having been an early employee and founder of a few startups and then working at a few larger companies, most people who only ever worked at FAANG have no idea how much more productive tiny teams with ownership are.
AI is making everyone faster that I’ve seen. I’d say 30% of the tickets I’ve seen in the last month have been solved by just clicking the delegate to AI button
I'll be honest, just the idea of working there makes me feel like vomiting. For me, they are bizarrely evil. They're not evil like, "we're going to destroy our competition through anti competitive practices," (which they do), but "let's destroy a whole generation of minds."
And now with the glasses. I mean, jeeze. Can there be a stronger signal of not caring for others?
It's as if Meta sees people as cattle. Though I think a lot of techies see humans as cattle, truthfully.
What was your rationale?
I guess this question is out-of-the-blue, and I don't mean for you to justify your existence, but I've never understood why people choose to work for Meta.
Where livelihood is concerned, rational individuals with strong morals can do irrational, and immoral things (e.g., work at the Palantir's of the world).
TLDR: incentives don't just shape perception, they form it
Then he took a contracting gig for Meta. His rationalization was that the project was an ill-specified prototype that would never see the light of day - if they wanted to throw money at him for stuff like that, he would accept it.
That gig is finished, and he's now thoroughly disillusioned with working for big tech.
Both sell things that are bad for you, but that the consumer has complete control over whether or not to consume.
And not all of what Meta is selling is bad. There's a lot of information exchanged on Facebook, Instagram, etc. that are good for society. Like health/nutrition advice, etc.
Brooks law “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” is just the surface of some of the metaphorical language that has most stuck with me: large systems and teams quickening entanglement in tar pits through their struggle against coordination scaling pains, conceptual integrity in design akin to preserving architectural unity of Reims cathedral, roles and limitations attempting to expand surgical teams, etc.
Love a good metaphor, even when its foundation is overextended or out of date. Highly recommend.
Mostly it's because when we hit a point where one person would get stuck, the other usually knows what to do, and we sail through almost anything with little friction.
I don't get why people try to simplify - you're removing important details that determine performance and therefore output. This leads to false conclusions.
And to your point, a single person can easily get stuck, I know that applies to me many times.
I agree its in the 2-7 person range.
The challenge for those teams is distribution. They will crush at building, but I'm not sure how they can crack distribution. Some will, but maybe there is a way to help thousands of small teams distribute.
Big corporations are full with people who love to entertain 20+ people in video calls. 1-2 people speak, the other nod their heads while browsing Amazon.
I wouldn’t be sad if those jobs vanished.
All of these people will consequently be on the job market competing for your opportunities.
Yes you may feel superior to their capabilities - and may even be justified in your opinion (I know nothing about you beyond this comment)... But it'll still significantly impact your professional future if this actually happens. It would massively impact wages at the very least
Your viewpoint is incredibly short-sighted and not actually realizing the broad effect on the industry as a whole such a change would bring.
Every efficiency wave made life better for humans. Why should this one be different?
Assume many people lose their jobs. This in turn means companies will have higher margins. Higher margins attract more competition. More competition means lower margins since some will use the lower costs to offer lower prices.
Lower prices increase quality of life for everyone.
People who lost their job might be able to pick up doing something they actually enjoy…
It's more probable they lose everything before ending up with a worse job that pays less.
We just gloss over them and villify the ones who tried to do anything about it (the ones that weren't executed also died in poverty).
during the Industrial Revolution many artisan and skilled trades lost their livelihoods.
And yet, while many people did suffer serious short-term hardship and wage collapse, most did not simply remain in lifelong poverty, because over time industrialization created new types of employment and average wages eventually rose.
You don’t want to go back to before the Industrial Revolution. Do you?
It's not acceptable to attack a fellow community member like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for better than this:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
If you have a different understanding of the topic, share it, so all can benefit. That's what people do when they are sincere about contributing positively here.
If instead you insist on continuing to use abusive terms towards others here, we'll have to ban the account.
People always say: "Things ended up working out in the end"
Things only worked out in the sense that society carried on without all the people who lost their jobs.
The U.S. has recent examples of large scale job destruction.
Michigan: From 2000-2009. Massive job destruction. 330,000 auto workers in 2000. Down to 109,000 in 2009. Estimates are that 1/3-1/2 of all those affected never achieved equal/similar employment. That is, somewhere around ~70k-120k workers never earned as much as they previously did. Since this was msotly contained within one city (Detroit), it's pretty easy for the country to ignore it and go on with their lives.
(Detroit was in decline since the 50's really. 2000-2009 is just a particularly bad snapshot.)
Coal mining towns have experienced the same phenomenon but more gradually. The poverty left behind by the destruction of those jobs has never been addressed.
With AI, we are heading into a situation where potentially a much larger amount of people will be affected. So maybe that changes the calculus on the government stepping in and fixing the problem. But I wouldn't count on it.
Sources for Michigan numbers:
https://lehd.ces.census.gov/doc/workshop/2010/LEDautopres031...
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1205...
It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.
The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.
"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."
But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?
When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.
That's so out of touch.
First, you're conveniently ignoring the possibility that people actually like the job they are about to lose.
And believe it or not most people aren't toiling away at jobs they hate because it never occurred to them to do something they like more. They work jobs they dislike because it's the only choice they have because they have to pay their bills so they can survive and so that their dependents can have an acceptable life.