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Discussion (155 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.
At least some companies reacted to this with more top-down management, stricter metrics etc. which kills motivation further and leads to metric optimization. Tell a good, smart, motivated engineer that you want more AI usage, and he's going to maybe start using some AI where it makes sense, but mostly ignore the metric while trying to do useful work. Demotivate the same engineer and make clear that his paycheck depends on metrics, and he'll give you what you're asking for, except https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn is probably not what you _wanted_...
I think it explains everything, most companies are optimizing for “confused” - a class within the framework of people who work hard for no reason.
Not saying it’s the best but it’s certainly a way to do it, and probably becomes inevitable once the company is big enough.
I also think it closely parallels the practice of companies being actively hostile to their customers (or Pareto optimal as they might see it). Big companies would rather provide an offering that suits them, actively mistreating their customers, and just target customers that will go along with it rather than wasting time on customers that want some less profitable version of the offering.
it's also about as valid a Freud or Horoscopes. Maybe some grains of truth, sure, but it's a view of the world filtered through old management textbooks then filtered through a comic and then filtered through the Office.
It's Dilbert meets Simulation vs. Simulacra.
Thus the company gets hurt 2 ways: good ones leave, and bad ones stay, making the lives of everyone else miserable.
This goes for the economy writ large. There are two generations of Americans who have been taught that housing is unstable, and that so is their paycheck, and that neither political party will lift a finger to help in any meaningful way (i.e., one that sacrifices donor sentiment and dollars). It's like the opposite of postwar Europe and Japan. How do you fix half the country not believing in your economic model?
1) empathy is a weakness
2) introspection is a waste of time
3) move fast and break things
The only introspection will be along the lines of “we should have moved faster and broken more things”; because of (1) and (2), it can’t progress to the level of “maybe we were completely wrong in a fundamental sense”, because they just don’t perceive human minds outside of their own (they really do view us as NPCs).
Even worse, the claim it’s bad
Actually... I wouldn't be surprised if some people were actually running the tool and got away with it (or praised for getting the metric up) for a long time...
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
I don't think that should be the real fear. The real fear is those 10x engineers still putting in equivalent effort, but now having to spend mental capacity on positioning themselves for future layoffs and worrying about getting fired.
I think we greatly underestimate the performance boost there is in security. When you don't have to worry about plan b, you can be so much more efficient at plan a.
Morale problems can be just enough to make your best people pick up the phone when recruiters call.
This is an interesting quote from Zuckerberg:
> trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected
Combine that with the other theories about Meta management in the article, I think we have the answer to is Zuckerberg a "dimwitted or just evil". It's probably the former. He can't plan four month in advance apparently, nor does he want to wait and work of actual data. Meta can affort to implement some AI, wait to see if it pans out and then layoff people. On the other hand, he had way to much patience with the Metaverse, even as all signed pointed to it being a failure. His personal hobbies shows that he is capable of patience, training, hunting isn't going to yield results in four months. I think he lacks the skills to manage, and to recognize and hire competent managers. Had Meta stock not been structured the way it is, I would like to think that the board had replaced Zuckerberg as CEO.
I wouldn't however agree that Meta was necessarily to late to AI. They showed a lot of potential early on, but then sort of dropped off. They weren't to late, it is just another mismanaged project.
He likely developed some irrational belief that clever and young beats anything else, and saw an echo of his own bravado in Alexandr Wang.
Turns out his heuristics were not calibrated properly.
Meta is basically the Temu version of Google. Google also goes wrong a lot, and they are mostly resting on their big successes from years ago, but they still at least have the people and ability to produce top tier results every once in a while, while Meta was always second rate.
Why is this an either/or? Those aren't mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
OK, not the saying. Perhaps should be.
Assuming a sufficient base level of competence, more of how things go for company A vs. company B can be explained by random walks through events (their dependent paths) than by management.
A competent and persistent leader can increase the odds, but under close study, fortuitousness and serendipity – or luck of the draw and timing – have more explanatory power.
Meanwhile, just try to make your own luck. Make sure you happen to things, instead of things happening to you.
He saw that coming and slyly prevented it. He cannot be as dimwitted as you suggest.
i think he’d rather just blow up the whole company than continue to be solely associated with one (or even a few) of the most successful websites/apps in history, for some reason. maybe he thinks people will like him if he does something else?
You can pretty much see his thought process in real time.
"Google and OpenAI have built these cool LLM things, but I have the best engineers in the world so obviously I should be driving that technology. Go build it for me."
Turns out his engineers aren't very effective at building it.
"Obviously I need to fire all these lazy employees and replace them with the best industry talent. They aren't going to refuse my money."
So he throws billions at a few top AI researchers, but they produce nothing of value.
"I don't understand, why am I still not winning? It must be because the AI industry itself is now moving at a very slow pace.
so he spends 1% of yearly revenue on AI talent to catch up? we can't judge if they have produced nothing of value, no? They don't owe the world to open source their work?
