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Comment by dpe82 | Hacker News Reader

One of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature.

It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more heads. Good for savvy mangers, bad for the company and overall effort. My impression is this is what happened at Meta's AI org, and VR/AR before that.

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Pournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others.

Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own survival over anything else. Product works instead becomes defensive operations, decision making slows, and innovation starts being perceived as a risk instead of a benefit.

Who’s “you” in this case?

The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering.

The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.

The you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift.

I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.

IMHO Meta should be investing/inventing AI. When the AI org was younger it was doing some impressive open source work. Then it bloated and we got Llama 3 and not much since. I don't know if they can recover that earlier magic or if the ship has sailed; there's a good chance the super effective early folks got fed up and left or are burned out by the bureaucracy, but if I were in charge my first move would also be to cut half the department.

I just don’t see how that helps their business at all. Does Llama 3 correlate with any sales? Maybe some momentary market gains as everyone was chasing AI but at some point the people smart enough to avoid built-here stuff will win. They probably are more focused on using AI instead of making it.

I'd always heard the Iron Laws of Beauraracy as:

(0) The only thing that matters is the budget.

(1) Beauraracies only grow, never shrink. You can only control the growth rate.

I worked at a company once who after several rounds of layoffs (and in the midst of a pretty pitiful product launch) sent out congratulatory emails about how exciting a time it was to work there and their main example was:

HR had completed many hours of meetings and listening sessions and had chosen to ... rename the HR department to some stupid new name.

It was like a joke for the movie Office Space, but too stupid to put in the film because nobody would believe it.

It’s amazing how process and internal operations will just eat up a company.

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