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Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.

I think it will take a very long time for leadership to feel the effects of what they've done.

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> I also work at Meta. The chaos and instability is awful. But I think they could fire pretty much everyone and the ads business would still continue to grow at nearly the same rate.

I spent 5 years at Facebook (2013-18), and I can guarantee you that if you fired the sales teams, revenue would take a pretty large hit.

More generally my friend who was there till last year (at a pretty senior manager level) said that once the AAP thing happened with Apple, it got really really nasty.

Like, every company tends towards the median of it's geographies over time but Facebook was a pretty special place to work at back in the day, and it looks like a lot of that has been lost now.

The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company

Interesting. Could you elaborate on any specifics for this claim?

996 culture, and Zuck has a particular fondness for China, Chinese people due to his wife.

ok so no evidence, just racist innuendo

the entre into the culture via his wife isn't anything to shake a stick at, but don't anthropomorphize the Zuck -- he's there because there are 1 billion people who already live in a surveillance state.

cheap programmers, long 996 hours, and access to the biggest market in the world.

> The median of its employees’ geographies is China. That’s how it got worse than your average maturing Bay Area company

I mean, this was true when I joined in 2013. One guy I worked with was the only non-Chinese person working with the targeting team. So I really don't think it can be reduced to such a simple explanation.

To be honest, Facebook acquired lots more US business culture, and that's (personally) where I think lots of the rot came from.

Some Facebook ad forums have gone from frustration to extreme hyperbole (e.g. death penalty for Meta execs). The "you're doing it wrong" replies have also shifted to more of "having the same problem". We would like to advertise again on Meta, but it looks quite scary to start again. We've even received two bills from Meta, though we have not advertised since 2020. Contested one and got a discount, the other was smaller and I didn't contest. Trying to disconnect everything currently.

I'm guessing you have 0 insight into the work that the ads, ranking, apps, and sales teams do to keep the gravy train flowing and even expanding 30% every year. If Meta fired even just half the ranking workers, the recommendation models (both ads and feeds) would very quickly become stale and start shedding many Fortune 500 companies worth of revenue.

When I read parent say "pretty much everyone", I assume the hypothetically not-cut people are still a thousands large skeleton crew keeping the cash cow fed and happy. What did you think they meant? 3 execs and an janitor?

I'm sure whatever your role at facebook is, it is very important. There are people who recognize how valuable your contributions were/are/will be. You probably won't find that validation on HN.

I'm guessing you have 0 insight into how monopolies work.

What monopoly do you suppose exists here?

…Or the ML team is just going to eat all those juicy screen recordings of those teams doing their jobs and can them in 12 months.

Your days are numbered, Zuck will get rid of you the second you’ve finished producing training data.

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