The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
ericlippert.com
ericlippert.com
You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta...
But yeah, I can imagine how the decisions on layoffs usually go: "what are those guys doing? Probabilistic something or other?! No idea what that's good for! And wow, look how much they get paid!"
It's a pretty common sentiment in my experience here, de rigueur even. Expressing it in the way he does here is definitely frowned upon though -- one of the most interesting cultural traits I've noticed that Meta has fostered is an awareness and avoidance of cynicism. When people comment internally and there is even a hint of cynicism in what they say, they are frequently called out on it. Never seen such a thing ever before in my life. For me it's refreshing, but I imagine for some, depending on the topic and how negatively they feel about it, it could lead them to spiral and exit.
It is interesting to me that cynicism is stifled at a cultural level at Meta. It is some kind of low-level cult like behavior, to stifle internal criticism. It must also breed a kind of in-group/out-group mentality, as I don't know a single person IRL who has a positive view of the company, its products, or the metaverse.
People are different. Good thing we tech folks are well-compensated and are in fairly high demand.
Do you think people's cynisism about Google has made you miss out on a positive opportunity or can their discontent have signaled actual organizational issues that'd have affected you in negatively?
> Do you think people's cynisism about Google has made you miss out on a positive opportunity or can their discontent have signaled actual organizational issues that'd have affected you in negatively?
This is a really good question and I don't have a good answer for it. At this point my sample size is high enough that I'm inclined to think it's Google but I also realize my sample set has lots of correlating factors (they're more junior than me, they work in different areas than I would, etc, etc) that could lead to their cynicism that might not affect me.
Are they wrong?
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't examine and criticize ideas, that we shouldn't seek to improve upon them and - perhaps, if they are irreparable - abandon them for better ideas.
Attempting to force the market into a box that is convenient for you because it enhances your power and market position, because you want to be in control of a hardware platform to achieve parity with your competitors - and refusing to acknowledge it may not be what people actually want - that is truly cynical.
It's like the workplace version of Instagram itself, where everybody shows their best side, is mildly ashamed of feeling anything but positive because of the collective emphasis on "good vibes only" and keeps any concerns, cynicism or suggestions that we're going in the wrong direction under wraps.
I think it's ultimately unhealthy (both individually, psychologically and to the company) and leads to the same problems you see in autocratic nations - the leaders only see everything going swimmingly.
I worked at Google when it was created and "went viral". Before memegen there was a strain of what I would call inauthentic positivity
I think memegen made it a lot more acceptable to be cynical, which was probably good, because the company was definitely drinking a lot of its own Kool-aid
Too lazy to check, but did memegen appear before or after the whole Google+ debacle? Because from the outside Google did seem to drink a lot of its own Kool-aid back then (before and during the first stages of the Google+ launch).
In a way, the current discussions around VR remind me of those times, lots and lots of smart people refusing to say that the emperor has no clothes, for one reason or another.
(Oh wait, yes they were.)
I can live with keeping the cynicism to myself as long as the rest of the culture is ok.
However well paid at the outset, such “cults” more often than not are ultimately pernicious not only to their environment but their members as well.
There’s a fine line between fostering avoidance of cynicism on one side, and fostering koolaiding and yes-manning on the other.
The metaverse is not real, it's not going to happen. The numbers are not there. All of those users are in vrchat, and when Facebook buys it and turns it into a hell scape of a child playground the community will yet again go elsewhere.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like whenever people presented valid criticism, the standard approach to silence it would be to criticise the tone with a holier-than-thou attitude. Sounds like a cynical ploy to shield yourself from criticism.
Cynicism is a good and healthy thing to share with colleagues over a beer, but when you're on the clock will kill morale. Arguably dumping loads of money on a vaporware moonshot is also a morale killer, but sniping at it in meetings helps no one.
I felt a step change again moving from academia to industry, but perhaps it goes a step too far. Sometimes I feel like thoughtful analysis is suppressed in favor of active thrash, because the former smells like bad-valence skepticism and the latter approved optimism.
Like working with US engineers there was one who deliberately put meetings at bad hours (time zone difference), or would "accidentally" send the invite to your pager email instead, etc. to make others look bad.
blink twice if you need help?
(Kantorovich) invented the technique of linear programming, a method of solving optimization problems perfectly suited to allocating resources throughout an economy. He immediately realized its potential and wrote a nice letter to Stalin politely suggesting that his current method of doing economics was wrong and he could do better - this during a time when everyone else in Russia was desperately trying to avoid having Stalin notice them because he tended to kill anyone he noticed. Luckily the letter was intercepted by a kindly mid-level official, who kept it away from Stalin and warehoused Kantorovich in a university somewhere.
Cynicism can be warranted. Of course it's possible to be excessively cynical, but lack of cynicism can be downright deadly. Sometimes you are in situations where you can do little, and the best you can do is still pretty awful. And if you suppress the doubts that could make you cynical, more often than not someone else has to carry those doubts for you, to at least prevent the disasters that ARE preventable.
I would be curious how many people are willing to wear VR goggles for any amount of time. I spend easily 10-12 hours a day at my computer. I am absolutely someone who is happy working, socializing, playing, and learning all at the same desk. But I can't wear those goggles for even 2 hours. Are there people who can wear them for 12?
As someone who has never seen or held a pair (I don't have a facebook account), what is the long term barrier?
Weight? Size? Such as, if they were sunglass sized, would they be longer term wear?
Or is it still the resolution/disconnected feeling/etc?
For many people there is a physical discomfort side. From either the heavy device or motion sickness. I didn’t have much issue with this other than playing one time for most of the day and the weight on my face was a bit much.
I cannot imagine spending ANY work time in VR at this point in technology cycle, once you add resolution, accuracy, etc. I do not understand what problem it's solving - if you want to visually interact remotely, turn on your camera. If you don't, just talk and screenshare. I do not understand what virtual reality will add to my interactions and productivity.
More physical activities can result in the foam around the eye piece absorbing a goodly quantity of sweat (addressable e.g. with the plastic cover that comes with the Quest 2 or aftermarket alternatives) which just feels gross and can lead to more humidity being trapped within the headset, fogging the lenses, and so on.
The weight is a bit awkward, and different straps can help distribute it better and stay comfortable for longer. The ear phones can be uncomfortable after a time as well, pressing down on the ears as they do. If they were a cupping style like high end headphones, that would help a lot.
I do find that the tethered units like the Rift are more comfortable for longer than the self contained units like the Quest, since they offload processing, power, etc and the attendant weight, to the desktop machine.
Eye strain does add up eventually, and newer headsets have better screens but I wonder if this is just a truly insurmountable problem of mounting screens mere inches from your eyes.
The more concerning thing is the motion sickness. Most people, at first, get nauseated after a short while, and if they don't stop using them for hours at that point, it gets worse and worse each time they use them.
However, if they stop and recover (at least a few hours, a day is better) when they first start to feel it, they'll gradually get more and more used to it.
There's also the inability to properly see things around you, like your coffee or your mouse. AR is a good fix for that, though, and Meta's new Pro glasses specifically don't have full wrap-around so that you can still see around you somewhat. It ruins immersion in games, but they aren't meant for games.
I'm a pretty big fan of VR from way back, and I've owned multiple different headsets now. I do think the "metaverse" is an eventuality, but it's not about meetings, it's about agency. Meta's current attempt at "the metaverse" is just a crappy attempt at doing better than Second Life, but without even the things that made Second Life as good as it was.
The agency to create things yourself and sell to others, and the ability to buy licensed in-universe items is pretty much essential to a functional metaverse, IMO. Meta may intend to get there eventually, but trying to sell it as "the metaverse" before that point is pointless and harmful to their goals. It's going to take a long time to get there, and I'm still hoping that a grassroots movement makes it happen first instead of a big corporation. Ready Player One was all about that scenario and what it would mean. You have to look past the cloying nostalgia to see it, of course. ;)
When they're in the same size/weight/appearance ballpark as sunglasses, is when AR/VR glasses will take off. It'll be the next "smartphone revolution", no question about it. We'll wonder how we ever put up with being as tied-down as we are at a normal office workstation. The smartphone put the Internet everywhere, rather than in one place, AR/VR will put your computer everywhere. Until then... yeah, it's niche tech.
Sounds like a nightmare. And I already have frequent nightmares about my phone. The one where I need to do something urgently and the phone just gets slower and slower. It's a modern rehash of the dream where you are trying to run from something but your legs just get heavier and heavier.
Otherwise, the future of at least "consumer" computing is surely computer-as-overlay/HUD-on-reality, very likely with a side of being able to toggle totally virtual environments on and off at will ("Siri, take me to my office") which is what I meant by the computer being everywhere, rather than just having Internet access everywhere. Unless we crack some kind of really good brain/computer interface before we solve the VR-goggles-suck problem, which I doubt, but who knows.
1. The battery runs out.
2. I get physically exhausted. Most of the VR stuff I do is fairly energetic so it's not the VR goggles that tire me out, it's the constant swinging of arms and jumping/crouching.
