" that they're unable to market successfully, but ultimately they're just milking their insanely profitable core product they came up with 20 or so years ago, like any legacy corp. I have no respect for either of those companies having to work with them in my day job, knowing how lazy and incompetent they are with the services that actually make them money.

vovavili5• 1 month ago

That's the unfortunate outcome of running a business at scale.

vjk800• 1 month ago

In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.

classified• 1 month ago

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.

zeroonetwothree3• 1 month ago

That wasn't my experience at all, I found the orgs I was in (infra) to have great culture.

throwsame12304• 1 month ago

One aspect of this sad situation that has not been reported is the degree to which Meta's H-1B hiring drives the politics of hiring and firing in the engineering org. Meta received positive attention for a lot of the US-citizen hires it made soon after Trump took office. The vast majority of those people were red-shirted and purged in the recent rounds of layoffs. The H1B loyalties within Meta, the reluctance to disrupt someone's life who is in the US on a visa, mean that US citizens get the boot first, even if a significant portoin of the retained international engineers speak English poorly and mostly manipulate JSON files. As has been reported elsewhere, those "meets expectations" engineers are now basically doing RLHF to improve Meta's internal models. Thousands of them. So I guess it's a toss up which group is worse off, those who were laid off or those who remain employed to do brain-numbing work. How telling that they are doing data-labeling because Alexandr Wang knows he can't trust the company he founded to deliver quality. And finally, I'll just note that the engineering and product orgs of the most popular social media platform in the US is staffed by citizens of America's greatest adversary. Great job, Zuck.

simianwords• 1 month ago

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?

somesortofthing• 1 month ago

layoffs don't explain reassigning half your engineers to work as labelers

marssaxman2• 1 month ago

"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.

ergocoder2• 1 month ago

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?

simoncion• 1 month ago

I remember personally hearing about a Big Tech rank-and-file employee who was trying very, very hard to work around Infosec protections on his company-issued laptop that were preventing him from installing some video game with super-invasive kernel-level anticheat.

So, yeah, people do absolutely braindead shit with their company-furnished equipment. It's fucking mind-boggling.

michaelt• 1 month ago

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

It is in fact common to do personal things on work PCs.

The senior manager spending 5 days visiting that foreign office is logging into his personal netflix account, and video calling his wife and kids. He ain't carrying a second laptop to do it.

That middle manager, with a report who needs a widget delivered tomorrow, and purchasing aren't fast enough to get the order in? He's logging into his personal account and paying with his personal card, then making an expense claim.

That in-office worker wearing headphones? Good chance he's logged into his personal music streaming account. Maybe he uses youtube music, so he's logged into his entire personal google account too.

And the sales guy who's constantly stuck in hotels for business travel? Oh boy you don't want to look his 11pm web browsing.

pessimizer• 1 month ago

You seem to have selected specifically people who are not likely to know the full implications of their behavior, and I agree with you.

I don't even like doing stuff like this on my phone.

jmaw2• 1 month ago

I may be the exception, but if I plan to work on non-work related stuff while traveling I absolutely take my personal laptop. I've done this when traveling to my HQ, as well as taking both work and personal laptops on personal vacations.

marssaxman2• 1 month ago

It was a rhetorical question; I am aware that people do stupid things with their employers' hardware. More directly, my point was that the supposed privacy questions raised by the AI-training keyboard tracking system do not matter much, because it has never been safe to do anything which requires personal privacy on work devices in the first place.

There are other reasons one might reasonably object to keystroke tracking, of course.

esafak2• 1 month ago

The sibling comments are weirdly out of touch. All the examples you cite are realistic.

losvedir• 1 month ago

This must be you being in a different bubble from me, with perhaps a hint of Normalization of Deviance[0]. Those all sound like terrible ideas to me (are you implying looking at porn on a company laptop!?). You absolutely should not cross pollinate work with personal stuff. Use your personal phone or tablet or whatever for anything non work related.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

drivebyhooting2• 1 month ago

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.

ryandrake2• 1 month ago

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.

asdaqopqkq• 1 month ago

in a way, arent we all?

drivebyhooting2• 1 month ago

No. Not everyone. And even those who are thankfully don’t have the wealth and resources to upheave thousands of lives in pursuit of a mirage.

jmuguy• 1 month ago

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.

skizm• 1 month ago

Their advertising revenue grew 33% YoY last earnings call. They're literally making so much money they don't know what to do with it so they plow it into each new fad as to not miss out if this one happens to be a new billion user business. This is in addition to returning capital to shareholders via buybacks and dividends.

