24 ms·

The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned

• snoopy_telex 4y ago
  Such a weird decision given the results they indicate. Was there any rational thought behind the layoffs beyond giving the metaverse more dollars?
  • treis 4y ago
    It wouldn't surprise me if someone glanced at the "Probabilistic Programming Team" name and said "I don't know what that is but I doubt we need it" and added them to the chopping block.
    • musk_micropenis 4y ago
      Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's no way that is how it went down.
      • alasdair_ 4y ago
        Facebook/Meta is a Zuckerburg-first organisation. Moreover, there are still a lot of decisions being made that are basically down to politics rather than engineering merit, or there were while I was there.
    • cableshaft 4y ago
      Meta hired the consultants from Office Space. "Probab...probabli... probably not going to work here anymore, anyway!" Scene from Youtube: https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g https://youtu.be/9ZUw8LYOQ-g
  • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    Yeah I overlapped with that team at FB, and they were freaking amazing. That being said, I suspect that it was a Thunderdome type situation where two teams enter, one team leaves. It doesn't end up reflecting the value delivered as much as the perceived value.
    • nemo44x 4y ago
      > perceived value. I think that’s the critical word here. Perception is reality when it comes to these things. I have no idea but I’d assume decision makers do not perceive enough future value coming from this team to make it worth keeping them on. They could be wrong but no one will ever really know.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Especially when the "perceived value" is avoiding a loss. If I come in and cut the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing. If I come in and fix a problem that was going to raise the bottom line by $15 million, I'm amazing for about five minutes and then forgotten.
  • newaccount2021 4y ago
  • apohn 4y ago
    It's possible to have teams that save millions of dollars a year and not be worth it to keep them. For the sake of argument, let's say a statistics team has 5 people. Cost of Employee at FB, including insurance, office space, 401K match, salary, bonuses = 250K/year (probably very conservative). Cost of Data and Software Infrastructure to support them (including people to respond to Infrastructure support tickets), let's just be very conservative = 100K/year. Cost of People Management overhead to support them. Includes salary of at least one manager, not to mention the time of a program manager, project manager, product manager, or whomever else. Let's just say 500K/year. Total = 1.85 Million/Year. Let's say this team of 5 people comes up models that save the company $4M a year. I once had a VP tell me that to justify a Data Scientist on the team, they needed to have a savings of 10X what they cost the company to have that person on staff. I know this logic and math seems very weak and hazy. Mapping costs is a strange thing. But this is how some decision makers think, and this is how people get cut.
    • drc500free 4y ago
      These employees are making a lot more than $250k just in base salary. Cost is probably closer to $1M each, all in. "A few million" in net cost savings isn't much for a team that probably costs $5M a year. It would definitely be better to find another internal home (assuming the team is portable without its mother team that got cut), but sometimes these decisions are made quickly without a lot of granularity. They aren't necessarily going to find one sub-team that saves only ~1x their cost in net profit and figure out how to transplant them to another org. He seems to have taken away the important lesson - if you're not primary you're in danger.
      • vikingerik 4y ago
        How in the world are you getting from $250k salary to $1M total cost? Stuff like office space and equipment/services, health insurance, HR overhead are constants per person, they don't scale up with salary. Are you assuming that some big bonus or grant package is necessary?
        • 4y ago
  • davewritescode 4y ago
    The author made it fairly clear why he thought they were let go; they weren't in the critical path anywhere. The only rationalization is that Wall Street is punishing meta for spending too much on R&D related to VR and cutting costs to the bone is one way to appease the market gods.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story.
    • csa 4y ago
      > I am familiar with this org from my time at Meta and I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. 2. Based on a few verifiable claims the op has made, I’m guessing you are missing or willfully ignoring some of the big picture details. I might be wrong about this, but I would certainly bet 100 push ups on it.
      • Jensson 4y ago
        > 1. No need to beat a man while he is down. A man who is still kicking isn't really down. No need to talk bad about a person who left silently, but anyone who kicks up a fuzz should expect people to respond if they disagree with the fuzz.
    • raydev 4y ago
      > I think the author paints a rosier picture of their achievements than I would. Let’s just say there is more than one side to the story. If this is all you are willing to say here, then there's no value to your contribution.
      • chis 4y ago
        There's something weird about cost-cutting metrics where they just aren't as impactful as they sound. FB has enough money floating around that many teams will write big systems inefficiently in the name of "moving fast" and then go back to optimize later. This is also a hack for performance reviews as you get to claim impact twice - once for making the thing, and again for saving XX million dollars (even though it's just cleaning up your own mess). Management is somewhat aware of this hack. I would say at FB it's shockingly easy to find a 10 million dollar efficiency win if you're looking for one, and I certainly shipped multiple things in that range. This wasn't really the probability team's charter though so they wouldn't get fully rewarded for it. The probability team had some genius engineers working hard on some very interesting long-term investments, but AFAIK they hadn't really shipped any of their core products so they were a good target for layoffs. I am shocked FB fired the engineers instead of just moving them around though...
  • lokar 4y ago
    Meta is never going to solve their apple problem by cutting costs. To get back to their old numbers they need users on a platform where they make the rules, not apple.
  • quasse 4y ago
    Based on input from my friends at Meta, this is a direct side effect of the way individual performance is quantified. Each person is required to "excel" along four axes, the two relevant ones for this story are likely "engineering excellence" and "impact" * "Impact" means you made KPIs go up. Specifically KPIs relating to getting user eyeballs onto content / ads. Reducing costs, designing good systems, reducing developer friction all do not count towards your impact. * "Engineering excellence" is where every other aspect of being a good developer is lumped in. Saved the org $10mm? Sorry, no impact for you, just a point in engineering excellence. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess "impact" is the weighted the highest when determining the value of an employee. I would guess Eric and his team fell afoul of this aspect of the internal political game at Meta.