Meta has plenty of failings, but taking risks and investing optimistically is not on my list. I guess the sentiment here on HN is probably biased by the addictive nature of its products.
Given that, the pattern I saw in my head was that Zuck sees a new toy, get excited and thinks it will change everything, invests in it, then admit he’s wrong, but at least we have an ads business to keep this whole thing rolling along. Rinse and repeat.
Reminds me a lot of crypto payments, metaverse / VR / AR.
A man trying to predict the future and being mostly incorrect while not really facing any consequences of being wrong. Always searching for the next big thing. Classic Silicon Valley tale.
If you have tens of thousands of employees the more complicated the communication is, the larger the variation of interpretation of its meaning, I suppose
I'll go with both... I think the guy made some real moves early on, but it's been a while since whatsapp and instagram. And since then, if the tales in Careless People are to be believed, so much smoke has been blown up his digestive endpoint that he's mostly smoke now.
People who innovate without becomming super rich dont get ackwnowledged as innovative. CEO buys or copy an app - innovative.
I can.
He is basically a middle-aged college bro that always got what he wanted and never had to ask twice for something.
He's not necessarily dimwitted but it would take an absolutely amazing person to understand the 8 layers below him without having lived any of them. Of course he can't transcend Meta into something beyond what it's become.
Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said.
If Zuckerberg is seeing problems, that means other large tech firms that also followed the siren call of AI transformation and opted to quickly shake things up are likely feeling similar pains.
For instance, Andy Jassy spouted very similar language in his 2025 letter to Amazon shareholders (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...) which was followed by layoffs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748603).
What have we seen since? Lots of stuff breaking, from seller-focused tech (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...) to cloud services. Amazon now mandates senior engineers to sign off on AI-generated code (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017), even though that will interfere with the mandate to "move fast and operate the like the world's biggest startup."
I'd believe that a complete automation of this aspect of our industry would only be enough to provide a 10-20% boost in productivity. Still impressive, but within the range of "Our team improved our CI, build times, development process etc."
It takes years or decades for the automation of an artisan process to shake out, because it involves rethinking how everything around the now-automated process happens, and because the benefits involve the automation's ability to continue scaling beyond a level where human capacity was saturated. We're only at the very beginning of that process for coding, and right now we tend to see LLMs somewhat awkwardly inserted into pre-existing software development lifecycles. But it's unlikely that'll be still be the way we're creating software in 10/20 years time.
I have heard a lot of claims like this, where we cannot imagine the benefits of AI because the work will look so different to how it is now, but I have yet to see that actually demonstrated anywhere.
Most times were spent juggling paperwork, bouncing back and forth on code reviews, negotiating ambiguous requirements, and attending pointless meetings.
Granted... the agentic tools can also help with that. I've had them automate JIRA tedium for me before, much to middle management's chagrin.
In the context of AGI, is it inevitable eventually? Sure, I would agree, unless some catastrophic event puts back our technological advancement.
IMO, don't see the path to AGI with the current tech, though. All current SOTA agents are still LLM based with all their flaws (limited reasoning, generalization, incomplete world model, hallucinations, ...). At their core, they are still next token predictors with a limited context.
Most of the advances in AI in the past 2 years are in post-training and harnesses.
I'd expect a different core technology than just an LLM in order to get to AGI.
What if it’s not a catastrophic event, but technological progress just asymptotically approaches 0? What if there is a limit to layers upon layers of abstraction and at some point it just becomes too complicated to keep going?
What if we all somehow decide that we don’t want AGI? It seems impossible now but a lot of people really seem to hate AI. What if that sentiment grows globally the next 50-100 years?
That’s all ignoring the possibility that the materialists are wrong. Around 80% of the world believes in some kind of soul or spirit. If anything materialism is a bit of a fringe belief.
Before the recent floodgates cracked open, AI research made only slow incremental progress for decades. Why couldn't we already be back near that rate of progress?
Meta's strategy is the kind of thing many/most people here could have come up with:
* "We have lots of users, let's show them more ads"
* "They are doing AI, let's do AI".
* "I've watched Ready Player One, let's build VR".
Duh.
I feel like a broken record but Google cracked this particular nut in the 2000s by creating an environment where people could flourish who would otherwise suffer in Corporate America. Google studied this and found in the 2010s that psychological safety was the number one factor in team success [1].
Corporate America typically has what's called an "up or out" mentality. Jack Welch dogmatic thinking rules here. Fire the bottom 5% every year and if you don't get promoted within a certain period, get rid of you because you've reached your potential. This is what created things like stack ranking (which is nothing more than a popularity contest) and smoothing of performance ratings. The last one is toxic because a certain percentage of ratings have to be subpar (ie below "Meets Expectations"). All of this destroys collaboration and creates an environment where those who are more political and more likable rise to the top.
And guess what? Your autistic engineers who otherwise flourished in early Google can't function effectively in such an environment. And these are the people who otherwise become subject-matter experts in storage systems, networking and other niche topics.