Herring• 1 month ago

The reason he seems poor is because he keeps signaling he doesn't have enough money to buy the one thing he really wants: trust. These people out for world domination never get it. He can't set up a platform (VR, AI) for the same reason Windows is dying: their brands are toxic and nobody will work with them if they have a choice.

fnordpiglet• 1 month ago

To be fair they’re doing it by increasingly immoral, unethical, and potentially illegal methods resulting in at this point over 300 lost lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny world wide, blowback over intentionally enabling scams and fraud for profit, enabling csam, trafficking, etc as long as they pay their ads bills.

It’s a matter of time before the regulatory hammer falls on them and they’re hemmed in via civil courts due to damages. Many of the civil suits they’re losing are petty weak cases showing juries and judges literally hate meta. These are signs that their revenues are short term money grabs due to blindly chasing iRev at the cost of literally everything else.

Even hacking they only really follow through on if their large business credit extensions are at risk or chargebacks. Debit and direct funding isn’t pursued because they’re not loss liable - if it’s literal theft via debit cards, it’s not a priority. If it’s their own money via credit that’s refundable, they’re all hands on deck.

This will all blow back on them at some point and that point isn’t far aware. Courts, governments, banks, they’re all starting to notice the lawlessness and pure avarice. The consequences will severely impair their ads business, require them to undergo worse consent, oversight, and audit that waving an AI hand at won’t be sufficient, especially when the courts are concerned as judges are especially skeptical of AI solutions to court orders.

Their only out is to find another business model, which they’ve been trying to do without success since Facebook was first launched.

rsynnott• 1 month ago

They've previously wasted a lot of money on stupid stuff (Facebook phone, metaverse etc etc), but my impression is that they messed with their core business less in the course of doing that. Whereas now, as the article mentioned, it seems like they're just kind of breaking engineering completely.

raincole• 1 month ago

You can call Zuck evil or greedy. But being bad at running a business surely isn't one of his traits. Meta's net earning grew so much in the past decade that it, ironically, has the sanest P/E ratio trend out of all big US techs.

datsci_est_20152• 1 month ago

I’m starting to classify great business minds as “earners” vs. “extractors” to help counter the braindead take that anyone who accumulates wealth is worthy of praise. Zuck is an incredible extractor: he does not create value, he exploits gray areas in the social contract of society like an oil baron vacuuming up oil wells using deceit and chicanery.

start123• 1 month ago

they burned too much cash with Metaverse

throwarayes5• 1 month ago

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.

hintymad4• 1 month ago

If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S

This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.

I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.

javawizard2• 1 month ago

This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance

I think you might have Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) mixed up with Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix). :)

closeparen2• 1 month ago

In other words, do not buy a house or start a family within 2 hours of any of their supported work locations.

gwbas1c4• 1 month ago

You can sell your house and roll the equity over to another one in a cheaper area. Depending on how you do it, you might even move into one with no loan or a tiny loan.

lumost• 1 month ago

I don't think this is really true, there are plenty of engineers/managers who rotate through major tech companies. Many Meta folks will head off to new companies which would pay at similar levels.

compiler-guy• 1 month ago

This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.

It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.

Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.

Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.

VirusNewbie2• 1 month ago

Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.

menloshark5• 1 month ago

median employee tenure

it's less than two years, probably well below average. maybe it was more previously

menloshark5• 1 month ago

or some other non FAANG big tech corp.

The acronym is outdated. I don't really see a difference between FAANG or Nvidia/Stripe/Uber/etc in terms of brand recognition.

And also it depends on where you land org-wise. What you actually are working on is more important than the brand name

cvak• 1 month ago

I have a friend that did that, in a 4y stint there, and was happy to get to one of the layoffs phase. He was fairly lucky with the stock price RSUs vs stock price(though he knew a few that were so lucky that their 100k RSUs grant at sign got to like 800k, not that lucky, but yeah, his 4 years of flying to office made him basically "I can retire whenever I please to".

Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...

microflash• 1 month ago

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.

mikaeluman• 1 month ago

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...

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

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.

CobrastanJorji• 1 month ago

Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

Your comparison is like comparing The Eagles to some little local rock band!

Rather than two competitive products I think React and Kube are both market dominant products that reveal the engineering culture, values and impact of the two organizations.

I can say that when I first started with React I thought it sucked and looked at Vue and Svelte and similar things. My take on all of them was that they made the internal frameworks I was using to build very complex RIAs in the 2005-2010 time frame look like something that fell off a UFO.

