205 karma · joined March 19, 2018
I suppose my larger question is if a private company is break-even/profitable would the investors/board ever ask management to make these cuts? If so, why?
I find it hard to accept both these statements "we continue to operate profitably" and "we still need to take more drastic measures for the health of our business". Why is the business health in question? The memo doesn't address it. I can only assume they are they projecting growth to go negative next year?
That said if we are talking about mid-level/L5 engineers... then yes, I agree. From a far, it seems very possible to coast for a full 4 year equity grant if you situate yourself correctly, and have a manager that lets it slide.
Clearly they aren’t doing enough of that if you can trigger this after waiting in line in a roller coaster park. I suspect they may end up geo-fencing known problematic areas as their algorithm doesn’t seem as great as they claim.
How do you primarily discover businesses and products?
The same thing can, and is happening server side. Every platform out there now has an event/conversion API [1]. If you are logging in to Uber Eats with a email/phone number you have used elsewhere then you are going to be tracked full-stop.
1. Here is TikTok's for example https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article?aid=10003669
It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.
1) Take PTO for that week. I would make it very clear to my team I will be completely offline (no checking email, or responding to Slack pings)
2) Give an early warning to family, friends, and significant other.
3) Plan out offline entertainment (books) and activities. If I was traveling I would print out any maps/tickets I need ahead of time
4) Relax and detox from my normally hyper-connected life
The two concerns that come to mind without deeply understanding the problem is that: 1) Measuring a qualitative, nebulous metric like "wellbeing" (which could mean different things for different people) is likely very hard to do right 2) In my experience, things tend to move fast, and experiments often don't run for _that_ long. I would hypothesize that Facebook's negative effects on users is a compounding effect that emerges over the scale of months. Sure, you can leave a small % of users in a holdout group of your experiment, but how often is that getting revisited?
I do like the idea that there are teams out there that are taking it as a goal to positively move these non-engagement metrics. If FB is going to correct course then steps like this are a big part of that.
My theory is that experiment dashboards, data visualizations, and "metrics" allow employees to almost fully disassociate from their product, and the end users. Engineers at large companies don't need to use, or even be familiar with the products they spend all day building. Yes, leadership and small pockets (researchers) can see the full picture. Everyone else stays willfully in the dark, doesn't look too closely, and clocks out at 5 happy because their dashboards look good.
He is comically arrogant. Not someone I'd like to hangout with, but an interesting (although dangerous) character for sure.
[1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/man-arrested-for-riding-in-back-of...