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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

I can't imagine what it's like at Meta right now, with the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers and then a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them.

Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him. If they were to quit there would be a line out the door to hand them as much money as they want to start a competing open research lab. I bet a ton of top researchers from other labs would be happy to join too, since from what I've heard from friends they're all miserable from dealing with incompetent management.

On current trajectory one of Sam Altman / Zuck / Elon will end up having full control over the frontier models that are trained on their huge new clusters. All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone.

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> the CEO publicly stating that they're firing the bottom 5% of performers

I understand that people don't like any talk about layoffs and performance management, but I've never worked at a company where being in the bottom 5-10% of performers meant your job was safe. I've also never worked at a big company that didn't have at least 1-in-20 people who were clearly underperforming and everyone around them knew it.

I know the real complain is that he said it out loud and people don't like threats. However, Meta employees are highly compensated, especially now that the stock price is extremely high. I don't really think it's unreasonable for a company that compensates well and has generous severance packages to be cutting the bottom 5% of their workforce.

The problem isn't that they are cutting 5%, it's that they use stack ranking. Within a team of 10, you may have the top 10 performers in the whole company, but the manager still has to rank them and assign at least one of them the bottom ranking, or engage in a lengthy battle to defend their high rankings.

They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason.

It's also terrible for morale to do it all at once. Sure, maybe there are some underperformers. Let managers deal with those people individually. Don't do a mass layoff where they have to select someone at a specific time when all their people might be doing well.

> They're not actually finding the bottom 5%, they're giving managers an excuse to get rid of people the don't like for whatever reason.

More insidious is the rankings are capricious and arbitrary despite haughty claims. Unless you're in the top quintile and know so explicitly you can never feel safe in your position. You can also drop into the bottom quintile of the stack for no other reason than someone else on your team self aggrandized a bit more right before reviews.

Vibes strike again.

Taking this to its eventual conclusion, wouldn't you just fire everyone?

Say you fire 5% now, then another 5%, and another, and so on. Obviously, you'll still hire, so you can argue that not everyone will be fired, but you could potentially just be firing/pushing out all the people you have today over the next X years to replace them with what you believed to be better employees. However, those newer employees are not the ones that got you to where you are today where you make so much money that you can liberally fire "the bottom 5%". It feels like a bit of a paradox.

At some point, it's worthwhile to step back and ask if maybe the system is broken. The constant hiring/culling cycle is ruthless way to wring out performance from people who are already likely overperforming in the industry.

>Taking this to its eventual conclusion, wouldn't you just fire everyone?

>Say you fire 5% now, then another 5%, and another, and so on.

sounds a bit like Zeno's paradox, or one of them.

I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point. I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation. I'm sure you're right that if he decided to leave he'd easily be able to get funding. I'm sure France would be willing to set him up with an AI research lab to get him back there. And there would be plenty of other companies/labs that would be trying to get him.

Yeah he could easily get Hinton (who hates nothing more than Sam Altman) to endorse a new proper open AI lab, similar to what was described in the OpenAI Charter.

Karpathy, Alec Radford, and a ton of their old students are practically free agents right now who could probably be convinced to join.

There's probably even a chance of someone like Wojciech Zaremba leaving OpenAI to join them.

EU would build them CERN style compute clusters to train healthcare, education, climate, etc models.

I'm sure there's plenty of people at HuggingFace, Eluther, old Stability AI group who'd also love to get involved.

yes ... let's dream on ... until the new openAI becomes just like the old openAI again.

human nature will never change.

q: what is the definition of an optimist?

a: a person with no experience.

q; what is the definition of a pessimist?

a: an optimist with experience.

mine ;)

This type of idol worshipping has to stop. LeCun invented CNN but he also said world simulation using diffusion was a deadened, which has been proven very wrong. The money is better spent hiring new grads with open minds and something to prove.

He's a director not a "in the trenches" researcher anymore. He's being paid for being a highly technical leader who enables and recruits researchers he employs to do great work, similar to Oppenheimer in a way.

$META is hitting 700, and RSU refresher price for 2022 performance was ~110.

My bet, is Yann got a huge set of packages with the AI talent race, and what may have been a $10M/4yr package may now suddenly be 70M+.

Unlikely any other AI lab would be liquid like that.