I first thought Vue reflected the way I thought about conventional "webby" applications particularly in terms of treating lists as a first-class object. I eventually learned with React how to draw absolutely anything, even whole 3-d worlds!

https://aframe.io/

I guess what I'll say about Svelte is "if you make such a radical change in your framework did you really believe in it?" Early on I stuck to controlled forms in React because uncontrolled forms seemed structurally unstable (add one too many features and it all breaks) and then I discovered

https://react-hook-form.com/

which is easy and very high performing. What I really like about React is not so much the DX or UX but rather the way it uses functions to seemingly transform a language into something else in a conceptually simple way... And how it solves the problem of composing components written by different people and organizations to the extent that we've now got the terrible problem of managing an app that has 50 third party components and 5 CSS management frameworks.

jmaw2• 1 month ago

Or Angular, if caring about Google

gulugawa7• 1 month ago

How do you decide to use useContext, useReducer, useState, or a third party management tool to manage state?

(I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).

dwoldrich• 1 month ago

I'm not a fan of state management in React apps, and it took me a long time to come to peace with it. What I landed on that works with the system rather than against is useContext at the page level containing Jotai atoms that wrapper Immer-managed objects representing the page states that get passed through the component tree as props.

I built my own action framework that gives me the ability to use Jotai getters to read atom data, launch asynchronous javascript, and then write to atom data via Jotai setters without ever having to fuss with useEffect myself. Jotai just handles the messy state transition work. My components used to be a jumble of DOM event handler, business logic, and markup, and now the business logic is all extracted to the separate action components.

React makes it hard to test business logic in isolation, and I am hoping my action framework could do a better job of that.

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

My main complaint is that React doesn't handle highly dynamic situations. Think of how tools like photoshop or programming IDEs have tons of views and windows and property sheets and stuff and manage to update the right parts of the UI when things change. React on the other hand makes a structural link between the component tree and how state propagates.

Specifically I wrote a bunch of React components for making little biosignals applications that can (say) show two people's heartrate from bluetooth LE and show my breathing based on a strap i am wearing and another person's breathing based on a $20 radar from China.

I can pretty easily snap together the components and the system that feeds the state to the components by writing code. It works great, it's not that hard to do, it looks great.

But: I really wish I could make something where I could drag and drop display and data acquisition and processing components like LabView. Actually I know a lot about how to do the dynamic processing (Hint: read the Dragon book, not On Lisp) but React doesn't support dynamically assembled components... But I know Javascript systems can because I was writing them 2005-2010 back when browsers didn't have async and all the great affordances they offer now.

zeroonetwothree3• 1 month ago

useState for local state or useContext (+ useReducer if it's complicated) for shared state is the "built-in" way that should be good enough for most things.

gitonup2• 1 month ago

If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.

Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?

React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?

PaulHoule7• 1 month ago

They aren't directly competitive (you wouldn't pick one or the other as product) but they are the premier open source projects of the two companies in terms of industry impact and they both reflect the engineering culture. (e.g. I am picking one as an exemplar for other software... like I want to make something like React instead of make something like Kube)

With just a little bit of hyperbole:

The culture of Google is that you hire "the best" developers (say top 0.1%) and hamstring them with process and cumbersome tools so that you need 10x as many of them as another company would need and pay them 3x market rates, but it is OK because (1) at the scale they work at they can amortize the cost over a large user base and (2) they make monopoly products. Google's systems are highly scalable, I grant that, but they have the first mover disadvantage that their foundations are first-generation and not based on experience and still slowing them down... but the market can't discipline them.

Facebook on the other hand, cares about internal DX, sees it a problem when developers are stuck with cumbersome processes, and greases the skids. They benefit from huge scale and monopoly profits but Zuck is keeping more in his pocket than he would be if he did things like Google.

