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Discussion (147 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Never seen people this universally fed up. I thought tech was too cushy for it to happen, but there's serious collective action posting out in the open all over the place.
It's also never been more cutthroat, backstabby, scope-grabby, political, and uncertain. There seems to be a flywheel in effect where top talent exits and those who will drown each other to stay afloat are all that remain. It's somehow leapfrogging Oracle's culture even.
I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.
I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit.
More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that once the AAP thing happened with Apple, it got really really nasty.
Like, every company tends towards the median of it's geographies over time but Facebook was a pretty special place to work at back in the day, and it looks like a lot of that has been lost now.
I'm sure whatever your role at facebook is, it is very important. There are people who recognize how valuable your contributions were/are/will be. You probably won't find that validation on HN.
People do like to remain oblivious to all. Some go even further to blame company for their immoral activities but remain firmly in place as income from those activities is just too good to leave.
This is the death spiral of a company. Things start to get bad, the best people with the most external options leave, which makes things worse... the people left behind are either those with no other options, or people who strive in the backstabbing environment of a company in decline.
My guess is that if the planned layoffs remove these "underperforming" devs that are actually fixing AI introduced bugs at the detriment of their own velocity, that will hopefully lead to a correction that AI isn't actually dramatically increasing efficiency, but rather that it trades efficiency amongst individuals with likely a slight positive trend in efficiency overall.
Interestingly, since I'm also from an academic background, it seems professors have leaned in heavily on AI and are essentially using their PhD students as filters for AI ideas (which have a MUCH lower signal to noise in that domain).
Interesting times (speaking as an NLP researcher).
Is the pay just so good you turn a blind eye? Honestly, I can understand that if I am being honest. But I don't see as many people being clear about this. I assume people are delusional on their impact for the dollar signs are so big they will look away from the hurt they help cause.
There are a lot of folks who also really do not care and are just here for the money though. The large majority, if I were to guess.
At least you know how much he is willing to sell his happiness for?
I mean, they had Carthago Delenda Est posters for a long time, so the competitiveness has been there for an extremely long time.
Now imagine every time one of these ideas happen a 2000+ person org immediately starts pivoting to work on it as its top priority.
The company has been known as kinda sketchy almost continuously since it was founded, yet people went there because it paid the most money.
If leadership is now thinking that an executive "ideas person", plus a small execution team fortified with AI, can bang out a product more quickly than the massive army of corporate workers they've been feeding at top of the market rates, and at the same quality level as the previous inefficient bureaucracy managed... isn't that plausibly correct?
Now, the company just needs to be the best-paying job available to enough of those workers. And the company believes this is getting easier for the company, due to the state of the job market. The workers who remain will remain motivated by money.
And the company may think they're not losing anything of value, since they knew that their culture was already sick.
Example: They think they weren't getting creative, aligned, diligent brilliance, amidst all the backstabbing and politics they'd created, and so mechanically executing on an executive ideas person's vision yields the same product result, faster.
From the outside, I think this shouldn't be a surprise, nor blamed on possible neurodivergence of individuals.
(Of course this isn't my own philosophy about morale and effective product teams, and I wouldn't want to work at a company like that. But you can see some company cultures from thousands of miles away.)
Back in the day you could mention in passing "oh that guy is on a spectrum", but it was always because they were awkward and quiet, not anti-social.
Zuck has spent his life from birth in a walled garden. He cannot relate to normal human emotions. In a way, that's not his fault, but we showered people like him with praise for being "geniuses" and "visionaries", which did not help matters.
I'm "neurodivergent" but when it comes to empathy/sympathy, I tend toward the over-sensitive side rather than oblivious (as does my son, who is diagnosed with ASD Type 1).