Presumes he's a weird creature that is motivated by the number. Don't really need to care anymore if you've already got $10 million.

>I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point.

Maybe he's happy with his compensation, his coworkers, the food at the cafeteria and doesn't want to uproot his life or be burdened with running a company.

>I can imagine he's not happy with Zuck's capitulation

Who did Zuck capitulate to?

I’d be pretty embarrassed to be working for someone who kissed the ring like Zuck did on Jan 20.

So kissing the ring and bending over was okay on Jan 20, 2021?

And it was already embarrassing for a myriad of reasons before that including how he went on Joe Rogan talking about how corporations need more "masculine energy". In the hobbies I participate in (notably I'm not in a major tech hub) some of these tech companies are getting a similar social stigma to like finance (and this is especially pronounced among women I know who really don't like what they view as "tech bros")

Indeed, I think the inauguration was kind of Zuck's "pedo guy" moment, where the pieces fell into place and a whole bunch of people at once were like... oh, yes, okay I see what is actually the state of things here.

Zucc has been kissing various unsavory rings for a long time, though. It's not like this just started. Didn't he ask China's President for the honor of naming his baby? [1] Totally shameless suck-up.

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/china-s-president-...

I've always thought that Zuck looked like a psychopath, even leaving aside his actions, many of which I have read about in the past.

you just have to take a look at his face, and those mad staring eyes.

>some of these tech companies are getting a similar social stigma to like finance

SV """tech""" companies have had this stigma since at least mid-2010s. Don't you remember the awfulness of Uber's CEO?

A lot of bros in tech delude themselves that they are the "in touch" ones and actually no, it's not chauvinism and misogyny it's just some "masculine energy" but it's always been lies.

It really shouldn't be this surprising that the same people who swear that there's nothing wrong with tech that results in it's INSANE gender ratios despite historical evidence that women love to code continue to ignore obvious signs of their bad behavior.

IDK, maybe it's proximity to hollywood and it's wealth of rich chauvinists and sex predators. Maybe california has something in the water that makes rich men act like sex predators. Or maybe they are a representative sample of male behavior when in positions of power over women in the USA and they just get outed more.

very, except that embarrassed is too weak a word.

> Who did Zuck capitulate to?

There's a pretty decent list of the actions and changes at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/technology/meta-mark-zuck....

> I'm sure France would be willing to set him up

Are you familiar with realities of incorporating a startup in the EU?

In the UK it costs £12 and takes 5 minutes. It costs between £300-600 per year for an accountant to file your accounts, and £12 for your confirmation statement.

And did when we were part of the EU.

Cheaper and quicker than America.

You don't incorporate in the EU, you incorporate in one of the 27 different countries.

All have wildly different requirements.

(These costs rocketed last year. Incorporation is now £50, and an electronic confirmation statement is £34.)

You also have all sorts of ancillary fees like the Information Commissioner’s annual charge.

UK was vastly different from the mainland EU. You're right that the EU is not singular, but once we start talking of Germany, the Netherlands, France, etc. - we quickly hit regulations that bear no resemblance to a free market and some of which are incompatible with IT business whatsoever.

I suspect France/EU would be willing to set him up in a government funded research lab - possibly they already have something going that they could put him in charge of. No issues with incorporation.

Sure, with roughly 50% taxes and a really dynamic free labour market.

Don't judge me, I'm living in the EU and I love the place, but regulations and business climate are definitely not great.

"I'm not sure what's keeping LeCun at Meta at this point."

The most obvious options are

1) An insane amount of compensation.

2) Access to an insane amount of compute to train new LLMs.

I've seen him on record that he'd pretty much work for whoever pays him (in the context of research grants for military). Virtue signaling to feel good is only worth so much to people. Humans compartmentalize very well.

This seems like a pretty widely shared ethos in today's software engineering culture. "I'd happily build the Torment Nexus if you pay me enough!" No ethical baseline below which we refuse to pass. Simply a required $$$:EVIL ratio.

It's not always like that. Most of the team would be hired to move protobufs around for the Torment Nexus so it seems quite innocuous.

Yea, I think this is how a lot of engineers rationalize it. "Well, I'm not directly participating in my company's A/B experiment to see what types of content drive children to suicidal ideation! I'm just moving data from the project's logging side of the stack to the metrics side of the stack so that reports can be generated. Don't blame me!"