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. That is, a system like what Hazelcast was before it became an analytics play could support clusters of 30 or so big nodes (two racks) and there are probably just a few 100 systems in the worlds that really need to get bigger than that.

spacechild1• 1 month ago

I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers

How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.

smrtinsert6• 1 month ago

Instagram runs on angular doesn't it? They make more money per user than the core FB product... You might want to revisit your criteria for your FAANG journey

ukprogrammer• 1 month ago

Someone who would compare React to Kubernetes instead of React (Facebook) and Vue.js (Google) does not have enough domain knowledge to provide an informed opinion on this matter

Kubernetes is the industry standard cluster orchestrator for a reason - it's fantastic

otekengineering2• 1 month ago

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)

menloshark5• 1 month ago

because they need to make as many employees quit as quickly as possible if they hope to avoid bankruptcy

right now they're freaking out over attrition and making a bunch of posts internally about how they'll "do better"

otekengineering2• 1 month ago

yes, that is the messaging that meta leadership is going for, you have received it as they intended

burnte• 1 month ago

When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

because enshittification probably has a third rail now with the belief that employees dont matter either.

uberman• 1 month ago

Why did Meta think that VR was the end all be all before throwing away billions of dollars? Why did that want to pay an AI expert a billion dollars? The reality is Meta chases shiny objects like a cat with little real or accountable leadership.

csimon80• 1 month ago

In a way, it isn’t that surprising. Executives are constantly being sold the idea that "software is a solved problem." Even if they recognize that this is mostly marketing, it can still influence their internal expectations. They may start thinking, "Maybe AI has solved 30% of software development."

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

rimeice• 1 month ago

raises privacy questions

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

Danox• 1 month ago

Meta is starting to recognize that they are hopelessly behind the other model makers, and they have been just burning cash over the last three years.

lokar5• 1 month ago

Past a certain point top talent care more about how they are treated then even more money. The top of the field can get generational wealth at a bunch of different places, why would they put up with Zuck?

tagyro2• 1 month ago

Meta laid off around 2,000 employees this year and in April they announced a further 10% planned cut in their workforce [0].

Employees were told to work from home and were sent emails at 4AM informing them they've been let go. Those that weren't impacted have software on their computer that tracks their every move. Remaining employees can now opt out of being tracked at work for half an hour [1]. Meanwhile, @Meta is raking in record profits.

ClickUp reduced headcount by 22% - and the CEO tweeted that the "business is the strongest it's ever been". In the same tweet, the CEO motivated this cut by their intention to build the "100X organization" ...[2] A week before the layoffs, they posted this video [3].

Webflow fired most of its staff, with some finding out about it after more than 24 hours [4] (while being on a locked visa, which means they'll have to leave the country!).

Cloudflare laid off 1,100 employees (~20% of its workforce) [5] and hired over 1,000 interns (one could say replaced).

My question for anyone still working at these companies:

Why are you still working there?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/technology/meta-layoffs-a...

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93x0k194yno

[2] https://x.com/DJ_CURFEW/status/2057522382315929802

[3] https://www.tiktok.com/@clickup/video/7638681657058364702

[4] https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/tech/bloodbath-at-california-t...

[5] https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future/

karel-3d2• 1 month ago

It's hard to find a job right now

criddell2• 1 month ago

Why are you still working there?

Probably for the same reasons you go to work everyday.

tagyro2• 1 month ago

Definitely not.

I work to put food in the table.

anukin• 1 month ago

This is the result of scale acquisition. Alexander Wang is a notoriously unscrupulous individual. Meta was in a bad situation post Sandberg era but Wang accelerated the process.

hintymad4• 1 month ago

Amazon has the Kindle

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.

farmerbb• 1 month ago

Yeah I'm surprised they didn't mention Fire TV or even Alexa in addition to Kindle.

jimmydonalds• 1 month ago

Honestly outside of the forced reassignment and surveillance this comes across as super whiny. Extremely unsympathetic.

dzonga2• 1 month ago

every engineer is hands-on with 'A.I' - yet we are not seeing quality software out in the wild.

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

throw-the-towel• 1 month ago

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.

crystal_revenge• 1 month ago

AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry

I've been fortunate enough to have worked on multiple AI intensive engineering teams (both on the product and research side) where considerable effort was spent reasoning through how AI was changing things and we were consistently evolving our practices. But they've all been orgs with 50 people less.

AI psychosis seems to effect very large tech orgs in a different way than small, high impact teams.

In small startups, at the end of the day, if the team doesn't ship a quality product, the company fails. Most importantly, every individual still bares the responsibility of their work. Personally, I've seen a lot of thoughtfulness around things like bad PRs because, on good teams, people realize we're all struggling to figure this out. But nonetheless, if something doesn't go well, there's always an individual that needs to figure out how to make it better. Virtually all the things I've learned about functionally shipping products built with and using AI have come from teams like this. Software engineering is changing, but for those of us shipping products, it reminds me a lot of the early webdev days when we were all trying to figure out the patterns to make this new world of software work reliably (anyone who recalls the pre-jQuery JavaScript days will remember how much we had to figure out before webdev could become what is today).