I've never had an issue with motion sickness and since I'm doing it in my home any worries about how dorky they look are silly. Comfort is mostly fine, although you do have to wash off the foam bits that touch your face regularly or they'll start to smell like old gym socks. Fogging of the lenses is also an annoying and regular issue that I've never fully solved, mostly just getting used to everything being soft looking. The final minor issue is that the lenses can get warm (like hardworking cell phone level warm) so if your room is already hot they would probably get fairly uncomfortable.
Thanks to the battery issue I've never used them for more than a couple of hours at a time however. I can't comment about the comfort after 12 hours. I imagine my arms would have fallen off long before I got to 12 hours of Dragon Fist, Ragnarock, or Beat Saber however.
To stay article relevant I will comment about Horizon Worlds: My overall impression after an hour of trying it out just to see was "What did they spend the billions of dollars on?" It's so corporate and empty and I have no idea where all of the money went. It looks like any old VR Chat clone, there are a handful of minigames, chatrooms, and "VR Experiences" which are just short looped videos. It's not like SecondLife where you could maybe build your own thing or might stumble upon some crazy weird thing at any point. It's just minimal effort everywhere you look. To hear that it is such a money pit makes me wonder if it's some kind of weird money laundering thing or if the developers are just watching YouTube all day for years?
When I am in the goggles, Its kind of cool, but Im completely disconnected from the real world.
Its not a group activity either, like board games connect you to other people. VR connects you to the matrix. When one person in a family puts on the goggles, everyone else just leaves the room. There is nothing to see or share. (if you have a TV on, maybe its interesting but you are still like watching a person move their head around and look at things that arent there like a person whose mentally ill, its a strange experience)
And the physical barrier is always there. You walk up to the zone you have defined in your real life room, which is probably a few dozen square feet. You can touch invisibility, some bizarre barrier exists to your hands but your eyes tell you the exact opposite - you see infinite space, but are trapped inside a tiny grid whose barriers appear when you walk too far. Your eyes and ears tell you theres a whole world, your hands and feet understand you are still in your living room or whatever.
So when I come out of VR i have this bizarre, uneasy, queasy, unpleasant, feeling, for which I have not the word to describe. It is not like waking up from a dream. It's like shifting uncomfortably from one reality to another, one you have been to by yourself, completely alone.
It is not a 'getting used to' exposure problem it is still very much is a VR technology problem. We are just not quite there yet.
I'm using it for porn (and it's amazing, VR porn is the most underrated thing imho, but maybe I'm just weird) and for movies (non-3d, having these slightly-3d-movies didn't really add to the experience for me). I'm someone who can't concentrate on movies on a normal screen, my attention wanders and I'll quit watching and do something else, continue later etc and it might take me three days to complete a single movie. Not so while using the Oculus Go, I'm cut off from the world around me, focused on the movie, and now I sometimes watch a movie in one sitting (though I do rarely watch movies these days, so idk how much this is worth).
I don't know if I want to spend any time "socializing" through it, but when I was sick I've definitely used it for 6-7 hours on one day to watch multiple movies, and it was fine.
I've never felt sick while using it, but I've also only played very few games on it, and those weren't action packed with lots of moving about, but more simple and relaxed.
Living in a bland Facebook controlled world overseen by Zuckerberg the God is about as enticing as filing my taxes on a daily cadence.
I thought my kids would go crazy on it, perhaps I'm too old, out of touch etc. but they can do 15 mins max too. It's a novelty toy, quickly put away.
If Google Glasses had really taken off and I could have AR, not VR - overlays on ordinary vision - I'd be there. Handy for work, could do virtual meetings, notifications, all sorts. But as with most things Google it went the way of the dodo and I haven't heard of any replacement poised to take the world by storm.
Back when Carmack was leading the tech dev, they came out with a rule saying that they needed a working minimum of 90fps for MOST people to tolerate VR.
The Quest headset screens operate at 72hz, iirc.
But the demos and screenshots required to sell the idea aren't impressive if they don't look comparable to recent AAA games, so the wrong kind of hardware keeps getting crammed into the prototypes, and the target keeps moving so there is no opportunity for Moore's Law to solve the mismatch for you.
Soon enough they will be more comparable to glasses than goggles and plenty of people wear glasses for 12-16 hours a day.
I think you're in a bubble. We have a way of avoiding glasses: contacts. But people choose glasses instead. I wear contacts, not glasses, but every time I ever talk to a glasses-wearer about why they wear glasses instead, they usually can't imagine wearing contacts and think glasses are just fine. I've never heard anyone complain about them. And just looking around me, most men wear glasses; it's usually women that wear contacts.
Putting contacts in takes a few seconds if you're used to it. What's weird is walking around with heavy metal contraptions on your head and ears.
I don't like having to take them out, or put them in, when I change tasks to where I don't need or want them in my ears.
VR is for immersive experiences. There is a place for that. It will not be in mainstream constant use, unless "mainstream" means to plug in and be fed a false reality for somebody's profit.
Some things aren't waiting for technological innovation.
Right now the tech obviously has a ton of comfort issues, from motion sickness to fatigue. But it's not hard to imagine a near future where it's a lot more comfortable to wear VR headsets and be able to do some novel things with them. I mean, the first "laptops" were quite burdensome.
First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years.
Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my opinion internally, though I haven't been broadcasting it either. The first thing I said in our team group chat when we'd heard this announcement was (context, I am much older than most people on the team) "I'm old enough to have read Snow Crash the week it came out and IT WAS A DYSTOPIA, why are we building it?"
Third, this opinion is indeed extremely common internally.
Fourth, I genuinely have no idea how this decision was made; it was certainly not on the basis of net cost savings. We did the math.
It is intensely weird to me that people hold the opinion that their company is building something that is bad for the world, and yet they stay there and continue to help build it.
I know that's easy to say as someone not in that situation, but not always easy to do for someone who is. I get that people don't always have a ton of choice about their employment; maybe they are afraid of losing their health insurance, maybe they are on a visa and can't easily switch jobs, or maybe they simply aren't able to find another job that works for them. Less noble, but maybe the pay is just too good, and if they stay for just a bit longer, it will be life changing. I can totally sympathize with that!
But if this opinion is "extremely common", I would expect that a good number of those people would have the ability to leave, to the point that perhaps Zuckerberg would rethink his strategy.
(I don't really buy the "change things from within" explanation; 1) that rarely works, especially in a company the size of Meta, and 2) if tried, that clearly has not worked, given Meta's continuing trajectory.)
So it's easy to see the dilemma in a sense. It's maybe really just a concentrated example of capitalism generally. All money has blood on it
Not really. People fear change. Engineers at Meta almost certainly have good pay, work with people they like, have a generally comfortable life.
Case 2) FBWorker drinks koolaid (mabye because they cant keep FAANGpaid from forming their identity). Probably noob out of college or someone that just wants FAANG on the resume. Stay and build it. Probably not a lot of talent. And get FAANGpaid.
Case 3) FBWorker generally hates Facebook, maybe a holdover from pre-monetization FB days, why stop your enemy from making a huge mistake? Wait, AND you get FAANGpaid?
Case 4) FBWorker who is principled moralist who once believed they could change the world for the better.
One of the reasons Facebook is in trouble, especially if they actually think the Meta pivot is key, is that almost all their employees are Case 1 or Case 3.
Case 4 quit long ago or doesn't apply anymore.
The question is, is there even a semblance of a core of Case 2 in facebook? Doubt it.
So Marky Z is like a dictator now. Yeah he's top dog of his realm, but motivating people to any fundamental degree isn't possible. Money only goes so far. The organization has purged all the truly motivated talent.
People seemed completely unable to connect the dots, that if you think Facebook is evil, why not leak all their stuff to the press, and get PAID to do it?
Regarding change from within -- that's what a team dedicated to improving decision making is for.
Wow. What an effective way of encouraging others to leave while discouraging others from applying.
Remember: toxic work environments are reinforced from the top, and the top _only._ Toxic leadership begets toxic work environments, and it looks like Zuck is a right peach in being insufferably toxic.
Show me a big tech company (or any MNC) that is not "building something that is bad for the world". The broader question is why do people keep working for big tech, and that has been answered many times before (lots of money, smart colleagues, interesting problems, and a difference in perception on culpability.)
Also, if the alternative is "work for a small company", some of us have tried that before and that hasn't been very good either, just for different reasons (terrible pay, abusive management, toleration of sexual harassment, etc.).
Understanding The Professional Programmer, p19 - Gerald Weinberg
When you peel back the layers and figure out how this sausage is made, underneath it's just sociology and broad target audiences. (Age, sex, location, social status.)
Retinal scans don't help solve this problem.
We didn't get access to the actual user lists, but the queries you could build in your ad bids could include these factors. We were also in a special "Ads For Travel" partner program, so we probably had bid options not available to the average FB ads account manager.