It saddens me that taking an ethical stance is now derisively considered "virtue signaling".

I would never work at Meta, not because refusing to do so would make me feel good, but because working there would make me feel like I'm making the world a worse place.

The idea of having a moral compass is antagonistic to the worldview of a lot of people in tech, so they are instinctively dismissive or condescending to anyone who does.

> Zuck needs Yann LeCun and other senior researchers at Meta a lot more than they need him.

Of course not. Quantifiably so. Proof: he can get all of them for comparably measly salary to his net worth. He has.

(P.S. Besides, you'd be surprised how replaceable such people are. Often at these companies who can hire high quality talent at lower levels you are going to see impressive people step up when the old wash away, so it might actually be the opposite.)

> a week later stating that the LLMs that his researchers / engineers are working on will soon be able to replace them.

This is a pessimistic interpretation of Mark's words that has been trumpeted in the media. Which I am appalled to admit.

He said that they anticipate the majority of new code to come from AI models rather than human engineers. He then adds that they expect developers to be augmented by these tools. Which tracks as you still need somebody to drive the AI and validate or correct their outputs.

https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=2h8m6s

I'm talking about this: https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/DFNf73PJxOQ

> "...we'll build an AI engineer that will start contributing increasing amounts of code to our R&D efforts".

What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work? He's already putting a squeeze on his employees now (https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/meta-ceo-mark-zucker...)

> "I think whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history," Zuckerberg said, according to the recording.

> Zuckerberg also reiterated his belief that this would be the year Meta started seeing AI agents take on work, including writing software. Asked whether this would lead to job cuts, Zuckerberg said it was "hard to know" and that while it may lead to some roles becoming redundant, it could lead to hiring more engineers who can harness artificial intelligence to be more productive.

> What do you think will happen when these models are good enough to do 90% of engineering work?

Honestly? I think we'll see a lot of vengeful and technically capable people who are out of work and who are looking to get revenge on the people that laid them off.

Some of those people who feel they have nothing to lose will build swarms of small drones that will use machine vision to track down Zuckerberg whoever they feel wronged them and kill them.

The future is going to be very, very spicy.

> He said that they anticipate the majority of new code to come from AI models rather than human engineers. He then adds that they expect developers to be augmented by these tools.

only 2 ways this can work:

1) Meta collectively generates 5x more code than it presently is capable of generating

2) Meta generates the same amount of code than it presently does, with fewer engineers since each engineer can (supposedly) generate 5x code

Unless Zuck announced some initiative that will require 5x more code than they currently can generate, you can be pretty sure the goal is #2.

The problem with #2 is Meta doesn't operate in a vacuum. Assuming there are problems to be solved, if Meta doesn't do #1 then someone else will. The someone else will eventually surpass Meta.

Surpass Meta in what? Meta’s revenue comes from social networks. Revenue doesn’t not increase with LOC. Writing 5x more code does not get you X billion users.

No company can rest on its laurels, even one the size of Meta. No one said LoC increases users or revenue, implementing ideas does though. If Meta decides to use the benefits of AI to keep the current productivity and cut staff instead of increasing productivity, they will eventually be displaced by a group that went the other way.

Competition means everyone is now 5X faster. So you can't get by with the previous output level.

> you still need somebody to drive the AI and validate or correct their outputs

100% visual inspection catches only about 80% of the defects.

The following is a classic example from QC circles (I used to run incoming QC at a medical device factory). Count the number of F’s in the paragraph below:

> THE NECESSITY OF TRAINING HANDS FOR FIRST-CLASS FARMS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FRIENDLY FARM LIVESTOCK IS FOREMOST IN THE MINDS OF FARM OWNERS. SINCE THE FOREFATHERS OF THE FARM OWNERS TRAINED THE FARM HANDS FOR THE FIRST-CLASS FARMS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FARM LIVESTOCK, THE OWNERS OF THE FARMS FEEL THEY SHOULD CARRY ON WITH THE FAMILY TRADITION OF TRAINING FARM HANDS IN THE FATHERLY HANDLING OF FARM STOCK BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE IT IS THE BASIS OF GOOD FUTURE FARMING.

How many did you get?

The correct answer is four dozen (I wanted to make the number harder to calculate before you count them).