In large tech orgs there's a much, much larger disconnect between employee effort and concrete value delivered and similarly much larger diffusion of responsibility. When accountability is abstract and nobody is quite sure what the real value of their work is, then there is fertile ground for AI psychosis to run amok. In part this is because there is a certain latent psychosis in these larger orgs anyway; who's "productive" and what's "valuable" always requires a bit of imaginative story telling, not necessarily grounded in reality.

However, I don't think this will persist long as the "new normal". Just like in the rise of web application development, smaller teams will charge ahead and figure some of this stuff out. The MVC pattern applied to webapps, increasingly powerful JavaScript frameworks and best practices, agile practices, git and the popularization of github, the use of No SQL for scaling etc all primarily where battled tested by smaller, high velocity startups and now lay a foundation I'm sure some contemporary devs don't even realize needed to be built by anyone.

jarjoura• 1 month ago

I know at my company our leadership was quite indifferent to how AI was adopted and really relied on the ground level engineers to determine what AI was good for and how we can best make use of it.

It was the engineers at the ground floor who I watched become religious about it. They have been the ones pushing for deeper and deeper tooling. They have been the ones convincing leadership that this is the future and so now, well, it's leadership who is saying, we want more adoption.

This psychosis is happening at every level in our industry, and this isn't a big tech, or leadership problem. It's all our problems.

Schlagbohrer5• 1 month ago

I'm actually worried that as AI gets smarter and more capable, it will become able to induce AI psychosis in even more people. Either accidentally or on purpose, I have no idea about that part.

junior446602• 1 month ago

The examples you give aren't exactly inspiring.

torben-friis2• 1 month ago

I think it's just one more show of how addicted to the algorithm people are.

The difference here is that this particular wave of propaganda hits people whose actions have deep effects on their industries, so their unreasonable actions are far more visible.

mlsu• 1 month ago

I haven't seen anyone really talking about this, but we've seen many very public and powerful people have what is objectively a psychotic break, due to the content algorithm, AI, or both.

We already know what the algorithm does to normal people - it should be treated like a radioactive object by anyone in charge of anything. Very powerful and strictly used judiciously and in small doses. Instead we've got some of the most powerful people on earth just cooking their brains on this shit just like anyone else watching reels on the bus.

echelon2• 1 month ago

It's not propaganda. It's a market trying to find the new low energy state.

This stuff is putting an expiration date on your domain experience, and leadership is salivating at the chance to cut OpEx.

At bare minimum, every PM is soon going to be able to do your work. That's a huge talent pool to draw from. This also opens the door to easy offshoring.

They'll use layoffs to get rid of the existing high salary earners and backfill with new hires earning 70%, then 50%, then...

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.

dlev_pika3• 1 month ago

The irony is that I’d totally test out replacing the CEO with AI - best bang for buck by a million miles

matheusmoreira• 1 month ago

Me too. I bet AIs could run a company much better than all of those lavishly paid CEOs. Can't wait for Cyberpunk's Delamain to become a reality.

jcgrillo3• 1 month ago

But then we wouldn't have had the metaverse, that was a barrel of laughs.

jcgrillo3• 1 month ago

this kind of AI psychosis might be the new normal for our industry, or at least one of the new normals

That's possible, but don't underestimate the cleansing power of a huge market crash. I don't know how it'll shake out, nobody does, but I'd bet in a few years hardly anyone will be looking back on the gung-ho AI thoughtleadering of 2026 as anything other than a stain on history.

to11mtm• 1 month ago

IDK, I think overall it will be more like the 'SAAS' and 'Low Code' waves than the 'Blockchain' fever dreams I've heard in my career.

Something that can be useful but being over-reliant on especially at a management level, could be disastrous.

majormajor2• 1 month ago

Even simpler, I think Meta—like many other companies before it, but most relevantly Twitter as an example of one that blew up its org recently—was likely massively over-hired and over-complexifying things, with too many toes in too many ponds.

The look-at-this-crazy-revenue-faucet period resulted in a LOT of constant hiring for a solid decade. That's not the way towards an efficient org.

So even if they fuck over 70% of their expeienced staff and are left with a relative skeleton crew, they'll likely be able to keep the lights on and keep the advertising-revenue-faucet running for years.

And... given that they've mostly failed to break much of any new ground despite all the previous hiring, the rest of the world probably won't care.