Creepy methods aside, you're trying to get people to do something other than what they wanted to do today.
I think most workers have accepted this reality. Workplaces are not a democracy. Even if most of the workforce disagrees with a policy that was approved from on high, there is little they can do to change it. Especially in the tech industry, where jobs are so highly-paid and sought-after, there isn't really the option of collective bargaining. And that's even assuming the kinds of snowflakes who tend to work in this industry would accept that Break The Build Joe deserves the same pay as Rewrote It In Rust Rob.
Personally I maintain my own principles around what will drive me to leave, but I have long given up hope that my decision to quit will have any impact whatsoever on the direction of the company. In the past it's barely even had an impact on the people I directly worked with. I'm just not that important, and neither is any other IC or low-level manager. I think most of us try to find a company whose direction we can tolerate just enough to continue working there for the cash. And, I suppose, there are thousands of people for whom Meta still passes that bar.
That's a funny way to say "rich".
Note that, among other things, the power of “the end justifies the means” lies in how it is reductive.
Hoo boy, the old "just take another job" trope. I've got news: First, in this late-stage capitalism neoliberal hell, people have to cling to their jobs for more reasons than anyone can count. Second, where are they going to go? Who is hiring that isn't also doing things that are bad for the world, at a rate that someone with a student loan, a family, a mortgage, and college-bound kids can afford?
Knock it off with the "just get another job" thing and come join the real world.
Most people work for the pay. Thats why you pay people: to make them work on something they dont necessarily like.
Not everyone needs to be or to act like an activist.
It is of course possible to meet one's higher-level needs in other parts of one's life, but if your career is actively opposing your values, it becomes that much harder to make up for what you are missing in the limited time remaining. If you can't make that balance work, burnout and depression are likely.
Your values can only be worth that much, and a big check will make you forget them faster than you think. After all, that's what corruption actually exists: people willing to compromise on whatever they believe or used to believe for financial benefits.
Also don't forget that people will rationalize everything. There's no one going to work every day and hating it - if you stay in a place you don't really like, ultimately you will find reasons to stay and to justify your choice.
Facebook is a giant privacy-violating advertising company that demonstrated repeatedly that it was bad for the world long before Meta happened. And yet they attracted a huge amount of great talent who knew going in what FB was. Microsoft did the same thing in the 90s.
People have their own reasons for joining such companies. Maybe it's stability, or the quality of the team, or freedom, or it looks good on a resume, or maybe it's just the money. I'm not going to judge somebody for any of that.
If I had been working at FB I might have tried to transfer to the metaverse team. Even if I had no confidence it would work it would have been much more interesting than that dying social network. And probably less evil, because it will probably die before it gets big enough to matter.
The "bad for the world" stories I've heard turned out to not have substance (Cambridge analytica and the "harmful to young girls" study). Are you aware of something else?
It's not black and white; there are degrees of separation. You and I participate in an economy that somewhere, many layers down, causes human rights abuses. No ethical consumption under capitalism.
It's impossible to separate completely. Everyone has to pick and choose how many layers of separation (and from what) are needed for them to feel okay about their effect on society. For you or me that might mean we won't work at Facebook or Amazon, but your startup's angel investors aren't angels either. Neither are the companies you buy your devices from, or the banks you lend your savings to.
This isn't to say we shouldn't care, but we shouldn't pretend things are clear-cut, and we should take care throwing rocks at glass houses.
From Oppenheimer onwards this hasn't been too unusual - but what is unusual I think in Meta's case is the fact it's so widespread by smart folks.
Interesting that the book essentially seems to render the "gig economy" as some dystopian element. Quite good prediction.
It is so relevant for today, you'd be forgiven for not knowing it was actually published in 1992.
But really, it's probably the best book I've ever read.
But at least it was a dystopia where pizza delivery was an exciting business.
It wasn't an exciting business.
Pizza delivery was an exciting job (in all the worst ways a job can be exciting, or, TBH, just stressful), but the business part of it was quite boring. The corporate takeover denouement was perhaps the most boring scene in the book, and barely justified the "Chekhov's Guns" that were required to give a baddie a single "oh shit" moment with no payoff.
This is such an incredible quote, I love it. And I love that you said it in your group chat. I wish more people in tech could see this forest from within the trees.
However, I don't believe metaverse is a waste of time, at least for business users. This can eliminate all office space use in about 5-10 years if the hardware and software is ready, which it very likely will. Or maybe a wall to wall LED screen will do the trick for remote social presence, making the headset redundant.
It can spill over from the office to personal lives like the PC did. But anyway, hope you continue to work on cool things.
We used advanced statistical concept and vended models for other teams/services to consume, but the truth is either it was just really obvious cost solutions that they didn't bother, or it didn't really work all that well (stats model are, unfortunately, prone to many interpretations).
I've since moved on to feature based team where I feel like I'm more on the ground. And recently was able to get rid of lots of cost just by.. looking at them. I remain skeptical of the teams that base itself on statistical models to reduce cost.
He still took the money, though. That was all I could think about while I was reading that paragraph.
I'll tell you it can't be done, of course, but if you insist I'll work hard at trying to do it.
I would hope we have better ethics than to work on things that harm others for truckloads of money.
Then again, a lot of people still work for Meta (and Twitter, and...), so I guess ethics is pretty lacking.
Just look at all the harm caused by the game SecondLife. Oh wait, it hasn't really caused much, if any, because it's not exactly popular.
I predict their VR social network will be even less popular.
Then Meta comes and it seems like it’s just a ripped idea that’s been done multiple times + some buzzword tech and graphics that make Xbox player profiles look good. The idea that this was seemingly going to be some grand new flagship product for the company was laughable from the beginning.
In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs.
The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest way to move the move the bottom line is by just getting rid of people. So when the axe falls the bottom line people get cut and it's hard to understand why.
It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed.
There is a large swathe of middle and upper management that gets by due to continually making sure their actual impact is never measured, and they are only a "force multiplier." not that you should do away with middle management, but there are many in middle management who could be done away with, with very marginal loss.
We all know what the problems are and where investment is needed, but management pretends that they don't know so they can have An Initiative to discover it, but not really address it (because e.g. the problem is one they caused with previous poor management).
I consider myself a fairly honest Data Scientist, in the sense that I like it when I can map what I'm doing to the value it delivers. I know some other great people I've worked with who are like this as well.
This is anecdotal, but all of us have hated working with many top line people because there's some really fuzzy mapping from goal to value (since value is realized in the long term), and some of the people are champion bullshitters. I don't need to explain sales people. But marketing, corporate strategy, and even upper product management - they drove us crazy because their standard of being data driven was absolutely not consistent with how we thought about things at all. All of it was because the mapping from project to revenue was over years, not quarters. And it was all projections.
Compare this to bottom line people, where the mapping from project to cost savings is on a shorter time frame. The types of personalities this attracts is different.
Maybe the growth hacking stuff at software companies is different and you can focus on revenue growth and still connect what you are doing to that. I've never worked in that role so I don't know.
told them flat out that they are most likely going out of business, but I’ll get it a try.
Couple of times owner tried to Ask me when feature X would be delivered. Just told them no. Managers were wise enough to understand they were one pissed tech guy from failure.
3 years of endless late nights to get company back to a good spot with a rebuilt time, new infrastructure. Proper documentation, the works.
Finally left after being passed over for promotion to a guy that did nothing, but promised the world. (He never delivered)
Took me a couple years to recover from that job.
I don’t work late nights anymore. If company doesn’t care to invest in infra, I look elsewhere.
If you are high in EQ and vaguely likable you can substitute for technical skill or hard work.
I had a colleague who was like a golden retriever and lacking in all talent. Everyone loved him. He never got anything important done and always worked on superficial shiny objects.
He was basically untouchable. Being optimistic and having no talent is a huge advantage.
The hard working workhorse industrious person always griping about how broken everything is: Can’t wait to get rid of you.
Don’t do great work for morons.
All of the collective results of these brutal lessons for me has been to become ultra cautious about where and who I work for and to try to do a much better job reading the room and analyzing people.
If you are an Aspergers person, this is super hard. I now do my best to get multiple second opinions about the situation because I learned my personal judgement and evaluation was nearly always wrong.
(And those few are probably the ones drinking the "metaverse Kool-Aid" and thinking the pivot away from data siloes is already complete to some sort of VR scape where data somehow doesn't matter or doesn't exist, that Meta still hasn't actually convinced consumers to buy or figured out how to build. They finally figured out "legs", pivot complete I guess?).
Now, a sane person will look at the improvements to margin across the whole business and still want to make those improvements because in aggregate, they add up, BUT, you cannot improve margin forever as a strategy. Eventually, hard limits come up and the incremental gains shrink and shrink. At that point, growth dominates.
Most mature businesses need revenue growth much more than they need marginal internal gains, especially because as businesses get bigger, marginal gains tend to apply to more limited segments of the business. E.g. improving one product is marginal and applies to only the sales associated with that product.