Having software devs become some sort of QC inspectors for AI code sounds like a fucking nightmare to me, and I know how much of a nightmare QC in a factory is and how many defects escape both the design and the manufacturing process even with very strict QC.

> The correct answer is four dozen (I wanted to make the number harder to calculate before you count them).

No it isn't? I counted 34, and a python oneliner agrees.

Good job, I guess, I was doing that for the comment-bait to get people to count it, not with Python though (is a Python one-liner visual?). In any case, go read stuff from Deming and Juran and others in manufacturing quality, and you will still see that 100% inspection is not enough.

I just finished a blog post with some thoughts on AI’s future [1] and the surprising conclusion was that most big tech companies probably have much bigger problems than whether researchers leave or not.

As Taleb and DeepSeek’s CEO point out, usually when you have a disruptive technology, then the incumbents will be left behind. Cursor AI and DeepSeek are a sign of new players coming out of nowhere and beating the incumbents.

[1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/ai-learning-rate/

It's Jack Welch's rank and yank but this time with LLMs!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

I wonder if there are future plans to rank and yank LLMs, too. Or whether LLMs will exhibit "morale problems" because of it.

>All 3 of them are unaccountable to anyone.

In what way are they unaccountable to anyone?

Their wealth is tied up in stock whose value is tied to the perception, aka the accountability, of the general public. Not being able to personally destroy someone's wealth because you don't like what they're doing is different from being unaccountable. If tomorrow Zuck released an AI model or FB feature that was deeply unpopular, his ventures and personal wealth would dwindle according to the market's reaction. That's accountability. I'm not even a fan of Zuck... he's a slimy weasel who changes his tune to whoever is in power. But public perception directly affects his decision making.

Zuck has majority voting shares, so can't be fired.

Sam already proved that nobody at OpenAI can get him out, and the new board makes that even harder.

Same for Elon.

No matter what happens, all 3 will be billionaires for the rest of their lives.

Nothing you said refuted the point made.

Actually the top talent wants to work at a company that regularly fires the bottom performers

All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative. If you want to work at not just Meta but Google or Microsoft or Amazon because money is good, that's fine. We live in a society where you need money.

But you're fooling yourself if you think you're doing something good for society should've shattered long ago. All these big tech companies have done an immediate and total heel turn to get in line with the administration, which isn't even a partisan issue. The interests of large companies is aligned with US domestic and foreign policy.

Meta (etc) are now no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. You are working for a defense contractor.

Every day Zuck further exposes himself as being about his own class interest: that of the billionaire class. It's now OK to say that LGBTQ have "mental illness" on Meta platforms [1]. Meta already had a longstanding policy of censoring and downranking Palestine content [2].

It's also why the government was so keen to ban Tiktok: because it doesn't censor

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...

[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...

>All talk of being about social change or diversity by large companies should now be exposed as purely performative

It was always understood as purely performative. You think Gay people actually thought Target cared about them? Do you think Trans people actually thought Budweiser was going to go out of their way to support the trans community just because they gave a trans person like $50k?

The only people who have ever insisted that corporate "we love the gays" was serious are the people who are yelling about how "woke" companies are. Except at the same time they will also yell about how it's just performative?

I can't help but feel what they were asking for was never genuine support of LGBTQ people either, since, uh, who they tend to vote for. Rather, their complaint seems to have come simply from any media, any images, any acknowledgement whatsoever that LGBTQ people are PEOPLE

It's weird. You either stay quiet or be loud and expect to be out of a job. The mindset is "will this help for PSC."

I'm not bothered by the free speech policy decisions or Trump political contributions. Especially in light of overreach by the Biden administration, allowing more speech is reasonable, and political contributions to the party in power area always reasonable.

What bothers me is dishonesty from leadership about cost cutting, refusing to answer hard questions at the Q&A, and short-sighted decisions causing a lot of churn. When Sheryl left, the adult in the room that would call out Zuck left. No one's there to tell Zuck that the gold chain and million dollar watch isn't a good look. And now Nick Clegg left and Dana White joined the board. I'm sure his UFC experience will prove indispensable.

Don't get me started on how much money is wasted on AR/VR.

If it weren't for juicy 2023 RSUs and the bad job market, there'd be a lot more turnover.

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