Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

joenot443

https://archive.is/JUPmz

ost-ing

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

downrightmike

MEta made billions on AI in 2025, 10% of their revenue... by allowing scammers to use AI to attack users and steal user's money.

Havoc

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop. There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.

bossyTeacher

Not going to lie, I have no pity for the tech employees of a company that has spent most of its existence making the world a worse place. They are finally getting a taste of the medicine Facebook has been giving to everyone in the last 2 decades.

bachmeier

> it is cutting jobs to offset its A.I. spending, saying last month that it would slash 10 percent of its work force. > Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said. Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.

androiddrew

I believe that's the point.

deanCommie

Every big tech company's embrace of AI is making all of their employees miserable. Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other) The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency. For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered . Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries. 2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries. Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity. And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing. How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp? I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.

LightBug1

That's what's making its employees miserable ????!

_doctor_love

I love the quote in there from Boz that basically says "no you can't opt out fuck off"

stephc_int13

I believe that any kind of partial automation is going to make the job more soul-crushing. Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing. I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.

shevy-java

Well, that's the goal of AI Skynet - it has no need for humans. Did nobody learn from that movie?

rl3

It occurred to me recently that AI's degradation of the human factor via way of increased pressure on the remaining ranks of humans might actually be far more damaging than the AI's output itself.

Giorgi

Meta has been banning it's core users for months now, above 20 million users are now banned, they are on death spiral after that Metaverse fiasco. https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...

onlytue

As someone who hasn’t spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I’m not shocked at all.

outside1234

I am not a big fan of unions, but we need some form of union as soon as possible.

softwaredoug

I noticed a lot more joy using AI from people at smaller companies or working by themselves :) I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.

synergy20

from a different perspective, there are way more people who are truly miserable these days comparing to these who earn probably more than half a million per year on average. we must live in parallel universe.

TinyBig

On top of token tracking, they're also scoring employees on how much they teach Ai to their colleagues. As bad as the token dashboard sounds, employees being forced to try to mine each other for credit sounds worse.