• apohn 4y ago
  I work in the field of Data Science and one upsetting reality has started to sink into my mind over the last year. In a business there is top line and bottom line. There are a lot Statistics/ML/Data Science jobs that are about moving that bottom line. You build something to optimize something to reduce costs. The value provided by the bottom line people is less visible than the value of top line people. The easiest way to move the move the bottom line is by just getting rid of people. So when the axe falls the bottom line people get cut and it's hard to understand why. It's the same thing as people say about fires. When you put out a fire you are a hero. When you prevent the fire in the first place, everybody thinks it's business as usual and nobody understands why you are needed.
  • nightski 4y ago
    I think this is an insightful assessment. Not everyone in a company can be top line. But I also think there's a lot more opportunity in using statistics/ml/data science in the top line than most companies practice.
    • greesil 4y ago
      But that would lead to accountability...
      • kneebonian 4y ago
        This is the real problem. Visibility is to be abhorred at the top levels because viability brings accountability. How many Dilbert comics are there out there with the punchline being "I don't care what the real numbers are these are what I want the numbers to be" from the PHB There is a large swathe of middle and upper management that gets by due to continually making sure their actual impact is never measured, and they are only a "force multiplier." not that you should do away with middle management, but there are many in middle management who could be done away with, with very marginal loss.
        • angry_octet 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cleandreams 4y ago
  This is sad. I find probablistic programming languages very interesting. This probably means that many of the most useful ideas are disappeared. Does anyone know any relevant papers that describe what they did?
  • troelsSteegin 4y ago
    His post mentions "Bean Machine." https://ericlippert.com/2020/09/23/introducing-bean-machine/ https://ericlippert.com/2020/09/23/introducing-bean-machine/ https://beanmachine.org/ https://beanmachine.org/
• KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  Eric Lippert was my hero back when his blog was hosted on MSDN. Sad to see him go into retirement when he's at his prime. Hope he finds some new exciting project.
  • Arainach 4y ago
    In contrast, I'm sad to see so many people spend their prime sitting at a desk 8+ hours a day, ever day. Getting old is rough. At no point in your life will it be easier to scuba dive, take nature photography, travel, or whatever your passion is. Eric's done this for 25+ years and presumably has a good amount of savings; why not take advantage of other parts of life?
  • runevault 4y ago
    I didn't take it as retirement, I took it as a break to figure out what he wants to do next and relax. Maybe he just calls it a career, maybe not.
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    Given how many greatly appreciated his blog and have been upset at the last few years of Facebook-encouraged radio silence (including myself, Eric Lippert has been a blogger I've looked forward to posts from), even if he were to just fall into the exciting "old" project of blogging regularly again (as his post teases at the bottom), I think that would be a great use of "his prime" and I wouldn't exactly call that a retirement either. Our industry tends to forget, overlook, and/or look down on pedagogy (teaching), but I think it is worthy enough to celebrate a great teacher returning to teaching after lost years away. I hope, if Eric does need to return to laboring for someone else's company that he does so without restriction to his teaching efforts, as he has seemed to always enjoy that. But I think more fervently I hope that Eric finds out what he wants to do, and if maybe that is teaching that is high calling, often underserved in this industry, and that he can find a fulfilling way to do that on his own terms as his own vocation. That may look like a retirement to a lot of us on HN, but I think there are few things more worthy to be doing with your time than a "hobby" that has clearly already educated a lot of people in threads around here.
    • 4y ago
• musk_micropenis 4y ago
  Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack. Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" content that will make the front page of HN, but was a great pipeline of information for a junior .NET developer hungry to learn. [1] https://ericlippert.com/2009/08/ https://ericlippert.com/2009/08/
  • ericlippert 4y ago
    Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
    • techterrier 4y ago
      ditto, thanks Eric!
    • mattchamb 4y ago
      I also want to say thanks for exactly the same reasons expressed above. I learnt a lot from your writing when I was a junior developer just starting out in 2010. You shared a lot of insights that made the internals of the systems we build upon much more accessible to me and helped shape my relationship with all programming languages I have used since then.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • wofo 4y ago
      Just wanted to say thanks too. Back when I was at the university, your blog helped me discover programming languages are something you can actually design. I even ended up contributing to the Rust compiler, which was an incredible learning experience. Thanks for the inspiration!
    • marcusf 4y ago
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• Quarrelsome 4y ago
  Always a big fan of Eric's blog so its sad to hear this story. I feel like MBAs need to do a better job at learning about selective truths. Far too many snap decisions made based on seeing the tip of a dataset in some corporate spreadsheet and assuming clarity in the data. In this case seeing the cost of this team and not seeing the saving its was generating for other teams. Or maybe it was just political as Zuckerburg slid the hatchet away from the Metaverse and onto things of (arguably) greater value.
• i_like_apis 4y ago
• UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > Most of my team has found other positions and I am hopeful that the rest will soon. Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway) > But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again. I feel this. I'm about to finish up a contract working on a product that's about to be killed (before ever really seeing the light of day) and it's kind of hard not to feel like Sisyphus at this point. Not really interested in looking for something else for a while.
  • dirheist 4y ago
    It's the way the cookie crumbles.
  • iLoveOncall 4y ago
    > Wow, I guess I would've figured that it would take people with this kind of background a while to find another gig (working on similar things) in the current environment. So maybe things aren't as bad as they seem? (yet, anyway) Finding another position doesn't mean finding another equivalent position. I work for a FAANG right now. If I was getting laid off I would get the first job I could and then keep applying to other companies that are more suitable to the level that I had before.
