Meta staffers reportedly spar with Mark Zuckerberg after mass layoffs
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He lacks vision. No, he’s an antithesis to innovation.
I don't think he lacks vision; I think it's pretty hard to go from $0-500,000,000,000 in value without vision, frankly.
People like to shit on Zuckerberg, but the truth is he built a global company that something like 1 in 3 people use. Nobody has ever done that before, and it's an incredible achievement. His vision might not be your vision, but I don't think you do something like that without a perspective on the future and how to grasp it.
Now I would agree that they were late on AI. But his last post only mentions AI as a tech (not even the metaverse). So let’s see.
Also I’ll eat my hat if his bet on VR/AR is not going to pay put eventually.
Additionally, it’s not clear if any gains Meta would see would be worth the cost. There’s the headline number of tens of billions of dollars spent, but more than the absolute amount of money, the opportunity cost of those dollars not being spent on other more promising technologies, like ML/AI, which Facebook actually was THE leader in 5-10 years ago, is the big problem, and is directly a result of poor leadership.
That's a very American-centric opinion, most people in the world don't care.
I can absolutely see why staffers are losing trust. Mark is treating this as if everyone already agrees with the idea.
Just, unbelievably callous.
Every major tech company (except Apple) is doing the same because they overhired to an incredible extent.
Mind you, these companies were already bloated before the pandameic hiring, partly because of a strategy to drain talent from the startups ecosystem.
I always lie in those internal surveys.
But a lot of fluff questions regarding satisfaction are answered with lies. "Sure, it's alright, 7/10".
he's never heard of a strike
/s
I ruthlessly unfollow people who post garbage links on FB and only follow who post their own content so I find my FB feed to be surprisingly sane and helps me keep in touch with people I've met throughout the years in all the cities I've ever lived in, which is not a few.
Despite younger people and curmudgeons retreating from FB -- no concern of mine since my own social network of people my age is what I care about (and one day soon the IG and TikTok crowd will learn that they are old school grandpas too and that they're the MySpace of their generation) -- I find I can still tell stories with pictures and words on FB better than any other platform except blogs, but no one follows blogs these days. IG stories are too short, posts are too limited (you can't caption individual pictures), and TikTok requires you to sit through a 15s video.
Because I ruthlessly unfollow garbage, I don't think I've seen a political post or any divisive content in years. Instead I've gotten to "travel" with friends to different countries, gotten updates on their kids and their struggles with growing older, volunteer efforts that they're part of, etc.
FB is still useful for those of us who use it correctly, and for those of us for whom the written word is still more important the pictures or videos.
React and PyTorch.
For everyone hating on the company, they did more for software engineers than any other company. The most meritocratic and highly compensated
These people are only one reorg away from losing their income, Mr. lz4/zstd should be able to focus on his work without such fears, so great is his contribution to our field.
That the direct-corporate-patronage/semi-employeeship model is so prevailing is a sign of brokenness. We need more, collectively, to have a health of our technical ecosystem.
Having these corps willing to hire great folk & have them keep hacking is still often a good option, often. "Create more vue than you capture" is easy to back/do when it's so clear who is out there creating mad value.
Developing for the web was far from hell before React…
If I had to be absolutely honest, the developer experience side of EmberJS was miles ahead of what React is today. NextJS is only just coming closer but I’m not even sure it’s there yet.
If React hadn’t existed, and more people had experienced EmberJS, I think web development would have been a far better experience today than it is right now.
FB’s devrel dollars completely drowned out EmberJS, which was being pushed by a very small indie team, and web development would have been immeasurably better if we were using EmberJS today, as opposed to React and its bandaged on partners.
When you get more experience, one thing you’ll learn is that when “literal hell” isn’t entirely untrue it’s a social problem. If your organization isn’t good at maintaining a large application, a tool won’t save you. It’s very common for people to look at problems and blame the current tools because that’s where the symptoms are and, critically, it doesn’t require saying anyone needs to be doing a better job managing the project.