I think the claim that data science is about moving the bottom line is right, but I think the other way of thinking about this is that Project/Consulting is probably a more relevant way for companies to buy these skills than Salary. Many companies can see the value in an incremental move in the bottom line, but most companies don't have a sufficiently large problem space to worry about paying a continuous cost to focus on this.
I've seen a lot of big companies say that they need these skills, but also believe they can't attract talent because they wouldn't be able to keep a data scientist busy.
The trick is understanding where the hard limits are. I've noticed that upper leadership tends to be pessimistic about these hard limits (they come quickly) and engineers on these teams tend to be optimistic (there's a lot of fat/cost to cut so the hard limits are quite far down.) Now naturally, the engineers on these teams have a vested interest in being optimistic, as their team charter is based around their work. But I've seen this conflict play out in many organizational situations and I'm not sure this interplay between upper leadership and engineering about these margins is illuminating for the business.
But growth is a tricky thing. If you're in a land grab market and you cut your costs at the expense of growth, you may find that you lost your chance to grow, because the market is now dominated by other people.
For people with this mentality, they expect in the long term to cut costs, but only after growth has slowed for reasons out of their control, e.g. the makret is stabilizing and has already chosen the #1 big gorilla, the #2 little gorilla, and numbers #3 though #100 small monkeys picking up scraps.
Developing the technology to do a thing profitably that previously could not be done profitably is the stuff unicorns are made of.
I'll nitpick a bit to ask, though, how many times has a new entrant to a market gotten a process/business/tool/etc from 120% operating to 90% through marginal gains? I'd wager almost never. Process improvement can be marginal or stepwise/punctuated. I think most unicorns create punctuated change in ossified industries, but, I don't think any big companies are likely to hire a data scientist and through years of grinding through the margins achieve that 30% improvement.
put differently, the decision to focus on revenue vs profit is a decision that typically does not include the NPV of R&D investments. those are uncertain and have some probabilistic value, but not so much in accounting terms.
That's not how unicorns are made, but it's how most of the economy operates.
Only if you want to close the company in ten years
That works as long as you have weak competitors (or a moat) and nothing terrible happens, like high defects. Essentially you're coasting on prior investment. But as soon as something changes in the market you're falling behind.
What I've often observed is that new low cost competitors introduce features which are often reserved for high end devices/products due to market segmentation. The dominant player refuses to adapt and hence they lose all their low end market share, the volume of which is necessary to make the whole thing work. Meanwhile new customers start with the lost cost ecosystem.
I've seen this happen with e.g. Agilent, or SaaS companies, who charge 10x for something that costs little, like SaML/AD auth.
Imagine if NVIDIA had charged for CUDA or considered it a distraction from selling graphics cards. They wouldn't own the HPC/ML space if they had done that.
A common theme for commiserating, the only investment we get are complaints
Make it work again with what you had or we have problems, must avoid OpEx at any cost
I got a dose of very cold water about this thirty years ago when I was building payware that improved developer productivity. I gave a presentation about its ROI, and afterwards, a developer walked up to me and gave me some feedback that none of the business-types had articulated:
Products are either vitamins or painkillers. People buy painkillers, because they're in pain. People postpone vitamins, because nothing is wrong and the benefits are always "later."
I didn't 100% change what I chose to build over the years, but from that time to today, I have worked on always spinning what I sell as an antidote to a customer's pain point, rather than as an investment they make to pay off eventually.
p.s. I don't know where that dev got the "vitamin/painkiller" metaphor, but it's sticky!
It should not be.
It should be a last resort.
You should take what fixes the problem and give your body time to heal not take pain killers and pretend nothing is wrong.
Pain killers are addicting, can have an increasingly reduced effect, can have a bunch of side effects and can make the end result much worse by not healing wounds (metaphorically) when they are still easy to heal(1).
(1): Through sometimes they can also help you healing by preventing you from doing pain-caused bad actions, like setting down your food in a bad angle.
EDIT: Just to be clear I mean pain killers for a "normal live" situation, not in context of you lying in a hospital bed or having extrema healthy issue which can't be fixed/heal anytime shortly.
I've heard this metaphor before, by a VC, and it was medicine vs vitamins.
AKA your removing the "vitamins" path in exchange for some future "medicine"
My other less painful headaches that started the cycle were an actual brain issue. Just took a few years to get correct diagnosis.
Eventually had a cycle of one round of pain killers every other day. Cycling through To a different kind each time. This mostly worked until I got excess brain fluid drained off. Which actually solved issue.
Apparently I’m genetically prone to clots. (Factor 5)
I had symptom of one every 6 months or so since high school. Got exposed to some chemicals and it went to a couple per week.
Blood thinners keep it under control.
I find it's a useful framework for selling b2b. Even then, desire can win over pain many times.
Fear and greed are the real big sellers in b2b anyway.
I would say that it was closer to a tasty pizza.
It was definitely not fitting either "vitamin" (worth investing for future payoff) or painkiller (solving immediate and urgent need[1])
[1] I guess that hiding/temporary fix is not intended to be part of this allegory
I personally find that metaphors work best as mnemonics. Unless you're in health sciences, products are neither vitamins, nor painkillers. If this metaphor helps us remember to distinguish products that solve urgent and existing problems from products that are investments providing an ROI over time... Good enough for me.
Now about fear and greed. I agree with you. In fact, I do so because when I was in sales and marketing, I read a book that said that the four motivations that mattered were fear, greed, exclusivity, and belonging. The first two are literally what you just mentioned.
That particular simplification doesn't fit every situation any more than Maslow's Hierarchy does, but it's another surprisingly useful lens to use when looking at value propositions.
At the end of the day, all these rules of thumbs and metaphors are tools, if you find one that's useful, add it to your toolbox and figure out when it works and when it doesn't. The more of these you have, the more ways you have of analyzing a situation and coming up with a rough model for how it works.
So I agree with you: Fear and greed are the big sellers in B2B.
It doesn't replace getting real sunlight though. Or if you're an Inuit, eating polar bear livers.
Not that I expect HN readers to likely end up in a situation where they have to decide whether to eat a polar bear liver, but that is definitely a part of the polar bear that no one should eat:
>...A polar bear’s liver contains an extremely high concentration of vitamin A. This is due to their vitamin A rich diet of fish and seals. The Eskimos have long been wary of eating the polar bear for this reason, but it’s something the early Artic explorers found out the hard way. Ingesting the liver can cause vitamin A poisoning known as acute hypervitaminosis A. This results in vomiting, hair loss, bone damage and even death. So although actually capturing a polar bear may seem life threatening, it turns out that eating its liver is just as deadly.
https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2016/10/04...
Now that I take supplements though my levels have been fine. From what I have read, quite a few people fall into a similar bucket.
Say you have a 100 developers and you reason each should get a second monitor worth 300$, because this increases productivity by 20%.
According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.
Who is to say that this 20% of freed up time is used productively? Or used on things that increase revenue? If so, how much revenue? And when?
A team that regularly saves costs for other business units is a promise of cost savings. Dropping the entire time is an immediate and factual cost saving.
Short-sighted? Yes.
>According to an accountant, you just added 30K in costs to the books, with nothing to show for it. You can't eat productivity nor is it a line item in the books.
Right, this is why developers should NOT get 2nd monitors.
Even better, the business can save another $30k by not getting the developers any monitors at all.
(Turns out I do have my own monitors, but they are for my own laptop, and are HDMI and Thunderbolt which the dock isn't, except one HDMI.)
That problem with Eric's group and most Data Science teams is that the company continues to move along. There is some long-term cost, but there are likely teams where there are severe short-term ramifications if they are cut. E.g., imagine if Windows cut their servicing team (snarkiness aside).
For DS it might mean being more on the market research / customer requirements / subscriber churn side, instead of being on the back end of services improvement / risk reduction. Be the thing that customers are asking about, that brings new customers.
I hope it's clear that I don't mean to excuse them for giving up. It's hugely destructive both for decision makers and everyone around them. I just want to show that the problem is substantially harder than "just reward preventing fires already".
Facebook is an example of where that breaks down: there isn’t an easy way to grow that much larger so they would likely see greater return from cost savings than they are likely to make from VR, but after a couple decades of thinking of themselves as this incredibly innovative tech company it’s hard to accept that they’re stable as an ad company.
For instance, say you want to be able to vectorize logos, e.g. find the SVG representation of a raster image. If you wanted to link a text model of the characters that make up SVG files to their raster representation via a modern deep learning system, you'd need a heck of a lot of data and training time. But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a chain of conditional probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with significantly less training time and data.
This is where the massive cost savings come in. You get a forward-deployed engineer who knows this stuff and can dig into the compiler for features not yet implemented, they can work magic on any domain problem. I would have loved to have seen the spinoff they mentioned. Sigh.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774459 is an old comment that goes more into detail on the tech and has a number of links!
