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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

Siri has had many, many, many engineers on it for a while.

I don't doubt it, but what were they all doing? The Metaverse had 10k employees on it for multiple years and seemed to almost be a standstill for long periods of time. What do these massive teams do all day?

Have meetings to figure out how to interact with the other 9990 employees. Then try and make the skeleton app left behind by the team of transient engineers who left after 18 months before moving on to their next gig work, before throwing it out and starting again from scratch.

Exactly. What Meta accomplished could have been done by a team of less than 40 mediocre engineers. It’s really just not even worth analyzing the failure. I am in complete awe when I think about how bad the execution of this whole thing was. It doesn’t even feel real.

Actually I would like see a post-mortem that showed where all the money actually went; they somehow spent ~85x of what RSI has raised for Star Citizen, and what they had to show for it was worse than some student projects I've seen.

Were they just piling up cash in the parking lot to set it on fire?

At least part of the funding went to research on hard science related to VR, such as tracking, lenses, CV, 3D mapping etc. And it paid off, IMO Meta has the best hardware and software foundation for delivering VR, and projects like Hyperscape (off-the-shelf, high-fidelity 3D mapping) are stunning.

Whether it was worth it is another question, but I would not be surprised is recycled to power a futuristic AI interface or something similar at some point.

The sad part about this fact is that the tech is mated to a completely rotten ecosystem. If it were sold off I'd be excited to try it.

Even within the XR industry, we had no clue where all that money went. During the metaverse debacle, the entire industry stagnated. Once metaverse failed, XR adjacent shops started to fail. There was no hardware or technique innovation shared with the rest of the industry, and at the time the technology was pretty well settled.

Since then we lost all the medium players and it's basically just Facebook, Valve, and Apple.

Big company syndrome has existed for a long time. It’s almost impossible to innovate or move fast with 8 levels of management and bloated codebases. That’s why startups exist.

I wish I could be assigned a project and make no progress in over a decade and still have a job.

Why would you want to be forgotten?

We will all be forgotten given enough timeframe.

"It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

Been there, done that, would not recommend. Working on such projects is incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.

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