(Plus, as the article itself notes, Meta has long had a pretty toxic perf-review culture; speculation about if that has to do with the lack of any particularly noteworthy new products/features/etc is left to the reader ;) )

ralph84• 1 month ago

The over-hiring was a deliberate strategy to keep talent comfortable on the sidelines instead of working for startups that could potentially grow into competitors. Any talent that escaped containment was quickly acqui-hired to get them back in the paddock.

asveikau• 1 month ago

I also read another lesson from this. The performance review system was already broken in the pre-AI golden age the article describes. Lines of code written and individual impact should not have been the goal. Team cohesion, architectural cohesion, building things that make actual sense are what you want.

smrtinsert6• 1 month ago

    the new normal for our industry

Not really. This level of toxic is definitely just Meta.

_heimdall• 1 month ago

Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea, but I'm also not surprised. Over the years leaders have tried tracking lines of code committed, total commits, etc. It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.

Statistics really is a bitch.

skydhash• 1 month ago

It always boils down to disconnected leadership that needs quantified metrics to watch because they don't know their front line employees and don't understand the work actually being done.

Sometimes they do know the work being done and how it makes them money. But they want MOORE and having engineers putting dampers on their latest wishes (this will break prod, what are the requirements,...) is something they truly dislike.

hibikir• 1 month ago

I once worked at a place where a VP in charge of software teams would look at sprint reports in JIRA, and complained if the burndown charts didn't look similar to the sample, ideal trendline. Managers would be chewed up when their team didn't have a pretty enough chart. So you might not be surprised to hear that ultimately the tickets were doctored to meet the demands of the chart, whether any actual work actually ever closed when the ticket said.

stanac• 1 month ago

Token leaderboards are a ridiculous idea

We have this at work, it's insane. Today I used opus high thinking to write a jira ticket for simple API endpoint. Every code change, every bug fix, every single code review, I have to utilize AI because managers will complain how we are not using AI enough. Every single person in my team have performance goal to increase AI usage.

At least meta will use employee prompts to train an LLM, so maybe it makes sense for them in the long run. We are not training models, only consuming external LLMs.

siraris• 1 month ago

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 worked with him for years that he brought on, were either fired or quit. One person who quit - who I would literally walk into the pits of hell for - told him straight up that he didn't know what happened to him, but he did not want to work with this version of the person he knew. I survived 3 layoffs before getting laid off, and you should see what they are producing now. If I didn't care about alienating myself from a lot of people, I'd share a link. It's honestly a mad king situation now. He's surrounded by a couple of sycophants - some of the most disliked, toxic people at the company, and who I've had the pleasure of working with - and the company is going down in flames.

I 100% can see this being the case not only with Zuck, but with many other companies. I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies. I honestly feel like someone in the future is going to write a Greek tragedy about this time, because it's going to get real bad very soon

itemize123• 1 month ago

what decisions did the CEO do that you would believe is poor? Just conceptually if examples are make you too easily identifiable - iam purely curious.

intended• 1 month ago

How much real productivity gains do you think people saw.

I know that lines of codes and PRs go up, but how much of that actually moves the needle forward?

aylmao2• 1 month ago

Maybe the CEO was always like this, but he went from being a likable, and liked person, to a fucking maniac.

I might not know him, but I don't think he changed. I think the circumstances changed and they happened to lead to another expression of who he is.

IMO the "AI psicosis" is just the latest expression of the hyper-capitalist ideology that has taken over Silicon Valley (and the USA).

Engineering at these companies was special, because there was good money to be made from software at practically nil materials and distribution costs. It was all labour; very specific labour. Instead of a million-dollar idea taking months and lots of $$$ to prototype, mass-produce, and distribute, the right people could type for a week, press a button, and reach millions of people pretty much instantly.

Of course capitalism is going to be kind on this type of labour. But as it becomes clear this labour can be replaced with cheaper automation, we just switch to see the other side of the coin; one employees in other industries have seen for a long time. As an employee, you're a human resource, a cost-center, and without proper labour protections, you get treated as such.

Mark Zuckerberg has also always been like this. Not with the engineers back when they were more special, but with the content moderators for example, who have long been considered "replaceable". plenty has been written about how terrible it is to work in content moderation at Meta, the quotas, the little thought given to doing a good job, to mental health, etc. As engineers keep getting less special, they'll keep seeing the face of Zuckerberg that exploits resources, decreases cost, and demands higher margins.

I am flabbergasted that I am a lowly peon in the machine, and yet unless I'm missing something, I seem to be a lot smarter than most of the people I see running these companies.