EDIT: see also https://beanmachine.org/ which is OP's team's work
It's a balance between engineer time (headcount costs) and training time/costs (infra costs.) Usually engineer time is more valuable than training costs. Embedding engineers into teams and building cost models is one of those cases where probabilistic programming makes a lot more sense than a DL approach, but most situations favor the economics of a DL approach.
And yet I don’t see myself retiring once I have enough money in a few years
Everyone is motivated by different things. My strongest motivation and satisfaction comes from implementing technology to make drastic and lasting positive change in the work done by other people. Agile development methodology with iterative development and meaningful change every couple weeks suits me very well.
What you described as your work would not be fulfilling to me.
When written in a single sentence, it implies that you have never written a publication, post- or pre- or during- a PhD.
I will rephrase my question: have you, or have you not, written a publication?
> My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk.
"My work is a trade secret so..." is an important part of the sentence, which I read as a qualifier/context to the "never".
It could be interpreted either way.
People are fulfilled by different things. Some people are far more interested in their working having a meaningful (to them) impact to the "outside" world than the specifics of the work.
At some point you may start to wonder what your legacy on this planet is. At the very least: if you've made a good use of your limited time (and the scarce resource that is your labor). (Hard mode: if you've left the planet better off than you found it?)
The last few years have pushed a lot of people's "burn out" buttons and the self-reflection of "what have I accomplished with my time?" (and "have I contributed more to good or to evil in this world?") are very easy burn out spirals to experience, so a lot of people are asking these sorts of questions now. (Including just about every day lately for months on "Ask HN", in a million different unique individual ways, if you've not yet noticed.)
You sound like you are in a very fortunate place in your life that you aren't struggling with that right now. I envy you a little. I'm also glad for you and I hope it remains that way for you.
(I've spent too much time in the last few months worried that too much of my precious labor into finished projects and net revenue generation has been spent in service to the greater evil than the greater good of the world and have been struggling to figure out what that means or what I do with that cursed feeling.)
Enjoy the process, admire your castle, but never forget the tide will have its day.
keep on fighting the good fight, and good luck
> I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
Personally I had an entire year worth of difficult sweng work thrown out due to politics, and it's impossible for that not to negatively impact my mood (or performance reviews)!
If I am hired to do trade secret work I'm already understanding that it will never be "known" even if the product or something associated with it DOES work - and many companies in the world will never be known anyway, let alone their products.
Never look for work in a Cost Center.
Come hard times, Cost Centers are cut first. Not because it is good for the business, but because cutting payroll impresses Wall Street, inflating stock valuation. To Wall Street, layoffs mean you are serious.
I've only briefly worked closely with a billing team, but my impression was always that billing is seen less as a cost center, but more as a critical "without this team we get no money" team, which seems closer to a profit center. I'm not sure how far up the management team that perspective stays true, though.
You read it wrong.
This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" (https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90...). That was wrong
or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" (https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim...). Looking around the beach and especially the train, everyone is lugging around a portable computer (phone)
I don't think today's VR/AR is "the thing" but I do think, in the same way people thought Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices were a small niche market for ~15 years and it wasn't until iPhone that the masses finally understood what a pocket device was good for VR/AR will eventually reach a version/device that will be more compelling than smartphones and similarly blow up
It might take until they get to a small dot like "Striking Vipers" but I'm glad at least one company, if not 5, are pushing forward.
Which is to say, I don't think you can tell much about the stickiness of a technology from what it's proponents say for or against it. History is full of well-hyped failures, and not a few overperforming fringe ideas.
Maybe they are cheaper nowadays, I remember the early days they would cost almost as much as a car. Whereas e-scooters today are in the price range where you can buy them as toys for your kids.
A segway that competed in the price range of bikes instead of cars would be much more widespread.
Cutting that sentence off there paints a slightly different picture from the full sentence:
> News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”.
Plenty of people want to wear VR goggles, but it's hard to see how the metaverse specifically will take off.
>or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours"
Exactly. It's also just like how "people don't want to wear 3D glasses in a theater". That was wrong too: every single movie today is in 3D.
Oh wait... No movies are in 3D now. They tried (for a 2nd time) and failed and gave up.
VR goggles might get some popularity for gaming, but the "metaverse" thing is just dumb.
AR, however, makes a lot of sense if they can make it convenient. I would love to have some cycling glasses connected by BT to my phone, which show a simple moving map display as I'm riding in the city so I know where to turn, instead of having to stop every so often and pull out my phone to look at where I am.
Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway)
> But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
I feel this. I'm about to finish up a contract working on a product that's about to be killed (before ever really seeing the light of day) and it's kind of hard not to feel like Sisyphus at this point. Not really interested in looking for something else for a while.
Finding another position doesn't mean finding another equivalent position.
I work for a FAANG right now. If I was getting laid off I would get the first job I could and then keep applying to other companies that are more suitable to the level that I had before.
I'm sure they were doing interesting work otherwise, but it make sense why the team would be considered for cuts if there weren't any breakthroughs on the horizon.
So if the team was around 20 people that already doesn't make sense.
..in theory not, but in practice cost-cutting is often less a scientific, data-based project and more a cataclysmic purgative process where factors such as speed of execution are important.
e.g. Elon has certainly lost many, many great people and teams who were net positive for Twitter's bottom line in his recent purges. But he probably thinks there is huge value in acting quickly and putting the aggressive cutting behind him and inserting his "hardcore" team. There would be a real cost to the Twitter shareholders in doing a slow and scientific analysis of who to cut - there's a case to be made that a ruthless tearing off of the bandaid would more quickly lead to a profitable place, even if there is collateral damage on the way.
Either way, not disputing the arguments in this comment chain.
Not that this is the case here, but this is how it can seem to the counters of the beans.
"The mission of the Probability division was to create small teams that applied the latest academic research to real-world at-scale problems, in order to improve other groups’ decision-making and lower their costs. New sub-teams were constantly formed; if they didn’t show results quickly then they were failed-fast; if they did show results then they were reorganized into whatever division they could most effectively lower costs.
We were very successful at this. The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work. We were almost ready to be spun off.
We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path."
I used to work at several mega corps. Very overstaffed ones. We had tons of very elite engineers doing god knows what. They always had stories that sounded exactly like this - It’s so complicated you wouldn’t understand!
I believe engineering has become way overvalued relative to what it is worth realistically.
I will give far more credibility to anyone who has built or tried to build and run or manage their own startup or business.
Too many engineers have only ever worked in these environments where they are totally disconnected from reality.
> But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again.
OMG, can I relate to this.
The chances are good, that, if he can support himself; even if not at oriental levels of luxury, he will not want to return.
That has been my experience.
Come on in, Eric, the water's fine...
A graphics artist on a Corridor Crew YouTube video recently said that you must love the day-to-day of your job because a lot of what you make will never see the light of day. I think this is especially true when you are not the owner of your work's fate.
This is not a criticism or judgment on Eric's feelings towards his work being abandoned. He seems like someone who has loved every minute of problem solving. And it doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel feelings when your work gets tossed. But it's something that resonated with me, and it might resonate with you too.
Getting old is rough. At no point in your life will it be easier to scuba dive, take nature photography, travel, or whatever your passion is. Eric's done this for 25+ years and presumably has a good amount of savings; why not take advantage of other parts of life?
I hope, if Eric does need to return to laboring for someone else's company that he does so without restriction to his teaching efforts, as he has seemed to always enjoy that. But I think more fervently I hope that Eric finds out what he wants to do, and if maybe that is teaching that is high calling, often underserved in this industry, and that he can find a fulfilling way to do that on his own terms as his own vocation. That may look like a retirement to a lot of us on HN, but I think there are few things more worthy to be doing with your time than a "hobby" that has clearly already educated a lot of people in threads around here.
I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll give that more thought.
If there was a course structured so as to teach compiler principles in a Roslyn way, I’d enroll today.
Your blog both inspired me to go into my current line of work and taught me so many of the skills I needed to succeed. I'm sad that so much of your and your colleagues' work is ultimately not going to reach its full potential. At the same time, I can't say I'm not excited that one of my favorite blogs is hopefully going to resume at some point in the future :)
> The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it.
It does sound naive, but it's also possible that this is plain wrong. Just because your team results in some cost cutting does not mean that your team is generating enough cost savings to justify 50 headcount. I'm sure there are teams at meta with very large / existential cost cutting needs, and it doesn't sound like any one of them was relying critically on your team for enough of their cost cutting objectives for them to make a case to keep this investment going.
When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist.
Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. That's important long term because it'll save on future repair costs. He gets to work. Then I suddenly have a need for funds for something urgent and unrelated, so I need to make a choice: do I stop paying the mortgage, or the roofer? Probably the roofer. It's still dumb not to fix the leaks. But it's more dumb to get the house repossessed.
When you hit the bottom of your capital reserve (for some definition of "bottom" - Meta is obviously not bankrupt but it cares about its stock price), you end up having to make choices that are really sucky. "Should I cut off your arm, or your leg, sir?" type of choices. Yet they must be made or you circle the drain for a long time before ending up like Yahoo.
we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work.
