How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?

It was claimed to be millions of net savings per deployed model.

> We were working on signal loss models that had potential to save billions

What are signal loss models in this context?

Unfortunately, top-down mandates are imperfect and should be avoided as much as possible. Net profit matters to an operator who cares about today's profitability, but not at all to someone whose paradigm is "thinking in bets" and future payoffs. And the street has been rewarding people who ignore today's profits in favor of the narrative about tomorrow's growth.

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 genuinely do not understand the logic of cutting this team to save costs.

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.

Eric, my best wishes to you, I've also enjoyed reading your texts, at these older times when you were allowed to write about your work.

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.

Perhaps in the future the company would not be adding any new models or require optimization of any new surfaces, so they don't expect to be spending enough on new initiatives to justify optimizing them. And all the existing initiatives have been optimized efficiently already (though that does seem unlikely when I type it out).

> 1. No need to beat a man while he is down.

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.

There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack.

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...

Especially when the "perceived value" is avoiding a loss.

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.

Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation.

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.