Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'
fortune.com
fortune.com
Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
"He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!"
"He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"
But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.
There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.
While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.
But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.
Would you think the whole ordeal was done better if they just refused to admit that any of the firings were in error? Nobody makes no mistakes when firing. There are many issues with the Twitter firings, but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
I'm perplexed by the mental gymnastics you had to resort to to try to deflect any responsibility from Musk, let alone the despair to omit any reference to the extremely poor judgement and outright incompetence it takes to pull this sort of stunt, and instead fabricate this theory where this impulsive shot in the foot was actually a brilliant plan to thwart entrenched interests.
Occam's razor and Musk's track record reject this hypothesis. Musk f-ed up, just like he keeps on f-ing up, like the recent shit fest of Musk posting a stream of brain dead and profoundly I'll advised tweets trying to publicly smear a employee with disabilities.
That we know of (meaning they posted publicly about it). The real number could be way higher.
> but asking some of them to come back isn't a negative sign at all.
It's a very negative sign, especially at the scale it happened (as I said, we know about the cases where the person accepted to go back or publicly stated they were offered to come back).
Mistakes certainly can happen, but they're much more likely to happy when things are done chaotically without proper planning.
In the last months before he took over it had become literally unusable. After some seconds of scrolling a sign-up window would show up which was impossible to dismiss and neither ublock nor umatrix helped.
Meanwhile:
- failures are happening more often. Just in the past week they broke "following" page for half a day, and then image uploads for a few hours (with hilarious "your account has hit the API limit for their own site)
- they just randomly killed third-party apps that made Twitter what it was with zero warning or explanation
- destroyed all possible credibility of blue checkmarks. Which are not just celebrities, but also government agencies
- people report an increase in harassment and trolls
I think the acquisition is partly idelogically motivated. So destroying the blue checkmark credibility is probably "mischief managed".
For government accounts, they now have gray checkmarks.
What increased velocity?
> So destroying the blue checkmark credibility is probably "mischief managed".
This statement makes no sense
> For government accounts, they now have gray checkmarks.
Wat?
Is this the velocity you're talking about? When they introduced paid blue checkmarks, then realized it's a bad idea, and introduced "official" label to only backpedal less than a day later, only to introduce gray checkmarks? First time I hear of gray checkmarks btw.
Just checked: of course there are now gray checkmarks. And of course they are randomly assigned. And of course there are also golden checkmarks because reasons. Also randomly assigned.
It is the whole "Learn WHY things are how they are, before you suggest changing them" which all new engineers need to learn, also seemingly applies to restructuring. If they had waited a couple of months, they could have made strategically smart changes, and over the long term it likely won't cost them more.
> Google overhired talent to do ‘fake work’ and stop them working for rivals, claims former PayPal boss Keith Rabois
The submitted title makes it look like a settled fact/conclusion, but there's no evidence provided AFAICT.
I thought this well known within the industry? Isn't this the point of the university to FAANG pipeline?
It doesn't make much sense to not fully utilize people once hired.
I don't know anyone who does what I could consider "fake work".
Unless you think anyone who doesn't measurably and immediately impact the bottom line is doing "fake work".
I'm not limiting this sentiment to just big tech.
For example very big companies tend to have a large number of people who do a lot of talking without saying actually saying anything. I would argue being trapped in those long meetings is "fake" work. The large number of employees working from home since COVID has shown most of those long meetings didn't need to happen.
Now that the four day work week is gaining momentum with no lost of productivity[1] we have even more proof of the amount of "fake" work being done.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...
I kinda doubt Google is having anyone do actual known-useless-to-all work just so they don't work at a competitor, but I think it's probably very possible that preventing someone form working at a competitor is _part_ of the value-add Google sees in hiring someone, which means they don't need to see quite as much clear value in what they'll be working on at Google.
In case someone goes "but what about the startups" - it doesn't make sense for any individual large tech company to hire people just to prevent them from starting startups or being hired at startups, given that most startups don't compete with them and often help create moat for their own business, not to mention that their own hiring (as opposed to big tech hiring as a whole) has a negligible effect on the talent pool as a whole.
That didn't stop Google and Apple on agreeing to not compete against each other on talent [1].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
But it absolutely calls in question the notion these companies wouldn't do something just because they're "competing" against each other.
This doesn't make any sense and you're misunderstanding the original comment. The point is the idea that they are hurting their bottom line by overhiring, but the whole thing works out because it prevents their competition from hiring is completely nonsensical, when you're alleging that they are all doing it. If they are all hurting themselves by overhiring, they can't be deriving any benefit from keeping the talent away from your competition. Your competition is also overhiring and doesn't need the talent either. So keeping them away from your competition helps your competition at your expense.