The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure
We were almost ready to be spun off.
I should have left years earlier, but money was good, and change was hard to think about. Fluffy handcuffs.
2 years later, Org still survives. Best guess is they are in rebuilding stage. No love lost.
Take your time to recharge the batteries.
That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and still not ready for prime time.
I take your point, but in my opinion nothing currently happening in the space gets remotely close to "revolutionary" , and maybe not even "cool" for some peoples value of "cool". It's more the same-old-same-old, chipping away at the broad array of problems.
So if you really want to us an automobile analogy, it's not like it's IC vs EV. It's more like steam powered vs. early electric (they predated IC's!) and nobody has come up with an IC yet. Or the right road system to use them on.
And VR has been in some form of "cool to play with for awhile and then left on the shelf" for decades now.
It gets better each time, but it's still just a plaything.
I own a Quest which mostly my son uses for games and loves, and I occasionally game on. It’s cool. It’s also a toy I would never try to use for work.
I can imagine a VR/AR technology that is world changing. It’s hard to say if it’s technologically and physically possible to implement ever or if it’s just fantasy. It’s also really hard to know exactly how far away we are from a toy to something that makes a very large number of workers significantly more productive.
I’ll say this, in a world where a lot of work is being done remotely, it seems to me that VR could be a powerful game changer with the right hardware and the right UI for company and team cohesion, feeling connected to peers, and collaboration.
Some day I am certain we will look back at Zoom-style telepresence and laugh at how quaint it is.
I don’t think we’ll ever spend 8 hours straight every day in VR, unless you’re the rare employee spending their entire day in meetings. I do think dropping into VR spaces for certain types of work throughout the day could become “a thing” and I don’t think we are actually that far off.
Facebook’s mistake was thinking they could spend billions to leap ahead to the goal, while simultaneously not being able to communicate to even their own employees that goal and why it’s meaningful.
I think there are generational advancements that take time to happen no matter how many people are “working” on it.
I also tend to think as a team goes from 100 people to 10,000 the other 9,900 are just making work not doing work, unless you can split up the problem into extremely well defined components that will end up snapping together properly and run them as 100 separate skunk-work projects.
Fundamentally, a cartoon world doesn’t help me get work done. But I can imagine customer support, content moderation, traffic control, all the real-time kind of twitch-based jobs out there could probably design an immersive VR interface which is a lot more efficient and fun to work inside than a desktop environment.
So many real-world tasks that a wearable AR screen could potentially assist with, whether it’s learning how to fix something around the house, or learning a hobby.
I recently learned to scuba dive and got my PADI cert but definitely still have a lot to learn. Could I one day put on a BCd (the diving vest) and a pair of VR goggles and do immersive training courses, or preview a dive?
I am learning guitar, I could imagine VR or AR goggles helping me get better but it would require a lot of custom software and UX.
I also like the idea of being able to put on the goggles and connecting with an expert that sees what you see and is in your ear waking you thru something, for times when software alone doesn’t cut it.
I just can’t help but believe there’s huge value to be unlocked and better ways to communicate, collaborate, and entertain and that we just need to cross a usability and ergonomics threshold which isn’t too far off and people will actually start getting comfortable and engaged in these settings.
Full disclosure: I am (today) a VR nay-sayer, despite this comment.
[0] https://thenib.com/this-comic-from-1919-imagines-what-it-s-l...
As a VR developer, this is professionally frustrating to read. Oculus and Meta have continually sucked all the air out of the room in this industry.
I actually really like my Quest Pro, if I squint and ignore the Meta logo for a minute, but there isn't anything particularly special about it. The hardware is basically a designer shell around a Qualcomm reference design. The software is pretty basic. The only reason the Quest line is so much better than the competition is because the competition is failing to show up.
And that's largely because of the huge amount of money that Meta is spending. How are you going to convince investors to back your competing platform if they look at the market and see Meta spending 20bil a year? How are you going to hire talent when Meta has been paying anyone they can find 5x normal salaries anywhere else, plus adult daycare benefits? Slurrrrrrp Hope you don't like breathing.
Meta isn't spending 20bils because that's what making VR takes. They're spending that to make it impossible for competitors to operate. It's basically the Reagan-era Cold War strategy.
Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.
Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g
I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.
If I come in and cut the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing.
If I come in and fix a problem that was going to raise the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing for about five minutes and then forgotten.
For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people.
Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative).
Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year.
Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year.
Total = 1.85 Million/Year.
Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.
It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org.
He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
Software Engineer: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
Software Engineering Manager: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
These grants are valued at the market price at time of hire (or refresh).
So maybe pre-2022 the comp was 700k...
However, they’re paying out bonuses twice a year, annual (PB)RSUs, (specifically for us) around almost $30k/yr in employer contributions to health insurance and our HSA combined, music streaming subscription, and so on.
The benefits, the bonuses, the extras, they all add up and are all very company specific. I’m not saying you’re wrong by any stretch. But with the number of extra benefits, healthcare, and everything else that’s different from employer to employer, we are all just guessing.
What are signal loss models in this context?
The biggest recent cause of signal loss was Apple changing the rules for apps on their phone, but there are plenty of other causes.
The idea of a signal loss model is to identify ways to work around signal loss and still do a good job of making a decision with the data you have, when some of the data you were relying upon disappears suddenly.
But with more inputs and such.
From afar, it looks like Meta's leadership is a bunch of future thinkers who got told to cut today's costs, and it's not a well-practiced muscle for them.
I've been in a situation where a company was under pressure, was trying to make a big pivot, and there where multiple rounds of layoffs.
At one point I could only make sense of it by picturing a somewhat blind lumberjack getting an order that says "There's a forest that needs 15% of trees cut. Go cut." Good trees get get, bad trees get cut. Thankfully we are not trees and if we get cut we can move on. We don't die just because we got chopped down.
Having had some similar experiences to yours now, I don't believe there has to be strict logic behind the managerial decisions leading to big changes. That's not how they are made, and that happens more often and with more impact than we typically register in our own environment, as we are busy doing our specific tasks. I know that it can sound cynical but I think it correctly reflects the reality.
In one specific case from my previous work, I know from those present where the decisions were made, that a decision about hundreds of people working further of not on many running projects was made after one high manager left and the few remaining who were the only one deciding literally had a short talk: "OK, who wants to take over these, I won't, do you?", "no", "no", "me neither." "OK, then let's dismount all that." And so it went. And similarly, it's not that it was not profitable for the company, it was clearly documented. The decision of each of those involved was then explainable with "it didn't match our vision of where we want to concentrate our company's effort." It is sometimes as simple as that. The "high managers" so often score additional points whenever they decide that the company makes less of different stuff.
Steve Jobs was, of course, famous for abandoning different projects in Apple on his comeback, and it provably gave the results. But I also see the companies overnight losing the proficiency in some fields based on managerial decisions impulsively made, performing even worse later. I don't have any grand narrative based on these experiences to push, except to state my belief that sometimes the "reasons" are extremely simple and very, very mundane, to the point of causing huge disappointment to those who heard so many decisions presented as strictly a result of precise measurements and deliberations, who knew they did their best and were aware that "nothing was wrong."
It does leave one questioning why they correctly invested as much energy in what they did, and if they made right decisions during these times, from a newly obtained perspective.
"The PPL team in particular was at the point where we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work"
The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
1. No need to beat a man while he is down.
2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
A man who is still kicking isn't really down. No need to talk bad about a person who left silently, but anyone who kicks up a fuzz should expect people to respond if they disagree with the fuzz.
If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.
I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it.
The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...
Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering excellence" and "impact"
* "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all do not count towards your impact. * "Engineering excellence" is where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point in engineering excellence.
Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee. I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of the internal political game at Meta.
You've build a large number of wonderful things and I wish we could have all experienced the latest.
I hope after a long rest you find your way back to software and perhaps share what you were working on in some other way.
This ties in with my earlier thought about why Zuckerberg is upset with Apple. He's not standing up for any little guy, he's upset that he's not getting his way with iOS devices anymore and that nobody cares about "the metaverse." It's essentially a tantrum.
https://ericlippert.com/2020/09/23/introducing-bean-machine/
The only thing really missing is the helmet but as far as occupying a virtual world, it's closer than anything else has been in terms of providing what people actually want.
I feel like MBAs need to do a better job at learning about selective truths. Far too many snap decisions made based on seeing the tip of a dataset in some corporate spreadsheet and assuming clarity in the data. In this case seeing the cost of this team and not seeing the saving its was generating for other teams.
Or maybe it was just political as Zuckerburg slid the hatchet away from the Metaverse and onto things of (arguably) greater value.
What was missing? If the team is that good, why don't they believe in themselves and offer their services?
This is so true. Facebook must die.
Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics...
They're going to own this space for decades to come, and everyone will license from them.
It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them together.
[1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.
