9 ms·

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Meta AMA. I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Mostly

Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Meta AMA. I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Mostly, it seems like most workers in the building chit-chat and have meetings rather than do anything resembling actual work that's building product going in front of users. Country-club, cult-of-toxic-positivity lots of relaxing going on, in my view. In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Also, the spend on R&D needs to be more focused on productization. Finally, I'm still wondering why there's no consultantish enterprise sales arm monetizing and discovering opportunities for lucrative SaaS products like Workplace.

rerx 4y ago
Please help out us outsiders. My guesses are: MPK = Menlo Park? FRE = Fremont?
EMM_386 4y ago
Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather. That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects. That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three. And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!
- loeg 4y ago
  You started with an absurd conspiracy theory and just ran with it. > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? No! No one does this!
  - EMM_386 4y ago
    Oh, come on. Yes they do. > Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching-restricted-stock-bonuses/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
    - colecut 4y ago
      Paying enough to keep key engineers is not the same as hiring new ones they don't need
    - 1letterunixname 4y ago
      Supposedly, there is software that uses "internet-based signals" behavioral predictions to identify which key technical people are being courted and/or are considering moving to a new gig. Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
      - boomerango 4y ago
        “Hey this guy just updated his linked-in for the first time in two years!”
    - guiambros 4y ago
      I love how people assume that a poorly written and tangentially related article, with a question mark in the title nonetheless, becomes the official proof of <wild speculation that bigcorp is doing X>. Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
      - pc86 4y ago
        Are you not familiar with the world-class investigative tech journalism coming out of iDownloadBlog.com? I mean the guy lying about his day job posted it so clearly it's a very legitimate and prestigious publication.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  The public already knows: the headcount graph trended upwards and accelerated in recent years until recently. I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Is this actually true though? The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition. https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-rates-microsofts-vr-layoffs/ https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
- mupuff1234 4y ago
  Perhaps one way to view hiring (at the scale of big tech) is a bit like a VC, you hire 100 people knowing 99 of them won't do anything special, but that 1/100 will make it worth it. And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.
  - selcuka 4y ago
    An SAP consultant once told me that they had a term that can roughly translate to "make a crowd" (sorry, no idea about the actual phrase used by consultants in English speaking countries, if there is one). It basically means that whenever a big customer have an issue, they send more people than actually needed, and one senior consultant works on solving the problem while others just walk around and look busy. It gives the impression that they are taking the issue seriously.
    - redeeman 4y ago
      this would explain the cost surrounding SAP :)
    - tmpz22 4y ago
      I’ve seen a version of this in sales where you have a welcoming call with the new client with the entire service team acting all cheery. Leaves the impression that their spend gets all those people when in reality it does not.
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      'Tis true with Incident Mgmt and some highly sensitive projects, too. Nothing SAP related at all, but gives the appearance to PMs and Ops leaderships that we're going extra hard on the issue. And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
  - 4y ago
- noisenotsignal 4y ago
  4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.
  - EMM_386 4y ago
    I actually screwed that up, we only have 3 total software engineers. Including myself. We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers. And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls. I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants. We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls. Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable. I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done. I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job. It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
    - throwaway1946 4y ago
      Sorry, but I'm skeptical that you actually run "an entire phone company" in the way that most people understand the term. You mention that you use lots of open-source solutions, and I'm guessing you outsource the build and operation of the network to a real phone company, probably similar to an MVNO. Am I wrong? Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense. I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  With three people there are limits with what you can build and how fast you can build it. At large tech companies there is a gigantic amount of scope. People will make up scope to justify their job, or to justify why they need to grow their teams to accomplish goals. If a company wants to invest into doing everything over prioriting what should be worked on then headcount will explode.