• georgeburdell 4y ago
  I’m probably not as talented as the author, but I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used. I have been working for ten years post-PhD and every single product I’ve ever worked on has been canned, sometimes very circuitously via acquisitions. My work is trade secret so I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. I have zero outwardly observable accomplishments. My resume and LinkedIn rolodex are the only testaments that I’ve done anything at all. And yet I don’t see myself retiring once I have enough money in a few years
  • 300bps 4y ago
    I can’t relate to this feeling of giving up because some work won’t be used Everyone is motivated by different things. My strongest motivation and satisfaction comes from implementing technology to make drastic and lasting positive change in the work done by other people. Agile development methodology with iterative development and meaningful change every couple weeks suits me very well. What you described as your work would not be fulfilling to me.
  • colineartheta 4y ago
    How were you able to acquire a PhD without a publication?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • daveguy 4y ago
      > post-PhD
      • colineartheta 4y ago
        > I’ve never filed a patent, written a publication, nor given a talk. When written in a single sentence, it implies that you have never written a publication, post- or pre- or during- a PhD. I will rephrase my question: have you, or have you not, written a publication?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kikokikokiko 4y ago
  "Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”." This is so true. Facebook must die.
  • echelon 4y ago
    I'm not a fan of Meta, but they're doing the cutting edge research in VR/AR that nobody else is [1]. Hardware, algorithms, attention to details like blend key-based lip syncing, markerless tracking algorithms, low latency posture correction, mocap compression and keyframing, fresnel optics, thin layer physics... They're going to own this space for decades to come, and everyone will license from them. It may seem impractical, but five years ago so did AI/ML. Meta is tackling all of the constituent pieces before they draw them together. [1] Apple may be a major player in this space, but their rumored efforts are still behind closed doors. Meta understands that Apple and Google won the smartphone era of tech, which is why they want to control their hardware destiny in AR/VR. Valve simply isn't investing as much, and they'll fall behind.
    • stonogo 4y ago
      The detail they have failed to pay attention to is "what the hell good does this do anyone." Still.
    • jimbob45 4y ago
      I don't think anyone can or will disagree with you. What Facebook is doing with VR/AR is technologically beyond anything anyone else is doing. We just don't think the ultimate application of all that research is going to be the Metaverse. Pretending that the ultimate goal is the Metaverse is masking the fact that this VR/AR research is all exploratory. We can assume Wall Street would otherwise heavily punish Facebook for investing blindly so heavily in R&D. The willingness of Facebook to mask the Metaverse as something other than R&D and not Eric's team, which allegedly paid for itself, is what is so baffling.
    • 4y ago
• wanderingstan 4y ago
  By writing this post, does the author violate the non-disparagement clause of any severance agreement? Or perhaps they are set financially so can turn down the severance?
  • grepfru_it 4y ago
    Or, more likely, op didn't get severance
• kyleyeats 4y ago
  So which one was it? Was the team very important or is the work being thrown away?
  • trenchgun 4y ago
    Facebook has become a clown car company.
  • raydev 4y ago
    Both.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I wish Mr. Lippert and his team well. > But after >26 years of thinking about programming languages for corporations, and the last three years of my work being thrown away, I need a good long corporate detox before I go looking again. OMG, can I relate to this. The chances are good, that, if he can support himself; even if not at oriental levels of luxury, he will not want to return. That has been my experience. Come on in, Eric, the water's fine...
  • sefrost 4y ago
    What is the water?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      The Write the Code You Want, Without Middle Managers and Clueless Coworkers Interfering Sea.
• zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  3 years of work being thrown away is not a big deal. Imagine a retail employee complaining about how nobody cares what they did the past 3 years. I don't see a difference.
  • fred_is_fred 4y ago
    Presumably the retail employee does not see this as a passion or life calling and rather only a paycheck. From the look of his writing he was pretty passionate about this.
  • cpsns 4y ago
    Nah, this is a huge deal for some of us. Many of us put in years of work for something to be thrown away without a second thought, all of our time and effort for nothing. I am someone who wants to build long lasting, useful systems. When my last employer was acquired and killed it really, really upset me to see all my hard work and my coworkers hard work destroyed. I’d go so far as to say it seriously affected my view of the industry in a negative way and permanently hurt my career satisfaction.
    • AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      Of course it's a huge deal. What they're saying is that it happens. Constantly. Sometimes I even ponder if my decades-worth experience is not basically because I'm writing the same program over and over again, just for different companies...
      • cpsns 4y ago
        > What they're saying is that it happens. Constantly. And I’m personally not okay with that when it comes to the work I do. It was a personally very eye opening experience to drive around with a guy who built homes. He'd point out every house he worked on, even ones 30 years ago and you could tell he was really, truly proud of his work and showing it off. I realised if someone asked to see my past work it simply doesn't exist in any meaningful capacity. I take pride in my work, but it doesn't exist long term like his does. I want that same kind of satisfaction he had, but there's no way for me to get it. His work lasts a lifetime and makes the lives of people better, mine lasts a few years at best and often doesn't.
• btown 4y ago
  This is really sad to hear. Probabilistic programming languages are IMO one of the coolest things ever: if you have an idea about how your data could be plausibly generated given some massive amount of hidden state and inputs, and an arbitrarily complex rendering function, you just write the rendering function and it determines probability distributions over the state variables that most likely map your inputs to your output. For instance, say you want to be able to vectorize logos, e.g. find the SVG representation of a raster image. If you wanted to link a text model of the characters that make up SVG files to their raster representation via a modern deep learning system, you'd need a heck of a lot of data and training time. But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a chain of conditional probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with significantly less training time and data. This is where the massive cost savings come in. You get a forward-deployed engineer who knows this stuff and can dig into the compiler for features not yet implemented, they can work magic on any domain problem. I would have loved to have seen the spinoff they mentioned. Sigh. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12774459 is an old comment that goes more into detail on the tech and has a number of links! EDIT: see also https://beanmachine.org/ https://beanmachine.org/ which is OP's team's work
  • Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    > But if you could instead just write a (subset of a) SVG parser and renderer as simply as you'd write it in any other programming language, but where the compiler instead creates a chain of conditional probability distributions that can be traversed with gradient descent, you can reach a highly reliable predictive model with significantly less training time and data. It's a balance between engineer time (headcount costs) and training time/costs (infra costs.) Usually engineer time is more valuable than training costs. Embedding engineers into teams and building cost models is one of those cases where probabilistic programming makes a lot more sense than a DL approach, but most situations favor the economics of a DL approach.