JFC, "when you get more experience". If you people are going to be throwing around this bs you better have your linkedin on your profile and you better have 20 years of experience.
edit: Which you do, touche. That being said, I'm experienced, I'm just hyperbolic and emotional about things. Not everyone that's experienced has that "cool, I've done this a million times before" demeanor ok.
Again, I’m not saying that React is horrible – only that people are prone to misattribution leading to overstating the benefits of their current favorite tool relative to other factors. That works both ways, too: it’s not uncommon for people to credit a newer tool for productivity improvements due to their skills increasing over the same time period.
1. Being angry at an action doesn’t make someone an ingrate. You can both be grateful and angry; I’d say it’s even common to be both.
2. Meta has had no meaningful impact on my software niche, or many others’. Their only real impact on me has been radicalizing my older family members and firing a few of my friends. They aren’t entitled to any particular gratitude for that.
Were they primed by other sources of media and culture exposure? Absolutely; what distinguishes Facebook is its place in the timeline, and the abundance of evidence that radicalization broadly tracks with social media engagement.
I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.
1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding
I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore.
One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding.
I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE.
But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck.
Wild.
Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved:
Why should a worker be motivated to do work if by the next day they could be gone?
No one could possibly concentrate enough to do good work with the loomimg axe.
I don't care if you're writing code or flipping burgers the distraction is mind-numbing.
I understand this might vary between individuals. It's just overstating your case to claim that it is impossible.
1) Company says "we reduce force" and fires a bunch of employees
2) They say "we'll fire a bug chunk more"
3) they notice productivity is low
4) boss says "won't tell you, whether you can keep your job"
This won't help to increase morale and productivity.
I'm not disputing that!
Note also that most layoffs will be non engineers.
While I understand that gradual layoffs are less risky and easier for the organization to absorb, it seems short-sighted.
Delaying the inevitable will only cause more pain and damage in the long term.
If the objective is to boost efficiency and reduce expenses while minimizing negative impacts on the product, one can establish metrics to evaluate the outcome.
By examining metrics such as feature velocity, revenue, SRE, and usage, I believe you'll find the answer to your question.
It could be argued that it's reasonable to aim for pre-pandemic employee levels, given the drop in valuation, post-pandemic revenue decrease, and the significant loss in revenue from Apple's privacy changes.
This is just speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt. To achieve pre-pandemic employee levels, Facebook would need to cut an additional 20K employees.
If this is some attempt to squeeze people back to to office, well they can forget about it. I'd leave tech before I move my family for a company that has a record of cutting people.
I’m thinking that as she went more and more into background, Facebook lost more and more focus. But maybe it’s just me.
We might not go back to that dire of a situation, but I imagine it will be closer than we have been for quite some time. A lot of people see Zuckerberg as being an asshole, where really he is going above and beyond by being this communicative.
To be a CEO, you have to be a bastard sometimes. You don't have a choice. The trick is in the execution.
However what people are upset about now is that is another huge layoff was announced only a few months later. The first one was supposed to be "deep" enough.
Imo it’s great and reflects what I saw from him when I used to work there.
All your posts in this thread read like you are head of FB PR.
Being obtuse won't get you far.
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...
Great answer for shareholders.
Not the answer employees are looking for when trying to understand if their job will continue to exist. Especially when front-line engineers don’t have as much control over whether or not their project succeeds in the market as the execs and product people do.
> short-term cost savings provided by a layoff are overshadowed by bad publicity, loss of knowledge, weakened engagement, higher voluntary turnover, and lower innovation
1 - https://hbr.org/2022/12/what-companies-still-get-wrong-about...
Given his experience presumably killing a variety of animals, I wouldn't be too anxious to take him on.
Not everyone with a homestead does that though. I know it's the traditional Jewish and Islamic way of doing things but it's cruel to drown an animal in its own blood or letting it die slowly from blood loss when you could just disable the brain in an instant.
If you have ever fainted, it is the same principle. Rapid pressure loss leads to immediate loss of consciousness.
Not sure what you're trying to get at. He eats meat and wants to respect where it came from rather than grabbing a factory raised, killed, and processed McRib and not thinking about it.