We just don't think the ultimate application of all that research is going to be the Metaverse. Pretending that the ultimate goal is the Metaverse is masking the fact that this VR/AR research is all exploratory. We can assume Wall Street would otherwise heavily punish Facebook for investing blindly so heavily in R&D. The willingness of Facebook to mask the Metaverse as something other than R&D and not Eric's team, which allegedly paid for itself, is what is so baffling.
Microsoft R&D built and patented many of those things and already pushed things through the entire loop from R&D to practical "fun" hardware (Kinect) to boring Enterprise hardware ("Azure Kinect" and HoloLens) and allegedly back to plenty of closed doors R&D again.
It's easy to ignore Microsoft because they "failed" in the consumer space a few times in that loop already, but since no one has proven yet that there is a long-term consumer space (and don't forget the Kinect actually was a very successful consumer item for a brief Wii-epoch moment) and their "unsexy" Enterprise tech has found comfortable niches to serve it is still very possible to see them as the easy "leader" in this space, even if they've never been crazy enough to rename the whole company after it.
I'm sure no-one here likes the idea of the Metaverse but from Meta's perspective I definitely think it's the correct bet. This doesn't make it less dystopian but that's exactly the point. If they can pull it off they win. Great video explaining it way better then I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkhjL3WvWQ
What kind of socio-political lessons did you draw from Second Life? Would love to hear your take.
There were small businesses, even, little mom and pop artists generating avatar clothing and customizations and hoping to make a buck from all these tourists that were around Really Shopping or Really Learning or what have you.
You know what else was Real that people brought with them to Second Life? Real Crimes. There were scams (not all those mom and pop artists were on the up and up). There were attacks (give coders enough scripting tools and they will code all sorts of terrible things). There was sex and porn so there was also sex scandals and sex workers and prostitution rings and allegations of sex trafficking. (Relatedly to that, EA sometimes doesn't want you to know that Sims Online ever existed because of events that happened in only a few days of a Beta test that spooked EA so terribly they stopped publishing MMOs for like a half-decade. Semi-relatedly to that, there's a recent sex trafficking lawsuit against Roblux, with Discord co-listed, that was recent-ish news that made it to the front page of HN. History repeats itself and Meta/Facebook should be listening.)
Eventually all the Real Brands and Real Companies and Real Universities and all that got bored and left. (Even despite the luxuries of avatars with working Legs! Lol, Zuckerberg.) Most of what was left was the furries and the crimes.
(To be fair, I think Second Life being mostly sex-positive was a good thing and the "Furries mostly" era of Second Life produced some fun content and wild stories, much of it positive in its way. The criticism is not at all that Second Life tolerated sex and porn; crimes happen all the same without sex involved, I certainly gave other examples. It doesn't help that crimes that the FBI likes to investigate tend to involve sex, but that's a different matter.)
I think Meta/Facebook are still in the phase of pretending like building any sort of Metaverse is just inherently good and separate from real world problems or concerns. I think Meta/Facebook are still publicly acting like a Metaverse would somehow "save" them from the real world problems of running Facebook and Instagram (and their various existing issues with world crimes). I think they have already forgot some of the lessons from Second Life that if you invite Real People into your virtual world you still get Real People with Real Problems including Real Crimes. It's in no way different in a 3D AR/VR (Now with Legs!) space, than an early Oughts 3D space (Always with Legs!). It's very much the same. (ETA: The technology may feel different, to some. But it turns out: the people are kind of the same. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Especially not anyone who has seen, I don't know, Facebook.)
A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
I hope he and others learn a lesson from this: you are not your job. Don't live to work, work to live. Do not attempt to derive meaning from your job. Do not let your passions be occupied by your job. Do not suffer your job. Suffer your friends. Suffer your family. Suffer your children. Suffer art. Suffer beauty. Suffer truth. Suffer justice. But do not suffer your job. They're all bullshit [1]. Do not suffer bullshit.
I'm probably missing something, but it honestly looks worse then burning money, it looks like extremely inefficiently burning money.
Anyway sounded like an interesting work before the team was dissolved.
In practice, it hasn't happened, and nobody seems excited to do it. Whatever benefits they hope to get from the network effect seem unlikely thus far.
No metaverse will be anywhere near as popular as Facebook proper if it can't match that feature. Even one that's built on Facebook. This entire sector is software R&D that's being done in anticipation of eventually hardware breakthroughs that'll make it not-suck—so right now, it kinda sucks, and there's no getting around that until the hardware gets a lot nicer.
A lot of middle aged people might still have an account because old people and aged contacts but don't really want to use it.
And this scenario still requires most people to have a VR headset which doesn't make them sick and is comfortable and easy to use, which is not just technically still a bit off AFIK but also has tricky problems. Like a lot of people have glasses, including many "non trivial" ones and just the act of needing to replace glasses with contact lenses makes it "annoying" and that is iff you can have contact lenses.
Then it needs to be lightweight, but also fast and to be charged but can't have a large battery and a cable is also annoying and needs high enough frequency/resolution but also cheap and must not get too war either. Also while it needs to be cheap it also must fit all kinds of head sizes and form very well so you kinda both need and must not have a one size fits all solution.
And even if you add all of that up it still holds that for a lot of tasks text/images is still best. I thats why most websites and apps are still "2d" today it's just more practical.
So it's a bit like video calls, but needing a specialized device instead of just your phone/laptop/AIO PC.
So for it to work IMHO you would need to do something like replacing phones with hybrid VR/AR glasses which are technological a jump comparable to the last 10(or more) years. And have hand tracking in the glasses as an camera. And convince most people to run around with glasses all the time (good luck). And convince people that using a facbook controlled device with camera and mic in nearly every part of their live both offline and online.
So it's possible, but especially for Facebook it's hard and I think they went all-in ~5-10 years to early. IMHO Apple has much better chances to take over that space, and if they do it right not limited to Apple users.
I'd lower that threshold to middle-aged people (I'm in my early 40s myself), but that's about it. Facebook the social media platform is a sinking ship.
I’m curious what Apple’s play will be. They better positioned with best-in-class mobile devices and that could allow starting small to avoid needing to justify a $1+k purchase — arguably we’ve already seen that with AirPod-style AR, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the first devices was something like a sports accessory allowing you to race your friends (or personal best) or do something like an adventure run, where you completely punt on the uncanny valley of realistic people and needing the virtual content to be compelling enough on its own rather than enhancing an existing experience. VR sets the bar a lot higher than AR and Apple wouldn’t need to keep you in for hours to sell ads.
but also very expensive
When they say that 95% of all startups fail, they were not kidding.
I have no doubt that I will live to see the day when the entirety of my life's work will be permanently abandoned.
I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off for any reason and the broader large-organization irrationality about costs.
And yet. We're talking about Facebook, a company whose impact on the world is very hard to see as net positive, from teen mental health to national politics. I just really wish it was the industry norm that people who are, in local ways, genuinely thoughtful and kind, and have many employment options, would also think seriously about what their work is ultimately building.
Infinite scroll perhaps twice a month and ruthlessly block whatever I don't enjoy.
FWIW I don't think it's true either. A lot of engineers can be convinced to work on basically anything if it's "a hard problem" in the right way. This is bad. We should all consider ourselves responsible for the end results, rather than entitled to the means.
I also submitted it under a title involving "probabilistic programming languages", thinking "it's cool that you can get paid to work on such a thing"
Though it's also true that I don't use Facebook and would probably not want it to be optimized any more than it is :-/
I also worked in Big tech and there is a lot of genuinely useful knowledge and practice "locked up" there -- i.e. knowledge that is not in open source code. They have assembled a lot of expertise
The P programming language (for concurrency / state machines) is another example of that -- it's used inside Microsoft Windows and AWS, and is beyond the state of the art elsewhere.
I don't know what to do about that, but it should be acknowledged. We should also acknowledge that some big tech products are great and world changing in a largely positive way (even though in my personal opinion Facebook is the least of those, I can also see it argued the other way).
Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other teams make better decisions at lower cost, the aim is to look at the whole system and improve the whole thing.
Let me give you an example. Most "this content doesn't belong on FB" decisions are made by ML, but a great many go to human review. Imagine what that job is like. It's emotionally exhausting, it's poorly compensated, burnout is high.
My team had a model in production where we would use Bayesian reasoning to automatically detect when a particular human was likely to have made the correct decision about content classification, and therefore, if two humans disagreed, how to resolve that impasse without getting a third involved. (And in addition we get a lot more information out of the model including bounds on true prevalence of bad content, and so on.)
Does that save the company money? Sure. Millions of dollars a month. (And for the amateur bean counters elsewhere on this page: the data scientist who developed this model is NOT PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH.) But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow.
That's just one example; everything that we did was with an eye towards not merely saving the company money, but improving the ability to make good decisions about the products.
I think reading that this type of solution was created, and person who worked on it was laid off, makes me very sad as a Data Scientist.