• Satam 4y ago
  Author mentions that his team's work saved "millions" of dollars for Meta every year - let's assume that's $10 million. Meta's operating expenses are over $80 billion annually. That's barely one hundredth of a percent in savings for Meta. I'm sure they were doing interesting work otherwise, but it make sense why the team would be considered for cuts if there weren't any breakthroughs on the horizon.
  • sp332 4y ago
    If the team is costing less than $10 million/year, it still makes less sense to let them go.
    • time_to_smile 4y ago
      It's not hard for a team at Meta to easily cost more than $10 million/year. Average TC for each IC could reasonably have been in the 500k/year area and that doesn't count other benefits/infra overhead. A few very senior people on the team could easily have pushed the average TC up quite a bit. So if the team was around 20 people that already doesn't make sense.
      • function_seven 4y ago
        This post notes that the savings were net of cost. Maybe Eric is wrong, but assuming his math checks out, cutting a team that delivers net savings can’t be justified on the basis of cost-cutting.
        • MengerSponge 4y ago
          It only makes sense if you can make it up in volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg&t=53s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodqIPMbyUg&t=53s
        • beachy 4y ago
          > a team that delivers net savings can’t be justified on the basis of cost-cutting ..in theory not, but in practice cost-cutting is often less a scientific, data-based project and more a cataclysmic purgative process where factors such as speed of execution are important. e.g. Elon has certainly lost many, many great people and teams who were net positive for Twitter's bottom line in his recent purges. But he probably thinks there is huge value in acting quickly and putting the aggressive cutting behind him and inserting his "hardcore" team. There would be a real cost to the Twitter shareholders in doing a slow and scientific analysis of who to cut - there's a case to be made that a ruthless tearing off of the bandaid would more quickly lead to a profitable place, even if there is collateral damage on the way.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  What costs were being saved? I am assuming hardware/cloud type costs? Or was it making people more efficient, working on the right stuff instead of the wrong stuff? It sounds like they were working with a gun to their head, with the short lived projects run in a survival of the fittest short-lifecycle way. Kind of sounds exhausting! I had a funny thought: The best team to be on during cutbacks is the probabilistic programming team that optimizes who to cut.
• stuff4ben 4y ago
  He's not wrong about Meta's VR foray. VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary, Zuck's vision for it in our daily lives is not.
  • ska 4y ago
    > VR as a technology is cool and revolutionary That's a funny way of saying decades old at this point and still not ready for prime time.
    • zaroth 4y ago
      The current state of VR is not decades old. It’s like saying automobiles are decades old so EVs are not exciting.
      • ska 4y ago
        The current state of anything under active development isn't old, sort of by definition. I take your point, but in my opinion nothing currently happening in the space gets remotely close to "revolutionary" , and maybe not even "cool" for some peoples value of "cool". It's more the same-old-same-old, chipping away at the broad array of problems. So if you really want to us an automobile analogy, it's not like it's IC vs EV. It's more like steam powered vs. early electric (they predated IC's!) and nobody has come up with an IC yet. Or the right road system to use them on.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        EVs are cool but for the vast majority of people they're just cars that do car things slightly differently. And VR has been in some form of "cool to play with for awhile and then left on the shelf" for decades now. It gets better each time, but it's still just a plaything.
      • acdha 4y ago
        Older automobiles were still useful, though. The Model T transformed rural America and many cities. VR has been portrayed as close to that point many times for decades but has flopped hard at finding anything many people want to do. It was primitive back then, but so were video games in the 1970s and they still sold a ton of systems. Maybe there’s an inflection point where things will flip but it seems hard to believe that we’re still in the pre-Pong era of something which will become huge.
• moloch-hai 4y ago
  To Management, you are either in a Cost Center or a Profit Center. In all advertising-supported monstrosities, only adtech and sales are profit centers. Literally everything else is a cost center. Everyone at Facebook and Google is in a Cost Center if they are not directly involved in landing advertising accounts, presenting ads, or billing for ads. Never look for work in a Cost Center. Come hard times, Cost Centers are cut first. Not because it is good for the business, but because cutting payroll impresses Wall Street, inflating stock valuation. To Wall Street, layoffs mean you are serious.
  • gknoy 4y ago
    > billing for ads is in a Cost Center. I've only briefly worked closely with a billing team, but my impression was always that billing is seen less as a cost center, but more as a critical "without this team we get no money" team, which seems closer to a profit center. I'm not sure how far up the management team that perspective stays true, though.
    • trenchgun 4y ago
      Full quote: "Everyone at Facebook and Google not directly involved in landing advertising accounts, presenting ads, or billing for ads is in a Cost Center." You read it wrong.
      • moloch-hai 4y ago
        I have patched it to be harder to mis-read.
• woah 4y ago
  > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. Sounds like this guy was totally opposed to the company's new focus, to the point of describing it in derisive terms. Seems like letting him go was the best thing for everyone, and maybe it was judged that his team wouldn't be able to continue successfully without him.
  • blitz_skull 4y ago
    Just staring at facts on paper... It sounds like Facebook has no interest in cutting costs since they cut a team that reduced the cost of every single team they interacted with. By a large multiple of whatever it cost to have that team employed. Regardless of your take on the "Metaverse", it's clear that this was in fact, not the best thing for everyone.
