It’s especially a big deal in the context of Facebook’s decline and bleak outlook. They’ve been outcompeted by TikTok, and their bet on VR looks misguided.
Facebook look doomed, and this is a big step in that direction.
Mind you, there was binge hiring even outside of the big five. Many high profile startups increased their workforces by 10-20% in less than a year... and my God you have no idea how many dumbass crypto initiatives launched at the same time.
All the while their companies remained unprofitable.
Utter insanity. Especially in hindsight when we know that there is no “new normal” - just the old normal with a few online-only remnants.
Indian here and can confirm.
This sort of situation is why so many people in comparable professions(like medicine) resent software people in India.
Having said this I do believe software people deserve to make more than doctors. Medicine especially after a while can be about trivia scholars.
Software on the other does demand training on bleeding edge tech almost every few months. We also tend to put lot of smart work[mathematically inclined work] than doctors.
And it's not just about software. They look at something like a big dam, skyscraper, a F1 car, a fighter jet, or something like Google and kind of feel insecure that there are bigger things which they could have been a part of, and feel they kind of (bad)-lucked into studying medicine[which happens to be a expensive academic course to finish, and also take more time].
I once showed a relative who is also a doctor using logic programming to solve puzzles like Sudoku etc. He kind of expressed disappointment he was stuck in a profession that doesn't allow this sort of everyday involvement in solving problems, or building things. The money part just adds to their resentment.
I can imagine how someone who doesn’t understand the complexity involved in scaling software or managing millions of users would think of coding as “easy money”.
Its certainly much easier to make money quickly - you can go from a complete newbie to a fairly well paid frontend dev in under 2 years. A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
>>A doctor needs a decade of effort to make anything similar.
MBBS is just a basic diploma. In the first 50% academic time of MBBS they just teach you how a healthy body works, because often the biggest confusion in treating a patient is to know what's is normal and what is a disease. This is followed by a assorted set of courses which touch upon basic disease-cure scenarios. And some small introduction to chemicals and their side effects on biology.
These people basically spend something like 7 years just to get here. MD is a different deal in India. Because the academics aren't really all that great and its just a detailed introduction into some organ speciality for just 2 years. Most people even here just go by established clinical practices in hospitals(a.k.a cya work)
In all the actual training is just 3 years. Its not an engineers fault that their profession is just trivia, and if-else scenarios for the most most part. This is where the resentment part comes in. Most engineers, or atleast the serious ones which make good salaries have gone too far both intellectually and in productivity in those 10 years.
The vast majority of doctors in India work in their own private clinics earning little money, treating small time fevers and stomach aches because that is the maximum you can do with that kind of training. You will be shocked just how far behind they are generally in the knowledge. Most will struggle to give you basic fitness and nutrition advice.
Are they aware of, or perpetuate the stereotype of the CS/IT student who memorizes braindumps to pass certification exams or post simple homework questions online or on StackOverflow, asking others to do the work for them?
As an aside, I work with a lot of engineers/PhD researcher types who think they are the smartest, nothing could ever be their fault, their systems etc are fine and it must be something simple that some other idiot messed up...
They resent literally the top engineers. Because they think they did better in entrance exams. Only geniuses are supposed to be doctors, and they also paid more fees and spent more time studying. So why aren't they making more money than those engineers?
There's a reason it's called "playing God".
My uncle is one of the leading lung specialists in the country. When Covid happened, his expertise was crucial in setting up the processes and best practices for dealing with everything from patient isolation to treatment protocols.
It was because of hundreds of doctors like him that literally millions of lived were saved.
do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
>>do you really think his expertise is worth less than some leetcoder with 5 years of devops experience?
All due respects to your uncle and his life's work. But I was there during peak COVID in hospitals all round. My dad was a post operative patient. Doctors had totally vanished from the scene. They had quite literally dumped all the work on junior nurses, not even the senior ones. I even got abused by one doctor for just asking how my dad was doing, and this on a call, not even a face to face appointment.
Right after this mess, where nurses didn't have a remote clue how to deal with complicated cases and we were making it up on guess work, because the 'experts' were too high sitting on their Ivory towers to even be bothered when patients were dropping dead like flies. What followed next was the worst sort of testing and consultation bills. I have seen people cry outside the gates and sitting on chairs. Much to the heartlessness and carelessness of these people.
There's a reason why so many people just don't out right respect or appreciate doctors in India. Most doctors have a very exaggerated sense of self worth and capabilities. They think they are gods and must treated as such because they think their academic training is long and expensive. For this very reason they think they have a right to indulge in price gouging. They also harbour deep resentment towards professions like engineering where there is more intellectual heavylifting work involved than their own profession will ever arrive at.
In all most doctors are just angry with their own choices for opting into medicine, they resent people richer than them. They resent professions better than them. Its a concentration point for sadist people, who go to any extent to humiliate others and indulge in price gouging.
> “To support our rapid global growth, we plan to continue expanding TikTok’s global engineering team, including adding approximately 3,000 engineers in Canada, Europe, Singapore, as well as the U.S., over the next three years,” a TikTok spokesman said.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tiktok-engineers-idUSKBN2...
Bear in mind this is from two years ago, but it gives you a sense of scale.
Similarly, it is safe to say that Netflix always knew it wanted to be a streaming service but had to mail DVDs until the timing was right in order to get there. Facebook is going through their metaphorical DVD mailing phase. Just another day in the life of business.
I'm not entirely convinced they can get to where they eventually want to go, but that's another story for another day.