I don't take any issue with that being used in this context, though. I mean, I wouldn't really in any context as long as the person writing it isn't intending malice -- they're just words, people can misuse/abuse them -- but specifically this context. "Neurodivergent" covers a lot of ground, but in reference to Mr. Zuckerberg, nearly all of us[0] pictured one of two things: Data (Star Trek) or Data with Borg accessories attached. Which you chose largely depended on your opinion of him, but both had an android character who has no ability to feel emotions or understand the emotions that others feel.
... and since good communication largely rests on people's understanding of your message, I think OP's word choice was largely sound. :)
[0] As in those of you who, like me, have never been in the same city at the same time as the guy so we know "him" based on what we read about him.
Arguably hacking Crimson reporters when they tried investigating him for activities at Harvard
Buying Whatsapp so he can have a monopoly
Copying Snapchat multiple times
I mean, I can go on
You literally work for a guy who, talking about the user data he dubiously acquired, that said "they trust me, dumb fucks".
It's hard to feel sorry for workers who chose that road, the writing was on the wall.
And to be very well paid to create the biggest spying tech on the planet, making doomscroll addictive, ads that serve scams, AI slop everywhere, and being accused of having participated in election manipulation.
At some point, I call it poetic justice, and I wish there were more of that.
But in the best case, I'd be working in a low ROI area -- actively draining money from the parts of the company that are most malicious -- primarily ensuring that assembly lines and skills at Goertek stay hot to carry the XR devices I'm passionate about through a nadir in the broader industry's investment. A mercenary agreement for the company and myself to both advance our goals.
But there are things you say as a young person that are revealing of core personality traits.
Most people would just not say that.
"A" dumb thing
Ignore dumb fucks
What about "if you need info on people at Harvard just ask"
Or "I'm going to fuck them in the ear" (Winklevosses)
I was just reading the old speech by John Barlow, in another post[0]. Sort of dovetails with this.
I spent the majority of my career at a camera manufacturer.
I probably made half of what I could have made, anywhere else, and there were lots of issues, caused by bureaucratic overhead, heavy-handed QA, and cultural misunderstandings.
But not once, during almost 27 years, did I wonder "Are we the baddies?"[1].
My first job was at a defense contractor, where we manufactured surveillance gear, and sold it to militaries and spy agencies around the world. One of the reasons that I left that job, was because we definitely were the baddies.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/leaving-physical-world
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
I've thought about this because it's true for most every place I worked, we just funnel money into Google & Meta's coffers and play the SEO and social hacks game just like everyone else.
Peace of mind over peace of wallet for me, every time.
So ... I understand bad morale and 10% layoffs. We went from 25,000 employees (1998-1999) at peek to under 3,000 (2004ish?). I did 17 years of (at least) 10% cuts company-wide, often larger in IT, every 6-12 months.
They're going to have a problem hiring, that's certain. They seem very unconcerned with that both with the drumbeat of layoffs and the forced spyware nonsense.
I remember when things were at the worst at my company, HR did a company-wide "engagement" survey. Being in IT at the time, we worked closely with them to ensure as close to complete participation as possible. The theory behind it was that each employee (anonymous) would receive a ranking, bubbled up to segments within the company (less anonymous) and specific managers.
The reason for the rush to get this out was fraud fears. I guess that number goes low enough to represent something near "an employee who feels morally obligated to destroy the organization", but the number of employees who fit in the range of "so disengaged from the company that they are probably engaging in fraud/theft" in the trial phase was an order of magnitude higher than the team had estimated.
When things get that bad, it's tough to recover. In certain locations we had an impossible time hiring most positions -- we had a toxic reputation in a high-tech location with a lot of job openings; we were often the last choice of the worst candidates no matter what the position was.
I really care about VR and had the opportunity to work at Reality Labs. They paid to relocate my family to the Bay Area, where I was able to get better medical care for an autoimmune disease. I interviewed at other companies too but it was late 2022 and hiring freezes eliminated my other opportunities.
