Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

simonw

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

fabian2k

> 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.

bevekspldnw

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

kadhirvelm

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

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?

operatingthetan

>“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!

vanuatu

"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?)

xnx

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.

josefritzishere

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

KaiserPro

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.)

jdalgetty

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

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.

Groxx

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.

jazzpush2

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.

ironman1478

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.

simianwords

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?

marssaxman

"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.

drivebyhooting

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.

jmuguy

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.