To me it's a way to signal to outsiders that Facebook is still cool and hip. That's it.
Now when recruiting they can play the Meta-not-Facebook angle.
Now if they can pad earnings calls with the amazing success the metaverse is seeing (so what if it's losing us money, that's the future!)
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It's like an inverse Alphabet. Where Alphabet silently serves as an umbrella for moonshots, Meta is a moonshot that's an umbrella for boring old Facebook
I am going to start using this term to satisfy people that argue its not called Facebook anymore.
would be better, because in case of the Meta-not-Facebook, 'not' might be strong enough to remember that way.
(Yes I know market cap != war chest, but expenditure on Meta is nothing compared to the "soft power" it provides FB)
I dont see a ton of fb recruiters hiring for VR skills, I dont see a lot of training/certifications /open source libraries /platform Sdks for other devs etc that feels like $10B a year kind of budgets are behind VR/AR.
That's a lot of money, Hard space companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin which have big hardware expenses spend only 1-2 billon/year and have thousands or tens of thousands of staff working and their progress is visible .
Does FB have 20,000 + engineers working on metaverse? even if so, doing what exactly ?
I am sure FB is recruiting, my point is not that reality labs is fake , I am sure it is real and they do recruit, it just that I don't see recruitment that would signal that large a number of investment.
I wasn't saying from a personal engineer anecdotal experience, but as some one working in recruitment tech, I keep an eye on industry patterns.
I could be wrong in my impression but I think they are just doing bit of creative accounting on existing expenses to show high spends on their flagship project.
At least 10k as of March
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/12/22326875/facebook-reality...