Is there a reason why you think FAANG only competes against each other and no one else? FAANG colluding to prevent other companies from getting access to tech talent is exactly something they would do even tho they are "competing" against each other. OpenAI for example is now seen a direct competitor against Alphabet and its cash cow.
Also, it's simply not economically possible for the cabal to be so threatened by the talent-starved companies as to engage in completely self-sabotaging actions to increase their own cost, while these apparently exceptional talent-starved companies are unable to outbid companies that derive no actual value from the talent.
Anyone who's familiar with any type of organization (and even have cursory knowledge of economics) should be able to see that overhiring has mostly to do with the fact that managing a larger team confers status to the manager while the cost is borne by the organization, so there are systemic incentives for managers at all levels to increase and compete for scope, which is inherently inefficient with respect to the goals of the organization at large. Ignoring these dynamics and focusing on implausibly airtight collusion between large entities that are made up of 10s or even 100s of thousands of people that constantly leak everything is just pure naivete.
Wait, what do VCs like him do with their time? Or are those meetings somehow more legitimate?
Anyway it's not like it doesn't happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn't show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We're talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.
The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator's dilemma.
Note that I think my job is at least somewhat important, I write code so at least I produce something. But there’s dozens of not hundreds of people whose jobs consist entirely of meetings, signing paperwork, and taking multi-hour lunch breaks…
How does one take "full responsibility" for such decisions? Give yourself pat on a back? Pay raise to compensate for moral losses?
In practice it's just a rhetoric figure
Personally I really want companies to build like ~4 teams with the same mission, same goal. Not fake work, but duplicative work. (Whether we tell folks this is happening or not: either way.)
Over time, try to figure out what are the best potentials/possibilities, what are the most promising components/people. Organizationally iterate. Developers are iterative as fuck, imo. Organizations just kind of have people & stay there, doing whatever. Trying to explore the space of dynamical organizations is a huge huge huge interest that I think society is no where near, but could greatly better the world & what happens.
Imo, we have a very: your org goes to battle with the team they have mentality. Personally I think orgs would, long term, do much better with a more deliberate effort to explore broader takes. I have a hard time connecting it explicitly, but I really dug the thinkpiece MIT paper "Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing 'Virtual Countries'?"[1], which to me suggested more dynamical orgs that had more than the single-poker-in-each-fire view that predominates the corporate world.
This seems like a prima facie case for regulatory intervention to require divestment or breakup.
* I know, I know, 'how can we say it's bad, what if the resultant competition created environmental destruction or led to the invention of a basilisk.'
But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it's just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste.
Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.
I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.
Maybe he is implying smaller impact but that is case for all mega crop
It seems a useless accusation tbh
I'm a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I've been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.
[EDIT] I think this is true even for extremely generous values of "essential", in fact. I think the vast majority of software effort delivers marginal gains at best, with a net effect that is overall harmful in the median case, which harm is masked by the occasional huge improvement it delivers.
It's possible to do most of the useful stuff Facebook and Twitter do with very small operations.
But then most of tech arguably doesn't serve the higher rungs very well, or is outright counterproductive with what evidence we have about Instagram[1] and Facebook's[2] effects on mental health, and so on.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram#Scientific_studies
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Mental_and_emotional_...
I’m not of the idea that all tech is unnecessary. We need information systems for things like banking, healthcare, government and so on.
But as you pointed out there are also tech products that are definitely not essential or even counter productive to society that employ a lot of people.
People don't end where they start. Sometimes you get lucky and have an opportunity to do something really worthwhile.
The thing is, when that happens, it's often the result of series of career "stepping stones" which are often not very worthwhile when looked at in isolation.
Many of the folks who were terminated from Google, I think, will use the connections and experiences gained at Google to do really essential work. Maybe not this week, maybe in years or decades. It's not wasted, if the individual makes the best of it.
How many finance workers on wall street do you think provide direct value to society?
When you consider the mental and physical energy and time it takes to produce the life of relevant comfort and safety of the average Western digital worker against the raw materials and environment that life is extracted and fashioned from (compared, say, to the prospect of surviving against nature on your wits and bodily power alone or the plight of a penniless war refugee), can you honestly say with a straight face: "yes, I deserve that"?
We - most of us - live off the value provided us from the great good fortune of having been born in to a society fashioned and built over hundreds of years; it seems to me that provides the bulk of what we "earn" as individuals, and particularly so in the digital economies.