4 ms·

"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 sa

by 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.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
This is something I still find as kind of a culture shock on HN honestly. The idea that pursuing work that is personally interesting and remunerative is at worst neutral is basically an in-built assumption here. There is often pretty intense policing of it if there's a whiff of deviation. FWIW I don't think it's true either. A lot of engineers can be convinced to work on basically anything if it's "a hard problem" in the right way. This is bad. We should all consider ourselves responsible for the end results, rather than entitled to the means.
- kalkin 4y ago
  Right. I've seen this parodically phrased as "I just make the rockets go up, it's the Luftwaffe's business where they come down" and I don't get that attitude at a gut level but it's clearly common (even if people don't like to imagine themselves in that particular scenario).
hunter-gatherer 4y ago
I've brought this up a few times and the response is usually against me. I feel the same way, although I understand that people need to work and people need to get paid. I've worked jobs that probably had little if any positive net impact on society. I'd contend that net-positive industries are actually a small minority. Just because something provides a consumed/demanded product doesn't mean that it is a net positive, and I think people generally aren't as good at diffentiating between the two.
chubot 4y ago
(story submitter here) This is true and should be acknowledged. To be honest, I submitted it because like many others I learned something from the author's blog, and followed it over the years I also submitted it under a title involving "probabilistic programming languages", thinking "it's cool that you can get paid to work on such a thing" Though it's also true that I don't use Facebook and would probably not want it to be optimized any more than it is :-/ I also worked in Big tech and there is a lot of genuinely useful knowledge and practice "locked up" there -- i.e. knowledge that is not in open source code. They have assembled a lot of expertise The P programming language (for concurrency / state machines) is another example of that -- it's used inside Microsoft Windows and AWS, and is beyond the state of the art elsewhere. I don't know what to do about that, but it should be acknowledged. We should also acknowledge that some big tech products are great and world changing in a largely positive way (even though in my personal opinion Facebook is the least of those, I can also see it argued the other way).
ericlippert 4y ago
I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues. Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other teams make better decisions at lower cost, the aim is to look at the whole system and improve the whole thing. Let me give you an example. Most "this content doesn't belong on FB" decisions are made by ML, but a great many go to human review. Imagine what that job is like. It's emotionally exhausting, it's poorly compensated, burnout is high. My team had a model in production where we would use Bayesian reasoning to automatically detect when a particular human was likely to have made the correct decision about content classification, and therefore, if two humans disagreed, how to resolve that impasse without getting a third involved. (And in addition we get a lot more information out of the model including bounds on true prevalence of bad content, and so on.) Does that save the company money? Sure. Millions of dollars a month. (And for the amateur bean counters elsewhere on this page: the data scientist who developed this model is NOT PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH.) But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow. That's just one example; everything that we did was with an eye towards not merely saving the company money, but improving the ability to make good decisions about the products.
- mrlatinos 4y ago
  I think you've avoided the original commenter's point completely. Facebook is a net negative to society. There is nothing you can do to improve FB products when the primary mission is to be an addictive ad machine.
- apohn 4y ago
  >But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow. I think reading that this type of solution was created, and person who worked on it was laid off, makes me very sad as a Data Scientist. I enjoy working as a Data Scientist, but I struggle a lot with the field. Lots of jobs are mostly about grabbing eyeballs or selling something. Some jobs are just total bullshit. Even the ones where you're doing something concrete (e.g. keeping a machine running), some days you still wonder if it really matters in the long run. But with some of these social media safety topics, it can feel like a job has some meaning beyond just shuffling numbers around on an spreadsheet. So it's disappointing to hear that people with the skills to create something like that are fired.

by kalkin 4y ago

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.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

This is something I still find as kind of a culture shock on HN honestly. The idea that pursuing work that is personally interesting and remunerative is at worst neutral is basically an in-built assumption here. There is often pretty intense policing of it if there's a whiff of deviation. FWIW I don't think it's true either. A lot of engineers can be convinced to work on basically anything if it's "a hard problem" in the right way. This is bad. We should all consider ourselves responsible for the end results, rather than entitled to the means.

kalkin 4y ago
Right. I've seen this parodically phrased as "I just make the rockets go up, it's the Luftwaffe's business where they come down" and I don't get that attitude at a gut level but it's clearly common (even if people don't like to imagine themselves in that particular scenario).

hunter-gatherer 4y ago

I've brought this up a few times and the response is usually against me. I feel the same way, although I understand that people need to work and people need to get paid. I've worked jobs that probably had little if any positive net impact on society. I'd contend that net-positive industries are actually a small minority. Just because something provides a consumed/demanded product doesn't mean that it is a net positive, and I think people generally aren't as good at diffentiating between the two.

chubot 4y ago

(story submitter here) This is true and should be acknowledged. To be honest, I submitted it because like many others I learned something from the author's blog, and followed it over the years I also submitted it under a title involving "probabilistic programming languages", thinking "it's cool that you can get paid to work on such a thing" Though it's also true that I don't use Facebook and would probably not want it to be optimized any more than it is :-/ I also worked in Big tech and there is a lot of genuinely useful knowledge and practice "locked up" there -- i.e. knowledge that is not in open source code. They have assembled a lot of expertise The P programming language (for concurrency / state machines) is another example of that -- it's used inside Microsoft Windows and AWS, and is beyond the state of the art elsewhere. I don't know what to do about that, but it should be acknowledged. We should also acknowledge that some big tech products are great and world changing in a largely positive way (even though in my personal opinion Facebook is the least of those, I can also see it argued the other way).

ericlippert 4y ago

I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues. Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other teams make better decisions at lower cost, the aim is to look at the whole system and improve the whole thing. Let me give you an example. Most "this content doesn't belong on FB" decisions are made by ML, but a great many go to human review. Imagine what that job is like. It's emotionally exhausting, it's poorly compensated, burnout is high. My team had a model in production where we would use Bayesian reasoning to automatically detect when a particular human was likely to have made the correct decision about content classification, and therefore, if two humans disagreed, how to resolve that impasse without getting a third involved. (And in addition we get a lot more information out of the model including bounds on true prevalence of bad content, and so on.) Does that save the company money? Sure. Millions of dollars a month. (And for the amateur bean counters elsewhere on this page: the data scientist who developed this model is NOT PAID MILLIONS OF DOLLARS A MONTH.) But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow. That's just one example; everything that we did was with an eye towards not merely saving the company money, but improving the ability to make good decisions about the products.

mrlatinos 4y ago
I think you've avoided the original commenter's point completely. Facebook is a net negative to society. There is nothing you can do to improve FB products when the primary mission is to be an addictive ad machine.
apohn 4y ago
>But it also (1) helps keep bad content off of the platform, so users aren't exposed to it, (2) lowers the number of human reviewers who come into contact with it, which is improves their jobs, and (3) frees up budget for whatever improvements need to be made to this whole workflow. I think reading that this type of solution was created, and person who worked on it was laid off, makes me very sad as a Data Scientist. I enjoy working as a Data Scientist, but I struggle a lot with the field. Lots of jobs are mostly about grabbing eyeballs or selling something. Some jobs are just total bullshit. Even the ones where you're doing something concrete (e.g. keeping a machine running), some days you still wonder if it really matters in the long run. But with some of these social media safety topics, it can feel like a job has some meaning beyond just shuffling numbers around on an spreadsheet. So it's disappointing to hear that people with the skills to create something like that are fired.