So my motivations were: - Working on something I care about - Getting to the Bay Area and eventually being able to move to a better/more moral company
My aspirations: - Leave Meta ASAP for somewhere less icky
I truly, honestly believed I wouldn’t survive at the company for very long, and would be laid off. Surprisingly I got great performance reviews year after year. The stock went up substantially and it got really difficult to quit. I then had a kid, struggled to adapt to the new demands, and had no extra bandwidth to interview anywhere else. Golden handcuffs, but not in the way I expected.
My moral justification for this continues to be that Meta is such a bloated, slow, and political company that there’s almost no chance that my work has any meaningful effect whatsoever on the company’s overall success or survival.
I also donate 5-6 figures to meaningful charities, particularly the Afghanistan refugee relocation efforts. Ideally our government would just fund those efforts directly but it’s nice to be able to control a very small part of the distribution of wealth
I am interviewing at other companies now, like basically all of my coworkers
Anyway, since we billed hourly, I ended up keeping track of all of the money I made while working on that client's work, and donated all of it to St. Jude's hospital.
But I still feel really fucking gross about it, and I don't think that will ever go away.
1: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Safe_withdrawal_rates
2: https://tpawplanner.com/
I’m nowhere close to $5m, and I’m hoping to leave Meta in the next few months. But I’d love to be able to “retire” and work exclusively for companies that match my morals.
I figured the amount I’m donating doesn’t make a huge difference to my FIRE date
What were you hoping to achieve with this comment other than making a person who is being vulnerable to anonymous internet denizens feel worse?
They didn’t seem to look much further than their desk and their bank accounts for what was meaningful to them. That’s ok, I’m sure we need people like that, but a lot of them were just doing the “career” thing and don’t really mind about what happens to the system they’re contributing to after they’ve done their part. They do the necessary work to keep the system in motion, without caring too deeply about what happens next. They worry about their locus of understanding and control and don’t mind much what happens after. That was my impression.
I visited a former colleague at the Palo Alto campus in ~2014. What they were working on looked intriguing (I signed an NDA to visit and don't remember the terms, so I won't say what), but it did feel cultish at the time.
Is that because if all people in the software industry cared about the subject and technology more than the money, we would be overworked for low wages? Eg. in the video games industry?
On the flip side, is it good that people are willing to ignore the negative societal consequences of their job?
(I'm not trying to make a point, but rather asking questions since I want to know how people see this.)
If there was no reason for it to exist, it wouldn't. I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's a question of accepting the construct of existence as what is not what I hope it could be under different circumstances.
There's probably an evolutionary reason why we need people who don't get paralyzed by second and third order effects.
1) Work with top minds in ML 2) Money
But I have enough money now and no amount of more money (that Meta could reasonably offer for my role) would make it worth staying. This place sucks now.
Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.
Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.
Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?
Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.
You might have a good amount of faith in dang (as do I), to not, say, let the investment firm sell HN account identity info to data brokers.
And HN is almost unique among popular sites, in not running any apparent third-party trackers at all.
But HN occasionally turns on Google reCaptcha, which I suspect could unmask most pseudonymous/anonymous identities here. Especially since it wasn't expected.
Unmasked, along with their entire past and future comment history, of which Google and other tech companies might have firehose feeds.
(I've emailed hn@ my concerns about people not expecting big-tech trackers on HN, but I suspect that HN is occasionally in a difficult position, due to attacks.)
Also, not all future employers are totally worried about that, especially when those that were doing the speaking have a very wanted set of skills. Quite often the future employer is like "Oh yea, everyone knows Meta/FB is balls, glad you pointed it out", especially in the case they are much smaller than the mega company.
Someone at Meta saying it sucks publicly and that they no longer want to be there would be a positive hiring signal for many people.
So i doubt you are really "working with" top minds at ml meta.
Some of the other BigTechs also have teams that work on this niche, but despite my best efforts, none of them are giving me offers :) so I need to work here until I guess I can get a job somewhere else.
If you are not in the Bay Area, the absolute numbers might seem unbelievable but here you go - I have seen mid-senior engineers (4-5 years exp) get Meta offers with 700k yearly TC.