- hintymad 4y ago
  > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    No one ever seems to explain how the companies are coordinating to suck up talent. Otherwise, there would be a free rider problem. Why not let Google suck it up instead?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? Rumor.
- papito 4y ago
  A team of 3 star engineers can take on the world. It's a killer setup.
daniel_iversen 4y ago
FWIW they did have sales people trying to sell Workplace by FB but it just didn't go so well. Things like Microsoft Teams is so well entrenched (and "free" with the CIOs' Office 365 subscription) that there wasn't much to come for. Even Slack was (/is?) struggling..
- josephd79 4y ago
  The bundling bs sucks. The only reason MS has that many people using Teams is because it’s bundled (free) with the M365. It’s hot garbage. I hate all those real time chat apps anyways.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Internally, everything and everyone uses Workplace. There is no email except for rare things. It's basically the same thing used by customers.
loeg 4y ago
> I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Are you saying there aren't engineers working outside of MPK/FRE (which is wrong) or that they're lazy (which is also wrong)?
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Woah, backup and chill. :) Edit: I guess you don't work at Meta because there's "the assume the innocent take" thing. ;) I merely had the audacity to state a fact that the building where I work demonstrably contains few engineers because I sampled titles in the seating app.
- aplummer 4y ago
  Yeah I laughed at this. Whether or not you like the business model, Quest and AI are in Burlingame and is obviously very hard groundbreaking work.
  - loeg 4y ago
    A lot of engineers working hard up in the PNW offices as well.
jxramos 4y ago
> cult-of-toxic-positivity I would love to hear details on a handful of instances of how this manifests. Toxic positivity, I don't know if I am to read that as like burying ones head in the sand, ears plugged singing la la la, ignorance is bliss or what not. What exact behavior would aggregate into a phrase like that? Very fascinating characterization of something interesting I'm sure.
- frozenlettuce 4y ago
  >>> Toxic positivity is the pressure to only display positive emotions, suppressing any negative emotions, feelings, reactions, or experiences. It invalidates human experience and can lead to trauma, isolation, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. https://www.betterup.com/blog/toxic-positivity https://www.betterup.com/blog/toxic-positivity
- gitfan86 4y ago
  Acting like EVERYTHING that ANYONE does is AMAZING with zero accountability and retrospection on if that actually made any difference.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Yes, exactly. It's bad for both mental health and productivity because it denies reality (promotes dishonesty) and puts distance between people with phony, exhausting expectations. Being exceptionally good and real is the real thing. ;) Life is so short, so why not be legit?
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    It also gaslights people into believing their negative emotions are their own fault, if everyone else pretends to be positive.
curiousllama 4y ago
Facebook felt culturally incapable of building good enterprise software products. Which is weird for a company that makes 90%+ of its revenue B2B. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing, though. I’ve never seen an engineering-first enterprise software group. The business is just so sales-and-relationship driven. Look at Amazon: you can plot the enshittification of their retail business with the rise of AWS. That’s not coincidence, it’s culture.
- gleenn 4y ago
  I think people immediately cringe commingling their work and social lives. Personally I think it's a huge over-reach that Meta requires their employees use their personal account as their work one too, but maybe that's not true anymore?
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    As far as I can recall, I did not use my personal FB account while working at Meta last year. Some tiny detail of it may have been imported somewhere, but I definitely had a totally different account for Workplace.
    - 1letterunixname 4y ago
      Contingent workers, that's possible. FTEs generally require an FB account to start the tech device provisioning process.
      - akawry 4y ago
        i don't think that's true anymore after project meiosis
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    There was recently a big memo about that. I have completely separate work and personal devices. (This was written on a personal device.) The only thing that goes in from personal -> work is music or random home office photos. The only things that go out from work -> personal are public résumé-level performance reviews, tax, and benefits information. Exceptions on work devices include Github and streaming services, but otherwise not much else should be co-mingled. Everything else stays in its own domain. (I don't use personal social media accounts so I'm the wrong target audience. Personal FB and Insta accounts are linked to work, and Github if you have one.)