That sounds like the right way to me if you're going to eat meat. Personally I think it's a bigger problem when someone doesn't know or care (especially if they don't want to know/care) how the meat ended up on their plate.
Do you truly believe that someone who would kill and butcher an animal is a threat to _you_?
An injury to one is an injury to all.
Apple and Google colluded to suppress wages:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
So, the industry seems to tick all of your boxes.
And unions wouldn’t have prevented collusion. That was illegal with or without unions.
The point is to change the industry to better conditions for everyone.
Yeah, I changed jobs to another job with similar bullshit Bay Area culture.
Are you seriously trying to argue that they're isn't a pretty universal culture of long hours and, often, the expectation of even more hours after work on "passion projects"?
Even ignoring small companies and "startup culture", the entire Google campus approach was to encourage people to stay longer and work more, and that seems to be the common model among the big tech companies.
And unions wouldn’t have prevented collusion
I didn't say anything about unions, I merely addressed the implication by the parent comment that it isn't an issue in the tech industry. That said, I don't know why you think unions can't help fight wage collusion. Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it has to be brought to light to be caught.
You realize there are jobs outside of the “Bay Area” don’t you? Do you know how many job “opportunities” I’ve “noped” out of in my career just based on asking the right questions about the “culture”?
> Are you seriously trying to argue that they're isn't a pretty universal culture of long hours and, often, the expectation of even more hours after work on "passion projects"?
I am very much arguing that - based on 25 years of experience and 8 jobs. I have not written a single line of code that I haven’t gotten paid for since graduating from college - in 1996.
> Even ignoring small companies and "startup culture", the entire Google campus approach was to encourage people to stay longer and work more, and that seems to be the common model among the big tech companies
If that’s not your preferred environment then don’t work for BigTech, there are literally millions of jobs at banks, government, insurance companies and other corporate America jobs where people work 40 hours a week.
> That said, I don't know why you think unions can't help fight wage collusion. Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, and it has to be brought to light to be caught.
And it was…
The lawsuit was brought in 2011, covering a period beginning in 2005. I guess you think that's optimal. Regardless, your assertion that a union couldn't help with this is entirely unsupported.
As for the rest, you can dismiss others all you want, but you know for a fact that what I've written about Bay Area and SV tech is true, and you also know that this site revolves around it.
Good for you for whatever you've done, but it's irrelevant to the discussion.
It’s not rocket science. There are 2.7 million developers in the US. Most don’t work on the west coast.
It’s not ”irrelevant” to the discussion. You chose to work in toxic environments. You had agency to choose another type of culture. There are literally millions of developers in the US who made different choices.
I in fact don’t know because I never worked on the west coast and I’ve done okay. I actively ignored software development jobs that would require me to deal with that Bullshit.
Yes I work for BigTech now. I haven’t been “stressed” about losing my job after the first year when I started working - over 25 years ago. My first mission was to save aggressively.
You are free to create your own company just like he did.
All the value Facebook ever made was made by its workers.
All of these CEOs are nuts. They are all greedy. The capitalism-to-the-max model is less than great… but those of us in software are treated amazingly well.
I agree these people should pay for their bad decisions but some of those decisions gave us equity grants, sky high salaries, and free meals. We can’t act like we haven’t benefited.
I remember fighting against Chinese groups criticizing western medias and talking about how tiananmen massacre is a hoax while Mark was publicly reprimanding the people who would scratch the “black” of “black lives matter” from some of the walls of the office to overwrite it with “all”.
During all that time the American people hated fb. HN couldn’t comprehend how engineers could accept to join and work at facebook. The social dilemma came out on Netflix.
As someone who really liked the facebook app and thought it would continue to change the world in a good way, it was really hard to read about the company externally and to see employees destroying it from the inside.
I think my opinion now is that 1) any type of organization becomes problematic once it gets too large/accumulates too much power (religion and the government are much more of a problem than Meta though) and 2) politics shouldn’t be allowed internally. People shouldn’t “come to work as themselves”. People really suck and they should keep a lot of things to themselves.