You can stay at the company and get stock appreciation up to that but you’re not getting a new hire offer at $700k below staff level. (Even for staff, it’s high)
It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.
Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.
However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.
Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".
Right now, layoffs are cool. It boosts earnings. And the current sentiment is that new ideas and projects are risky unless they involve shoving the square-shaped-AI into the circle-shaped-hole.
The thing that bothers me the most is that the people making these decisions are "winning" regardless of the outcomes. I can't remember a time where the industry was so overtly like this (i.e., the outcomes don't really matter). Perhaps the dotcom-era but I wasn't working in tech yet.
This isn't stopping until it gets all the way up to the asset holders.
The company has tens of thousands of people. There will be some variation but a lot of orgs are quite ruthless with their metrics.
I think execs are vastly underestimating the damage an apathetic engineering org armed with AI can do to their platform. The short-termism can (and I think will) come back around when they foster an angry culture with a huge token budget.
It reminds me of Woodstock '99, when in order to keep an angry, hungry and drunk crowd under control, the organizers planned a candlelight vigil for Columbine and gave the crowd real candles. That went over about as well as one might guess.
I don't really understand the rationale otherwise, hiring is hard, and they are not forced to reduce cost now.
This seems like a colossal mistake. Not the first of course.
He took Latin at his first high school and at Exeter when he went there for 11th and 12th grades, so he almost certainly knew it without Wikipedia.
But yeah, whenever I've survived a layoff it feels a bit like surviving a decimation or some other collective punishment.
A collective punishment, 10% of the soldiers killed by their peers, randomly choosen.
Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077126
My heart bleeds.
- harvested user data which helped a company manipulate a US election and the Brexit outcome?
- played a role in spreading hate speech, which was used to support a genocide in Myanmar?
- harmed the mental health of a generation of young people.
Just highlighting some data points. I'm really not suggesting you stand up for yourself and do something that might harm your employer that is now harming you.
but c) because they forced this on themselves. Free Basics is Zuck's idea to own everything. They expand into markets without, I guess, checks and balances. Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198
You are destroying a profession that was fun and profitable. Don't come with your Luddite and "a subset of us did it to others as well" talking points.
Adding numbers wasn't fun, spreadsheets by hand weren't fun. But you are actively destroying fun thinking, perhaps because you have never worked on anything substantial yourselves and want to drag others down.
Stop enrolling in CS, let us see how that works out for FAANG in 5 years. There is no incentive any longer.
How will the people who continuously rationalize the Internet justify that they are destroying a profession - travel agents - that was fun and profitable?
If we blocked every possible innovation because it lowered the fun of something existing we'd never have progressed past the Stone Age.
cars: people now live completely car-dependent lives and drive way too much. our infrastructure cannot handle people driving so much and it's extremely expensive and bad for our health and terrible for the environment
internet: well... obviously... social media and all the harms that come with that.
Travel agents used to give better recommendations and even cheaper flights. There is little innovation in the ad laden travel sites that give bad deals. Case in point: Often if you call a hotel directly you get a better price than on the sites and they don't give you the room next to the elevator that appears to be reserved for people who order via the sites.
Real anti-stone-age innovation has mostly been in the physical world to free up time for thinking. That is what the rich people who cannot think for themselves now want to take away.
As Meta's stock price falls that fuck around money falls away and people's jobs are suddenly a lot more focused on making the company cash. Of course that's going to make people miserable.
Of course Zuckerberg has no idea what he's doing
When I was finally laid off, there was no notice at all. Ripping off the band-aid was better (though it still sucked).
It ratchets up both after the silent layoffs, and before the announced ones; after the silent refresher reductions, and the announced MCI-like initiatives.
It's nice to think morale is only bottoming out for a month, but in actuality it is spiraling catastrophically.
They do have a small circle of trusted people who they like (like the 1%, lol), but if you're not in, you're just trash that they haven't gotten around to cleaning out yet.