This has also long been the case, especially in other industries. I can assure you an average barista at Starbucks knows more about making good coffee and keeping customers happy than the CEO.

Credit where credit is due, the CEO probably does know more about playing the politics, pleasing investors and how to ruthlessly optimize organizations.

sensanaty• 1 month ago

Same exact story for me in my prior company that I left lol. In my exit interview I said "I love literally every single person in the company, except for $PERSON because $PERSON has lost their fucking mind and is going to kill this company with their psychotic AI push". I was the 30th dev to leave in 2 months, in a company that had ~40-50 devs to begin with.

Schlagbohrer5• 1 month ago

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

wilkommen• 1 month ago

I have had the chance recently to meet my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss at my current job and it is amazing how in this era of robber-baron capitalism we seem to be promoting exclusively the most unserious, irresponsible, and magical-thinking among us. The fish does seem to be rotting from the head. And it's not just some companies or institutions, it seems to be all of them. At least during the gilded age, the robber barons were serious people. I'd rather have Vanderbilt or Carnegie as my economic royalty than Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel. Vanderbilt and Carnegie may have been evil, but at least they had their heads on straight.

mystickphoenix• 1 month ago

The funny (not-so-funny?) thing is that reading this if I didn't know better, I'd figure we worked at the same company and I'm sure that most people reading this have a similar story. That's the sad state of the tech industry right now. The reins are controlled by a few at the top that seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to believing whatever AI slop is presented to them, whether it comes from AI or from their underlings.

It'll sure be interesting to see where this goes in the next year or so. The companies that have flamed out due to C* AI Psychosis. I'm sure the next set of "startup leadership" books will be around "how to avoid AI psychosis" and/or "how to use AI psychosis for fun and profit!"

gwbas1c4• 1 month ago

Around 2010 I used to point out to Facebook engineers that "Facebook is the new AOL."

snapcaster• 1 month ago

what's your point here considering you were wrong? in the last 16 years they've been one of the most profitable companies in the history of the earth

gwbas1c4• 1 month ago

It's not always about profits, it's about the user experience. In the late 1990s, almost everyone was on AOL and spent a lot of time using it. Now Facebook has a lot less usage.

gwbas1c4• 1 month ago

I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize.

If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television.

I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.

brokencode2• 1 month ago

Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing.

Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.

datsci_est_20152• 1 month ago

Turns out they have no product vision beyond selling personally-identifiable information to advertisers. I hold them quite a bit in contempt so I would relish in their failure.

softwaredoug• 1 month ago

Well probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.

aurareturn• 1 month ago

Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business.

You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.

zeroonetwothree3• 1 month ago

A LOT of those work in VR, AI, etc.

Not that many of the 25k work on the core apps.

LarsDu882• 1 month ago

There's an aspect to this which feels like part of it is that Zuckerberg himself is sliding into middle age.

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.

pixel_popping2• 1 month ago

What's wrong with Ketamine? Everybody (or at least population majority I'd bet) have consumed hardcore drugs like Alcohol, Cocaine, Ketamine and so-on, what does it have to do with anything?

Haven't you tried?

LarsDu882• 1 month ago

No I have not

warumdarum• 1 month ago

We are going to seem some fairchildren spinouts out of this mess

hintymad4• 1 month ago

Managers inside Meta “fight” over the pay packets of their employees, which involves “knocking down” the packet of engineers on other teams
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.

vkou• 1 month ago

Because that would give managers too much agency. You aren't supposed to get that agency until you are director. Managers manage people and get headcount. Directors manage money and get budgets.

That agency has a price, though. Whatever level you get it at, your boss will not give a single crap about any excuses for why you didn't deliver. A meteor could have hit your building, and it wouldn't matter.

bcatanzaro• 1 month ago

"A founder-engineer driven company. Facebook is one of the few Big Tech firms whose founder is an engineer, and still is the CEO. Netflix is the other one where founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings was also a software engineer before starting the company. Amazon was the other example of this until recently, but it’s not the case at Google or Apple."

So funny how people overlook Jensen Huang repeatedly. As if NVIDIA wasn't big tech, or Jensen wasn't a founder, or an engineer...

AJRF• 1 month ago

I live in $MAJOR_CITY, and Meta is a not a viable workplace for serious engineers anymore.

The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers.

Aside from having the sword of Damocles over you at all times because Zuck has lost his mind, there is a sense he has had 1 too many failures after Metaverse and they are seriously floundering in AI, and their core products (Ad Manager) has a very poor image, even with non-technical users.