woodruffw 4y ago
> In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. I think it’s somewhat telling that you didn’t list “engineer” here. Meta isn’t a quirky startup, and hasn’t been for a decade: it’s one of the largest corporations (by market value) on the planet. By all rights, there ought to be a lot of people performing boring, turn-the-crank work that doesn’t immediately surface to you.
- jononomo 4y ago
  A hacker is an engineer.
  - grayhatter 4y ago
    Admittedly they seem to be overlapping circles; but I don't believe they actually are.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Exactly. A subset of engineers who deliver much and fast.
    - grayhatter 4y ago
      haven't read the hacker manifesto yet?
    - davidgay 4y ago
      Snide putdowns of other groups of people just convince me your opinions are not worth listening to.
    - sollewitt 4y ago
      Much, fast, maintainable: pick two.
    - innagadadavida 4y ago
      Also at Meta. The software stack is a shit show - xplat debugging in Vscode can’t even print the variables properly. This hacker culture is good at shipping shitty stuff and getting your bonus/promo and moving on.
go_discover 4y ago
What does your team do exactly? Are you hiring or is there a hiring freeze for all teams?
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Hiring freeze everywhere*. * Supposedly not hiring freeze for senior ICs.
muglug 4y ago
I'm biased (since I work at Slack) but, as a casual user, Workplace seems like an un-loved afterthought. I don't think Meta is well-configured to make consumer-facing products that "surprise and delight", and Workplace's slightly janky interface is a clear symptom.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  And I have to use Workplace everyday. :D There's jank that can be fixed. The problem with Slack is it creates an instant, continuous distraction noise barrage worse than email groups. We at least have a cultural norm of not DMing individuals (unless it's a SEV) and seeking info in group posts or maybe group chat.
  - muglug 4y ago
    We generally have that cultural norm too — I'm as likely to DM someone as I am to sidle up to them in the office. I never feel like using Slack is stopping me from writing code, but when I'm waiting for a build or what-have-you I can look at channel updates asynchronously.
  - piva00 4y ago
    The problem with Workplace is that it looks much like Facebook, the UI/UX is not conducive to reading long-form posts, it's also a feed of posts organised in hard-to-find groups, there's no focus to guide me through a journey to actually enjoy using the product. Interaction with posts is an afterthought, threaded discussions do not exist, it's just a "dump" of information that seems to work for whatever use-case Meta had internally but was never translated to other B2B needs. On the other hand, Slack is a simple communication tool where I can asynchronously coordinate with whatever team I need to get in touch with, it's exactly what I had asked for years at companies I worked for in decades prior to Slack: a well made IRC-like interface. It just works, with all its flaws and performance issues, it's still valuable. Workplace on the other hand is not valuable at all, it could disappear from the company stack of tools and I would never bat an eye. And I work for a global company, much smaller in size than Meta but definitely one that you either heard about or use our products.
zymhan 4y ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/18/meta-layoffs-tech/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/18/meta-la... > “This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Goler wrote. > The company is expected to lay off what will likely be thousands of highly skilled employees — such as engineers and other technical staffers — who help build the company’s products, according to people familiar with the matter. I wouldn't be so certain
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Elon, stop it with the throwaways.
roland35 4y ago
That's interesting. My team (not MPK) is completely overwhelmed! The entire team is hard working and not much relaxing unfortunately (could use some of that!)
asdfman123 4y ago
I’m not trying to be aggressive, but this is the kind of “just world hypothesis” reasoning you hear from people caught in layoffs. Sometimes the people doing that kind of reasoning are hit next. I’m not saying there’s no waste, but this is classic rationalizing.
naijaboiler 4y ago
>You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Actually, you do!
spacebanana7 4y ago
Why doesn't Instagram have a native iPad app? It seems like an immensely profitable project that would take a relatively small amount of resources. iPad users likely have a GDP bigger than France, I don't know a single millionaire who doesn't have one... yet their ability to click ads is very restricted by the mini/stretched screen. How does the culture allow so many non-core projects to get priority over this?
throwaway665654 4y ago
I actually wonder if you're an engineer at Meta because this isn't my experience at all. My whole team (in London) is working hard doing useful engineering work. The evaluation process is such that employees are pressured to deliver. I haven't seen anyone "relaxing". To me, the problem with Meta is the constant focus on impact. There's little incentive to write robust software. Many tools are half-finished, fragile, poorly documented.