I enjoy working as a Data Scientist, but I struggle a lot with the field. Lots of jobs are mostly about grabbing eyeballs or selling something. Some jobs are just total bullshit. Even the ones where you're doing something concrete (e.g. keeping a machine running), some days you still wonder if it really matters in the long run.
But with some of these social media safety topics, it can feel like a job has some meaning beyond just shuffling numbers around on an spreadsheet.
So it's disappointing to hear that people with the skills to create something like that are fired.
I could say the same thing about TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, WeChat, etc.
I'm not bullish on the metaverse. I live simply, with less tech than the average person. I don't expect to participate. With that said, I don't doubt it will be more successful than what graybeards expect. More than what Meta is dumping into it? No idea.
There will be things in the future you will not want to participate in. That's ok.
If you don’t directly produce revenue, you will get laid off. Not if, but when.
It sounds like they were working with a gun to their head, with the short lived projects run in a survival of the fittest short-lifecycle way. Kind of sounds exhausting!
I had a funny thought: The best team to be on during cutbacks is the probabilistic programming team that optimizes who to cut.
I am someone who wants to build long lasting, useful systems. When my last employer was acquired and killed it really, really upset me to see all my hard work and my coworkers hard work destroyed.
I’d go so far as to say it seriously affected my view of the industry in a negative way and permanently hurt my career satisfaction.
Sometimes I even ponder if my decades-worth experience is not basically because I'm writing the same program over and over again, just for different companies...
And I’m personally not okay with that when it comes to the work I do.
It was a personally very eye opening experience to drive around with a guy who built homes. He'd point out every house he worked on, even ones 30 years ago and you could tell he was really, truly proud of his work and showing it off.
I realised if someone asked to see my past work it simply doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. I take pride in my work, but it doesn't exist long term like his does. I want that same kind of satisfaction he had, but there's no way for me to get it. His work lasts a lifetime and makes the lives of people better, mine lasts a few years at best and often doesn't.
What I find interesting (and hard to reconcile) is how society loves to reward the intangible, derivative, overcomplicated stuff, and ignores the foundational things. The overused (and valid) example is "compare swe to teacher compensation".
In truly fractal fashion, this is also true within our own industry:
Build an engine capable of running an ML model very fast? Meh.
Take that, and layer an API on top, and charge $$ per image-generating call? Shut up and take my money.
I don't have an insightful mental model for how to deal with this, except to note that this pattern is prevalent in all human occupations -- the "higher up" you are in the "value chain", the more derived/bullshit-y your fundamental contribution to society is, and simultaneously, the more $$ you can make off of it.
You would not have anything to show for three years of that beyond a series of paystubs, but every day you would have seen the fruits of your work.
Laboring for years on something that ends up trashed and under corporate NDAs, with nothing to show beyond a series of paystubs, is different from that. Most of my friends who work for corporations have felt this at least once in their career, to be honest. It generally pays better than the retail job, at least.
I'm struggling to relate to this. Me and the rest of my team were literally laid off just a few weeks ago. What I'm hearing from the inside is that half of our work is now in maintenance mode (it's kinda necessary for KTL) and the Big Project™ we were working on is fully abandoned.
I guess I'm sad the Big Project™ will no longer exist, but I learned dozens of lessons while working on it, and I'm more confident and a better engineer because of those lessons and effort. And I get to add some nice things to my resumé.
It doesn't truly feel like a loss. Hundreds of other companies will do similar things and I will try to join them or I'll be interested in some other field in a few years.
But I'm already familiar with changing jobs every few years so perhaps that's why I find it harder to relate.
There’s a big difference between project work and operational work, including what kind of individuals it attracts and therefore what many of those individuals gain work satisfaction from.
Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" content that will make the front page of HN, but was a great pipeline of information for a junior .NET developer hungry to learn.
You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped shape my relationship with all programming languages I have used since then.
Thank you so much, and I hope that someday in the future you will return to blogging!
Hoping he gets the time to recover and decompress.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The hedge fund guys would say the same about your team. I know you are emotional but this is uncalled for.
I'm a big fan of Eric Lippert's work, but this blog post comes across as whiny and evinces a completely unwarranted sense of entitlement. This is a person who voluntarily chose to get paid (I can only assume) a very large amount of money to work on something that he found to be exciting and fulfilling. The only catch: it all belonged to Mark Zuckerberg.
Why does Mark Zuckerberg owe him an explanation for why his services are no longer needed? Why does he think that the decision process should be visible and rational (cost vs benefit) to him? It suggests that he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Instead of being "vexed" that he was fired instead of the people building toys for Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps he should be thankful for the two years he spent working on the PPL team.
> How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process? How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else?
He chose to work for Mark Zuckerberg. He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer. Perhaps you can understand why I don't have a lot of empathy.
He never said that this is why he wants to continue working at Meta. People do have other reasons for wanting to work there.
He has a blog. He can post any thing he likes, any time he likes. As can anyone here who can manage to put together a blog.
I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building community and connecting people; running an ad-funded social media platform is the means to that end. That's not a mission that is super important to me, but I can respect it. And (2) FB is the company that is investing heavily in advancing modern developer tools outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. That is a mission that is important to me.
Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.
Your lack of empathy is clear.
> Your statement that I wish I could continue to work for and enrich Zuck is false. I was regretted attrition.
Perhaps you should make it more clear in the blog post that you left of your own accord. People who are not familiar with the Facebook org chart might not understand that when you say "My team — Probabilistic Programming Languages — and indeed entire “Probability” division were laid off a couple weeks ago" that you yourself are not included in that set of people who were laid off.
No kidding. I just spent 30 minutes reading both Eric's blog post and this HN thread with a (very) wrong idea in mind.
I've had many gentle, kind, thoughtful and loving friends, classmates and coworkers who have lived with autism, and it's unfair and unkind to compare them to internet trolls. Thanks!
I somehow value my time more than the money. I think that I have some kind of stake/interest in things I dedicated my time to.
Though I am always thankful (as Eric is in this post) for the people and the income. I can't help but feel regretful as the product of my time and dedication is discarded.
You see, most of us actually care about our work and hate to see it thrown away.
> Instead of being "vexed" that he was fired instead of the people building toys for Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps he should be thankful for the two years he spent working on the PPL team.
Again, you don't understand how normal people work.
Normal people would be sad to see work they cared about passionately and had sunk thousands of hours into being thrown away, particularly when it's being done for no good reason.
---
Your post comes off as callous. You claim to be a "big fan" of this guy's work, and yet you mock him repeatedly for caring when that very same work is thrown into the garbage.
I suggest cultivating compassion for others, particularly people you are big fans of.
Me neither until about a month ago. Let me tell you - it's awful. I've watched myself and many coworkers go through the process of emotionally accepting it.
Some people want to know what algorithm or decision-making picked them for the chopping block. Some out of a desire to know that it wasn't performance-related, others to know the mechanics because maybe it feels like you'll be able to avoid it next time, or at least see it coming.
Some are just mad. Mad that their hard work went unappreciated, mad that their lives have been upended at the whims of a handful of rich people (who take full responsibility of course), mad that they have to change life plans and go through our industry's stupid interviewing process.
Some are very sad - it's deflating and depressing to be plugged into the fast-paced, high pressure environments these places cultivate and then just be told the next day you'll be doing... nothing. (Not here, anyway!) And pulling yourself out of the rut means going over the bed of nails that is job-seeking.
I was personally mostly in the first group. I think I'm mostly accepted it now. Except for while I'm in the shower - then I'm just mad at it all.
Anyway, my point is, everyone deserves the space to emotionally process this stuff, and I don't think you should look down on his own version of the process.
Good leaders spell out the why. For one, it’s just decency. Secondly, if you care even a little about a subordinate, you want them to succeed after leaving. This feedback helps them understand any missteps they can avoid later. Thirdly, removing uncertainty reduces stress. It reminds me of the study about mice and electric shocks. The mice who were randomly shocked with no rhyme or reason became helpless because of the uncertainty in their life.
Nobody is entitled to good leadership, but most can understand why it’s necessary.
I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I lowered FB's costs by about $4000. The argument that I should be eternally grateful to Zuck for allowing me to keep a quarter -- before taxes! -- of the profit that accrued to him for writing zero lines of compiler code while he keeps the other three quarters is maybe not the strong argument you think it is.
Sounds like this guy was totally opposed to the company's new focus, to the point of describing it in derisive terms. Seems like letting him go was the best thing for everyone, and maybe it was judged that his team wouldn't be able to continue successfully without him.
Regardless of your take on the "Metaverse", it's clear that this was in fact, not the best thing for everyone.
I was not the lead.
A team focused on helping the company make better decisions is all the more necessary when attempting a pivot.
You are off though. I know plenty of Meta people both inside and outside of the Reality Labs division and they love it.
No offense, but “I have no data to back this up, but … (shareholders and employees of a company I don’t have inside knowledge of think X)” is lame discourse.
As for my comment being “lame discourse”, fair enough, but why does that apply to my comment and not the one I was replying to?