    • woah 4y ago
      How much money did it save? How much was this in savings after paying their salaries? Article doesn't say. If they were breaking even, or barely "profitable", then maybe it wasn't worth the management overhead, especially with a team lead vehemently opposed to the company's focus.
      • ericlippert 4y ago
        We were a team of mathematicians focused on cost savings and improving decisions. We know how to subtract costs from benefits. I was not the lead. A team focused on helping the company make better decisions is all the more necessary when attempting a pivot.
  • mikebenfield 4y ago
    I have no data to back this up, but if I had to bet I’d guess that the large majority of Meta employees - along with shareholders - are also strongly opposed to the company’s new focus.
• rob74 4y ago
  > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta... But yeah, I can imagine how the decisions on layoffs usually go: "what are those guys doing? Probabilistic something or other?! No idea what that's good for! And wow, look how much they get paid!"
  • dnissley 4y ago
    > You can somehow feel that he has been dying to say this for years, but couldn't while he was still working for Meta... It's a pretty common sentiment in my experience here, de rigueur even. Expressing it in the way he does here is definitely frowned upon though -- one of the most interesting cultural traits I've noticed that Meta has fostered is an awareness and avoidance of cynicism. When people comment internally and there is even a hint of cynicism in what they say, they are frequently called out on it. Never seen such a thing ever before in my life. For me it's refreshing, but I imagine for some, depending on the topic and how negatively they feel about it, it could lead them to spiral and exit.
    • maxbond 4y ago
      You say "cynicism", I say "acknowledging nudity".
    • zwkrt 4y ago
      Too much cyncism in any person or organization will lead to gridlock and/or burnout as new ideas are immediately scrapped and morale tanks. Just ask anyone who has worked for 10+ years in government. However, for a private company that kind of critical thinking is often important to make sure that all the lemmings don't run off the cliff. It is interesting to me that cynicism is stifled at a cultural level at Meta. It is some kind of low-level cult like behavior, to stifle internal criticism. It must also breed a kind of in-group/out-group mentality, as I don't know a single person IRL who has a positive view of the company, its products, or the metaverse.
• tristor 4y ago
  I feel this so much. To my deep dismay the work I’m least proud of in my career somehow endures in production and the things I’m most proud of building were acquired and chopped into parts or killed off. As a PM luckily everything I’ve launched still exists, so far.
• squokko 4y ago
  > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. The hedge fund guys would say the same about your team. I know you are emotional but this is uncalled for.
  • svnt 4y ago
    Are… are you attempting to shame-discipline him? You non-seq a hedge fund and then appeal to morality? What a strange little comment.
• aaron695 4y ago
• kalkin 4y ago
  "Everyone was kind, smart, dedicated, thoughtful, generous with their time and knowledge, and a genuine pleasure to work with." I know this is what everyone says after leaving a company if they don't want to burn bridges, and I bet it's even fairly true to Eric's experience. I'm also entirely sympathetic to his frustration with both the immediate experience of being laid off for any reason and the broader large-organization irrationality about costs. And yet. We're talking about Facebook, a company whose impact on the world is very hard to see as net positive, from teen mental health to national politics. I just really wish it was the industry norm that people who are, in local ways, genuinely thoughtful and kind, and have many employment options, would also think seriously about what their work is ultimately building.
  • tasuki 4y ago
    I use Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and sometimes people organize events and they invite me on Facebook and it works and makes my life a tiny bit better.
    • autotune 4y ago
      Then you submit a post on FB that none of these old friends or acquaintances like or comment on and wonder why you suddenly feel like a leper afterward.
      • tasuki 4y ago
        That hasn't been my experience.
    • kalkin 4y ago
      I used to try to do that and yet I found it was net negative for my mental health in practice, with infinite scroll etc.
      • tasuki 4y ago
        I usually go to the chat directly. Having missed several event invitations in the past two months, I now try to check the notifications every couple of days. Infinite scroll perhaps twice a month and ruthlessly block whatever I don't enjoy.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  To touch lightly on the title: A graphics artist on a Corridor Crew YouTube video recently said that you must love the day-to-day of your job because a lot of what you make will never see the light of day. I think this is especially true when you are not the owner of your work's fate. This is not a criticism or judgment on Eric's feelings towards his work being abandoned. He seems like someone who has loved every minute of problem solving. And it doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel feelings when your work gets tossed. But it's something that resonated with me, and it might resonate with you too.
• eevilspock 4y ago
  > Apologies that this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter. A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal's famous line (that is commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
  • ericlippert 4y ago
    Not the first time I've made that joke, but it's none the worse for having been used before.
• UweSchmidt 4y ago
  Damn, even the top performers are jaded and checking out. Someone has to keep believing, no?
• dathinab 4y ago
  As someone not in the topic the metaverse seems even worse, i.e. it looks like Facebook spent 20 Billion and didn't manage to add anything to VR other small companies haven't added years earlier... I'm probably missing something, but it honestly looks worse then burning money, it looks like extremely inefficiently burning money. Anyway sounded like an interesting work before the team was dissolved.
  • jfengel 4y ago
    In theory you're missing the network effect of everyone already being on Facebook. So they can quickly spin up a vast virtual world with all the people you know already in it. In practice, it hasn't happened, and nobody seems excited to do it. Whatever benefits they hope to get from the network effect seem unlikely thus far.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      Facebook's popular and people use it a lot because you can use it on the shitter or in line at the grocery store or for five minutes in bed when you briefly wake up at 3AM or while feeding the baby or while not paying attention in a boring meeting or under your desk while you're pretending to work or on the subway. No metaverse will be anywhere near as popular as Facebook proper if it can't match that feature. Even one that's built on Facebook. This entire sector is software R&D that's being done in anticipation of eventually hardware breakthroughs that'll make it not-suck—so right now, it kinda sucks, and there's no getting around that until the hardware gets a lot nicer.