So it's not even a sure bet you will even get a short term monetary payoff

senordevnyc2• 1 month ago

In their defense (haha), virtually all the ad management platforms for social and search are total dogshit. Like seriously, some of the worst software I’ve used. Constantly broken, incredibly poor UI / UX, slow, frequently burns money for no reason, ads just mysteriously stop working, etc, etc. Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, they’re all like this. They don’t give a shit about the advertiser experience and it shows.

But I put up with it, just like everyone else, because it’s still amazing ROI when you get it working right. And there’s no other choice if you want access to these platforms with billions of potential customers.

jatins2• 1 month ago

The short term pay for the lunacy of working there is not a sensible trade-off for decent engineers

Besides top 2 AI labs, don't they outpay everyone?

dozerly• 1 month ago

Yea, they have to as a tax because no sane person will work there anymore.

wildredkraut• 1 month ago

Well, who cares if they do. I wouldn't miss Meta if they disappear tomorrow.

typeofhuman• 1 month ago

Agreed. Of all the major companies, I am actually surprised I use 0 of their products. 0.

Apple: yes

Google: yes

X: yes

Samsung: yes

Amazon: yes

waterTanuki• 1 month ago

Needless to say, this is invasive and raises privacy questions: 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? Meta held no consultation and there are no workarounds; just a top-down decision being pushed through.

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?

thraway3837• 1 month ago

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 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?

alex11382• 1 month ago

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?

sota_pop• 1 month ago

Could it be possible that Zuck has a Llama-shaped magic 8-ball to which he has fully committed himself to “dogfooding” an AI-only strategy to his responsibilities in the company?

“[Ll]esus take the wheel”

spamizbad2• 1 month ago

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.

This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.

lokar5• 1 month ago

Zuck hired him and has always been super hands on. He is responsible.

spamizbad2• 1 month ago

To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.

menloshark5• 1 month ago

was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling

I think the main proponent was Bosworth, not Wang

menloshark5• 1 month ago

From the inside, there's a crazy amount of attrition right now. The way they handled this layoff freaked a bunch of people out. They didn't acknowledge it for one month and every week we were wondering if it was going to happen.

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

laweijfmvo2• 1 month ago

it’s worth paying attention to what the stock price was 4 years ago for the next year or so

ux4• 1 month ago

Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface:

I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left.
On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure.

This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle.

With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.

mwambua• 1 month ago

It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"

digitaltrees• 1 month ago

Yes. Most companies are.

mannanj• 1 month ago

He talks about psychosis, and I'm glad to see some people here seeing that for what it is rather than gaslighting everyone and pretending that its a made up word or that that sort of thing is a "conspiracy".

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!

kens• 1 month ago

On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.

For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178

whatever1• 1 month ago

It’s such a waste for a company that has attracted the best talent, to just toss it.

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.

jojobas• 1 month ago

Never stop your enemy from making a mistake.

aspeckt_112• 1 month ago

I don’t have much to add, but it’s been interesting reading the comments here. I don’t engage with many of their products. I deactivated my Facebook account in 2014, one of the few times in my life I’ve done something before it was “cool” to do so. I do reluctantly use WhatsApp, but that’s really just because literally everyone in my life does so its just easier.

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.

frobisher• 1 month ago

Folks what has Meta got to do with engineering? Their products suck, we all use them because of network effects, nothing else mostly...

dmujic• 1 month ago

Isn't that really common thing now, just look at Microsoft for example...

rgavuliak2• 1 month ago

Well paid engineers compare their experience to a labour death camp just confirms how out of touch they are.

olsondv• 1 month ago

Felt the same way. Set aside the hyperbole, and it’s coming from the very real fear that data labeling does not have long-term job security. If the company continues to run after you’ve been moved, it’s pretty obvious you were redundant. Tough realization for people that see themselves as having been successful career-wise.

Schlagbohrer5• 1 month ago

Hyperbole is fun though. So is complaining.

rgavuliak2• 1 month ago

There's a difference between a hyperbole and being tone deaf.

a3f8c2d• 1 month ago

If the engineering culture is broken isn’t that an indication that the company is moving faster, breaking things, failing harder, etc? That’s a good thing according to Facebook’s little red book, which, according to the author is an example of good engineering culture. So I’m a little confused.

MRaid• 1 month ago

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

mac3n• 1 month ago

"cattle, not pets"

vladak• 1 month ago

I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus.

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

Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

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