At some point innovation ends and the only way to satisfy the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is to raise prices and/or cut costs. So all these companies have engaged in the suppression of wages despite being wildly profitable on a per-employee basis.
As for Zuckerberg in particular, he clearly has no idea where to go with Meta and the AI division is a disaster. The posterchild for bad decision-making and leadership was the Metaverse because $70B+ was spent on an idea with no product-market fit. There were other less expensive boondoggles (eg Libra).
So Zuck hired like crazy in the pandemic because that's what everyone else did and has now engaged in massive layoffs because, well, that's what everyone else is doing and he has no idea what to do with those people. Notice how it's leadership errors that are massively disruptive to people's lives but they suffer none of the consequences when they're responsible? Yeah, me too.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
Evil
> Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698684
It's metaverse deja vu.
Search is bad at finding what you want but good at keeping you searching.
Here in Canada, kijiji(ebay classifieds) was popular and has accounts and ratings. People still have moved to marketplace.
By practically any measure all of the things you've listed have been wildly successful.
Apple is wildly successful at both, arguably more so the leadership than the actual product. Amazon, despite its faults, has a ton of businesses many of which do well, and it continues to innovate. I'm biased but I think Google is also in that category, with many new products that are widely well regarded (yes some were acquisitions, but typically smaller ones).
Meta on the other hand... Facebook was huge, no doubt. Instagram too, but that was already semi locked in on acquisition, they already had product/market fit at least. WhatsApp has languished under Zuckerberg, having had their explosive growth independently.
Oculus? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. Crypto? Nope. AI? Nope, or at least not yet.
By business metrics, very successful. By innovation in ads, very successful. But building new consumer businesses? Not really.
The moment they couldn't do either they got their clock cleaned (tiktok)
His original moneymaker was sort of happenstance, a right-place-right-time quick hack that lucked out, got traction, and raised enough money to scale out, BIG, with essentially the same concept that he lucked upon.
Instagram and WhatsApp, both absolutely successful beyond imagination, were acquisitions. Same goes for Oculus.
Has Zuckerberg/Meta ever once themselves deliberately sat down and invented and built something great masses of people want? Facebook doesn't count; that was happenstance. He didn't hack that together in a day to get a billion users, or perhaps even to build a "product" at all.
They tried doing hardware with that Echo Show knockoff, afaik nobody really bought it. They tried the metaverse thing, and, again, nobody really wanted it. (I'm still not convinced it doesn't have legs; the way they did it was obviously not it.)
React and zstd don't count, obviously.
...Yes
Former meta wanker here.
Its both. but also its the structure around Zuckerberg that makes it worse.
First Zuckerberg only cares about tech, he doesn't care about product. he loves research, and he loves new things that can be done with the research that he's been sponsoring. People management, politics, product design is all stuff that is outsourced.
Now, rightly, Zuckerberg has trust issues. Everyone either tells him he's brilliant or a massive cunt. there is no inbetween. This means he has an inner circle that manages his action flow and diffuses it into the organisiation.
This is problematic because they are not there because of competence, virtually all of them are there because they have been at facebook for a long time. Its network not competence.
Facebook used to (it was less before I left) bang on about this being "your company" as in it was a town hall of ideas, and the best would bubble up to the top, the rest would dissolve into the primal talent pool.
This means that the company "product team" were setup and still to some extent to be information brokers, they would pull the best initiatives and show them selectively to Zuck. They didnt really provide strong vision about what the "facebook" product should be.
Combine that with the 6month PSC cycle, where you have to demonstrate "impact", means you have lots of half baked single ideas that bubble up, get tested and then either kinda fizzle out or stay there like a fucking cancer. These ideas are driven by metrics of a sub department of a sub department of a sub department. At one point the notifications on the facebook app were owned by more than one team, possibly three, with a overall family of app notification team(I get hazy on this, whatever it was there were many many people who's job was to move images around on the notification panel by minute amounts and work out if that drove screen time)
This means that direction is hard, mainly because there is none from the centre, and that the company flow isn't designed for a single design to be implemented globally. There isn't enough glory to go around to feed the senior ++ staff engineers who get paid $3m a year to specialise is tweaking the colour of the border of buttons in the facebook app by 3%.
Boz bills himself as the "moderator" and "unblocker" not the arbiter of taste, or the "facebook style". I don't think Cox has publicly ever uttered any words of substance. the point is, none of them have said "here is the experience design that we want, go and make this work so that it looks and feels like this". Its all "ok this feature moved MAU by .0005% lets ship that one"
There is one exception to all of that: monetization. If monetization want to change something for whatever reason, then they get it. Gambling adverts in your notifications? sure, creating an audience group for tweens that have just deleted a selfie? fuckyeah Hiding fraud from the outside world? sure is 10% of global revenue enough?
TLDR:
Zuck is politically naive, and consistently fails to learn. He is reliant of his inner circle to spoon feed him decisions outside his competency areas
Zuck ruined enough lives, let him go become an mma podcaster like he wants.