    • nottorp 4y ago
      In practice VR is still at the early adopter stage and techies who would buy into it are more aware of what a Facebook account requirement means.
    • dathinab 4y ago
      Through in my experience no one but old people is actually on facebook. (EDIT: In the country where I live.) A lot of middle aged people might still have an account because old people and aged contacts but don't really want to use it. And this scenario still requires most people to have a VR headset which doesn't make them sick and is comfortable and easy to use, which is not just technically still a bit off AFIK but also has tricky problems. Like a lot of people have glasses, including many "non trivial" ones and just the act of needing to replace glasses with contact lenses makes it "annoying" and that is iff you can have contact lenses. Then it needs to be lightweight, but also fast and to be charged but can't have a large battery and a cable is also annoying and needs high enough frequency/resolution but also cheap and must not get too war either. Also while it needs to be cheap it also must fit all kinds of head sizes and form very well so you kinda both need and must not have a one size fits all solution. And even if you add all of that up it still holds that for a lot of tasks text/images is still best. I thats why most websites and apps are still "2d" today it's just more practical. So it's a bit like video calls, but needing a specialized device instead of just your phone/laptop/AIO PC. So for it to work IMHO you would need to do something like replacing phones with hybrid VR/AR glasses which are technological a jump comparable to the last 10(or more) years. And have hand tracking in the glasses as an camera. And convince most people to run around with glasses all the time (good luck). And convince people that using a facbook controlled device with camera and mic in nearly every part of their live both offline and online. So it's possible, but especially for Facebook it's hard and I think they went all-in ~5-10 years to early. IMHO Apple has much better chances to take over that space, and if they do it right not limited to Apple users.
• Kiro 4y ago
  > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. I'm sure no-one here likes the idea of the Metaverse but from Meta's perspective I definitely think it's the correct bet. This doesn't make it less dystopian but that's exactly the point. If they can pull it off they win. Great video explaining it way better then I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkhjL3WvWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqkhjL3WvWQ
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    I haven't watched this particular video yet, but a similar explainer video that I came across this week has me feeling a lot like "Those who have forgotten Second Life seemed doomed to repeat it (badly)". I had a bit of a rough moment realizing that statistically most of the engineers at Meta are probably too young to remember Second Life. (And some of the ones that are old enough like Mark Zuckerberg were too busy in other parts of the internet to have learned the realest lessons, which were not technical but sociopolitical.)
    • mrlatinos 4y ago
      The thing is, they won't pull it off, and they won't win. No one under the age of 30 wants to use a product with Zuck's face on it (or in it).
    • rrishi 4y ago
      I wasn't exposed to Second Life. But I do feel that the alternative life within a metaverse isn't going to appeal to a lot of people. What kind of socio-political lessons did you draw from Second Life? Would love to hear your take.
      • WorldMaker 4y ago
        Second Life briefly had That Moment where it looked like it won: it had a metaverse that everyone wanted to buy virtual real estate in. There were virtual malls full of shopping with Real Brands. There were virtual office parks for Real Companies to get Real Work Done (Virtually). There virtual campuses for Real Universities with Real Lectures from Actual Professors. Nearly every avatar had Legs! (I can't believe that needs to be stated in 2022, thanks Zuckerberg.) There were small businesses, even, little mom and pop artists generating avatar clothing and customizations and hoping to make a buck from all these tourists that were around Really Shopping or Really Learning or what have you. You know what else was Real that people brought with them to Second Life? Real Crimes. There were scams (not all those mom and pop artists were on the up and up). There were attacks (give coders enough scripting tools and they will code all sorts of terrible things). There was sex and porn so there was also sex scandals and sex workers and prostitution rings and allegations of sex trafficking. (Relatedly to that, EA sometimes doesn't want you to know that Sims Online ever existed because of events that happened in only a few days of a Beta test that spooked EA so terribly they stopped publishing MMOs for like a half-decade. Semi-relatedly to that, there's a recent sex trafficking lawsuit against Roblux, with Discord co-listed, that was recent-ish news that made it to the front page of HN. History repeats itself and Meta/Facebook should be listening.) Eventually all the Real Brands and Real Companies and Real Universities and all that got bored and left. (Even despite the luxuries of avatars with working Legs! Lol, Zuckerberg.) Most of what was left was the furries and the crimes. (To be fair, I think Second Life being mostly sex-positive was a good thing and the "Furries mostly" era of Second Life produced some fun content and wild stories, much of it positive in its way. The criticism is not at all that Second Life tolerated sex and porn; crimes happen all the same without sex involved, I certainly gave other examples. It doesn't help that crimes that the FBI likes to investigate tend to involve sex, but that's a different matter.) I think Meta/Facebook are still in the phase of pretending like building any sort of Metaverse is just inherently good and separate from real world problems or concerns. I think Meta/Facebook are still publicly acting like a Metaverse would somehow "save" them from the real world problems of running Facebook and Instagram (and their various existing issues with world crimes). I think they have already forgot some of the lessons from Second Life that if you invite Real People into your virtual world you still get Real People with Real Problems including Real Crimes. It's in no way different in a 3D AR/VR (Now with Legs!) space, than an early Oughts 3D space (Always with Legs!). It's very much the same. (ETA: The technology may feel different, to some. But it turns out: the people are kind of the same. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Especially not anyone who has seen, I don't know, Facebook.)
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  I wonder if this is why there's been a spate of open source announcements from Meta. Might just me being sensitive to it, but I can imagine worried team members wanting to give the world some of their work, and/or want to pick up where they left off in another company.
• defen 4y ago
  > Then said Jesus unto him, "Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword". I'm a big fan of Eric Lippert's work, but this blog post comes across as whiny and evinces a completely unwarranted sense of entitlement. This is a person who voluntarily chose to get paid (I can only assume) a very large amount of money to work on something that he found to be exciting and fulfilling. The only catch: it all belonged to Mark Zuckerberg. Why does Mark Zuckerberg owe him an explanation for why his services are no longer needed? Why does he think that the decision process should be visible and rational (cost vs benefit) to him? It suggests that he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Instead of being "vexed" that he was fired instead of the people building toys for Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps he should be thankful for the two years he spent working on the PPL team.
  • aerovistae 4y ago
    This comment conveys to me Asperger's levels of superrational thinking and lack of empathy. "How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process? How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else? I simply don't understand, on paper it is the logical outcome." Okay spock.
    • defen 4y ago
      He can feel however he likes; nothing compelled him to post it publicly for all the world to read and comment. > How could someone be resentful at losing their job to a nonsensical decision making process? How could someone possibly be frustrated to be shown zero gratitude for their very profitable work for someone else? He chose to work for Mark Zuckerberg. He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer. Perhaps you can understand why I don't have a lot of empathy.
      • jbullock35 4y ago
        > He wishes he could continue working for Mark Zuckerberg, in order to make Mark Zuckerberg richer. He never said that this is why he wants to continue working at Meta. People do have other reasons for wanting to work there.
• kepler1 4y ago
  Lucky you -- I don't get more than a week before I'm told my work is useful, but we've moved on to other things and won't need it any more!
• samiam_iam 4y ago
  Boohoo
  • dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
• s3000 4y ago
  > We were almost ready to be spun off. What was missing? If the team is that good, why don't they believe in themselves and offer their services?
• dibt 4y ago
  > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. I could say the same thing about TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, WeChat, etc. I'm not bullish on the metaverse. I live simply, with less tech than the average person. I don't expect to participate. With that said, I don't doubt it will be more successful than what graybeards expect. More than what Meta is dumping into it? No idea. There will be things in the future you will not want to participate in. That's ok.
  • baobabKoodaa 4y ago
    There's a difference between you personally not using WhatsApp and you saying "no one wants to use WhatsApp".
• Andy_G11 4y ago
• geraldwhen 4y ago
  Anyone who currently works in a cost center: leave before it’s too late. If you don’t directly produce revenue, you will get laid off. Not if, but when.
  • dohdhdaa 4y ago
    “Too late” in this case is being paid not to work for 4+ months.
• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  Seems like this man drank the kool-aid - sad! Many such cases. I hope he and others learn a lesson from this: you are not your job. Don't live to work, work to live. Do not attempt to derive meaning from your job. Do not let your passions be occupied by your job. Do not suffer your job. Suffer your friends. Suffer your family. Suffer your children. Suffer art. Suffer beauty. Suffer truth. Suffer justice. But do not suffer your job. They're all bullshit [1]. Do not suffer bullshit. [1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/1030241785 https://www.worldcat.org/title/1030241785
• jrnichols 4y ago
  > Speaking of cutting costs, the company is still pouring multiple billions of dollars into vaporware called “the metaverse”. News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles to spend any time in a digital heaven where the role of God is played by Mark Zuckerberg and you can do anything you can imagine, including “work” and “shop”. This ties in with my earlier thought about why Zuckerberg is upset with Apple. He's not standing up for any little guy, he's upset that he's not getting his way with iOS devices anymore and that nobody cares about "the metaverse." It's essentially a tantrum.
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  I don't know who needs to hear this, but the Metaverse is literally just The Sims with a helmet. The only reason FB cares about it is it's a place to sell advertising. But nobody wants it. We wanted Facebook because we could be voyeurs, shout into the void, and receive little hits of dopamine from "likes". But who wants to be a voyeur of virtual people? People who play The Sims, that's who. I don't think The Sims will make billions of dollars, with or without a helmet.
  • hnick 4y ago
    I've heard people make the case that MMOs were VR and Social Media combined, before Facebook etc existed. And I think it's true. I would log on to chat (FFXI in my case) with friends. We would occupy a shared space. People still run nightclubs and do other roleplaying in virtual spaces in these games. The only thing really missing is the helmet but as far as occupying a virtual world, it's closer than anything else has been in terms of providing what people actually want.
• geph2021 4y ago
  we were regularly putting models into production that on net reduced costs by millions of dollars a year over the cost of the work. ... The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure It's comical, I have to chuckle, even though deeper down I'm truly saddened. The short-sightedness and lack of understanding of upper management seems inevitable as companies grow.
  • 8bitsrule 4y ago
    Seems to me that a product/knowledge that can save that kind of money ought to be easily portable to places where it will be properly valued.
    • geph2021 4y ago
      It sounds like that was perhaps the path: We were almost ready to be spun off. Turning an internal tool (or what sounded like a customized process, for each internal team/group) into a portable product fit for a broader market can take considerable effort.
• shirononon_ 4y ago
  I consider the author of the article to be “relatively new to software development” if this is their first time to have had an Enterprise company abandon years of their work and have their repo archived and/or deleted.
• yafbum 4y ago
  > We foolishly thought that we would naturally be protected from any layoffs, being a team that reduced costs of any team we partnered with. In retrospect, that was a little naive. A team that reduces costs of other teams is not on anyone’s critical path. > The whole Probability division was laid off as a cost-cutting measure. I have no explanation for how this was justified and I note that if the company were actually serious about cost-cutting, they would have grown our team, not destroyed it. It does sound naive, but it's also possible that this is plain wrong. Just because your team results in some cost cutting does not mean that your team is generating enough cost savings to justify 50 headcount. I'm sure there are teams at meta with very large / existential cost cutting needs, and it doesn't sound like any one of them was relying critically on your team for enough of their cost cutting objectives for them to make a case to keep this investment going.
  • ericlippert 4y ago
    You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to different teams or companies? This is the very definition of penny-wise and pound-foolish.
    • yafbum 4y ago
      What are they going to do... make poorer decisions? How much poorer? Will it matter? When a company undertakes cost cutting as a strategic priority, it is usually that they have made overeager long-term bets that turn out to be unsustainable and need correcting. It tends to be short termist. Real estate analogy. Say I bought a house on a mortgage and I'm fixing it up to resell it. I'm hiring a roofer to fix leaks. That's important long term because it'll save on future repair costs. He gets to work. Then I suddenly have a need for funds for something urgent and unrelated, so I need to make a choice: do I stop paying the mortgage, or the roofer? Probably the roofer. It's still dumb not to fix the leaks. But it's more dumb to get the house repossessed. When you hit the bottom of your capital reserve (for some definition of "bottom" - Meta is obviously not bankrupt but it cares about its stock price), you end up having to make choices that are really sucky. "Should I cut off your arm, or your leg, sir?" type of choices. Yet they must be made or you circle the drain for a long time before ending up like Yahoo.
• justhere4beer 4y ago
  I spent 15 years helping to build something great, only to be subjected to abusive gaslighting the last 3-5 years. When I quit, I was called irrational and emotional. Same year, 15 people followed my exodus. I should have left years earlier, but money was good, and change was hard to think about. Fluffy handcuffs. 2 years later, Org still survives. Best guess is they are in rebuilding stage. No love lost. Take your time to recharge the batteries.
• shahbaby 4y ago
  I wonder if the outcome would have been different if instead of "Probablistic Programming Languages" the team was called something like "Applied Cost Saving Research".
• aboodman 4y ago
  I am late to this thread, and I don't know if you'll see this eric, but you've been a sort of hero of mine for a long time and I'm sad both on your behalf and the worlds' that your work is being abandoned. I followed your blog waaay back in msft days, when I was just getting started, and you were a small part of why I applied to Microsoft, got into .net, and became the programmer I am. You've build a large number of wonderful things and I wish we could have all experienced the latest. I hope after a long rest you find your way back to software and perhaps share what you were working on in some other way.
  • ericlippert 4y ago
    Thank you, that's kind of you to say!
• chrischen 4y ago
  Honestly between pouring money into competing with TikTok in an AI arms race to suck everyone’s attention into oblivion and the meta verse, I’d prefer them to explore VR and AR. There’s definitely something in the AR metaverse if the technology can get there, and I think that’s where they seem to be headed.
• pronlover723 4y ago
  > News flash: no one wants to wear VR goggles This to me sounds similar to "I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers" (https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90-49e3-895d-4c54bb49ecce https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=164a442a-1b90...). That was wrong or "people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours" (https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-times-story-that-predicted-the-quick-demise-of-the-laptop https://qz.com/593329/choice-quotes-from-a-1985-new-york-tim...). Looking around the beach and especially the train, everyone is lugging around a portable computer (phone) I don't think today's VR/AR is "the thing" but I do think, in the same way people thought Palm Pilots and Windows CE devices were a small niche market for ~15 years and it wasn't until iPhone that the masses finally understood what a pocket device was good for VR/AR will eventually reach a version/device that will be more compelling than smartphones and similarly blow up It might take until they get to a small dot like "Striking Vipers" but I'm glad at least one company, if not 5, are pushing forward.
  • cvz 4y ago
    The full line from the article appears to be more along the lines of (and I am paraphrasing here) "no one wants Mark Zuckerberg's cynical and unimaginative interpretation of VR" and not a dismissal of the technology itself.
  • walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    Sounds just as much like what critics said about the Segway, which was supposed to revolutionize pedestrian movement, and which ... well, let's just say the critics turned out to be right. Which is to say, I don't think you can tell much about the stickiness of a technology from what it's proponents say for or against it. History is full of well-hyped failures, and not a few overperforming fringe ideas.
    • andrewflnr 4y ago
      Yeah, it turns out what we wanted was e-scooters, OneWheels, and the like. That's actually a pretty solid example of the same principle.
• namuol 4y ago
  Sadly reminded of this: http://worrydream.com/Apple/ http://worrydream.com/Apple/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• moron4hire 4y ago
  > I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe there is a useful, engaging, fun, just, equitable, democratic, sustainable, novel VR experience where the avatars have legs, but Meta is $20 billion in and aside from the legs I don’t see any evidence that any of the above is forthcoming. As a VR developer, this is professionally frustrating to read. Oculus and Meta have continually sucked all the air out of the room in this industry. I actually really like my Quest Pro, if I squint and ignore the Meta logo for a minute, but there isn't anything particularly special about it. The hardware is basically a designer shell around a Qualcomm reference design. The software is pretty basic. The only reason the Quest line is so much better than the competition is because the competition is failing to show up. And that's largely because of the huge amount of money that Meta is spending. How are you going to convince investors to back your competing platform if they look at the market and see Meta spending 20bil a year? How are you going to hire talent when Meta has been paying anyone they can find 5x normal salaries anywhere else, plus adult daycare benefits? Slurrrrrrp Hope you don't like breathing. Meta isn't spending 20bils because that's what making VR takes. They're spending that to make it impossible for competitors to operate. It's basically the Reagan-era Cold War strategy.
• Borrible 4y ago
  You could start a consulting firm that offers it as a service. Maybe Meta is interested.
• loxs 4y ago
  Never... ever... get emotionally attached to your work. You wrote some curly braces, you got paid. That's it. Move on.
• martin82 4y ago
  I have spent my career building web applications for startups. When they say that 95% of all startups fail, they were not kidding. I have no doubt that I will live to see the day when the entirety of my life's work will be permanently abandoned.