rerx 4y ago

Please help out us outsiders. My guesses are: MPK = Menlo Park? FRE = Fremont?

EMM_386 4y ago

Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? That, of course, is absurd on the surface. Hiring people for the sake of hiring ... so they can stand around the watercooler discussing the weather. That led to double or triple the headcount! 85,000+ employees to work on Instagram, Facebook, and pet projects. That number alone boggles my mind. I work with three other senior developers and we run an entire phone company with five-nines uptime. Yes, three. And now suddenly everyone is shocked about layoffs!

loeg 4y ago
You started with an absurd conspiracy theory and just ran with it. > Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? No! No one does this!
- EMM_386 4y ago
  Oh, come on. Yes they do. > Is Apple throwing enough money at key engineers to prevent defection to Meta? https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching-restricted-stock-bonuses/ https://www.idownloadblog.com/2021/12/29/apple-meta-poaching...
  - colecut 4y ago
    Paying enough to keep key engineers is not the same as hiring new ones they don't need
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Supposedly, there is software that uses "internet-based signals" behavioral predictions to identify which key technical people are being courted and/or are considering moving to a new gig. Poaching is a big part of the game. You can't get a raise compared to what you can playing the game.
    - boomerango 4y ago
      “Hey this guy just updated his linked-in for the first time in two years!”
  - guiambros 4y ago
    I love how people assume that a poorly written and tangentially related article, with a question mark in the title nonetheless, becomes the official proof of <wild speculation that bigcorp is doing X>. Wait until we see the flood of ChatGPT-generated articles. Oh, wait...
    - pc86 4y ago
      Are you not familiar with the world-class investigative tech journalism coming out of iDownloadBlog.com? I mean the guy lying about his day job posted it so clearly it's a very legitimate and prestigious publication.
1letterunixname 4y ago
The public already knows: the headcount graph trended upwards and accelerated in recent years until recently. I joke with people in another department that we're a poaching ground for TikTok. Mostly, I work with people who have been at the company many years and are senior production engineers, so I can't appreciate dotcom-style spending in non-engineering business units. For the same space, Alphabet has 10x headcount compared to us.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Is this actually true though? The data seems to suggest that for most companies the trend was constant, and they just reached a point where it was no longer economical, which was exacerbated by hiring freezes halting attrition. https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-rates-microsofts-vr-layoffs/ https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
mupuff1234 4y ago
Perhaps one way to view hiring (at the scale of big tech) is a bit like a VC, you hire 100 people knowing 99 of them won't do anything special, but that 1/100 will make it worth it. And like VCs the math makes more sense when money is cheap and there's a bull market.
- selcuka 4y ago
  An SAP consultant once told me that they had a term that can roughly translate to "make a crowd" (sorry, no idea about the actual phrase used by consultants in English speaking countries, if there is one). It basically means that whenever a big customer have an issue, they send more people than actually needed, and one senior consultant works on solving the problem while others just walk around and look busy. It gives the impression that they are taking the issue seriously.
  - redeeman 4y ago
    this would explain the cost surrounding SAP :)
  - tmpz22 4y ago
    I’ve seen a version of this in sales where you have a welcoming call with the new client with the entire service team acting all cheery. Leaves the impression that their spend gets all those people when in reality it does not.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    'Tis true with Incident Mgmt and some highly sensitive projects, too. Nothing SAP related at all, but gives the appearance to PMs and Ops leaderships that we're going extra hard on the issue. And to be fair, it's useful for incident mgmt since you don't know what you'll find, and will often have lots of people up your ass; having supernumerary bodies means I can throw them at something if I find an artifact or concern, and it also gives me a distraction-shield: I communicate only to Senior Engineer X, and all inquiries from Mgmt and Customers go to X; I only have to update X instead of 10+ irritated users/owners.
- 4y ago
noisenotsignal 4y ago
4 engineers for an entire phone company sounds scary. I’m sure your engineering is robust enough such that outages are minimal, but that still sounds like a lot of on call (rotation of 4 = once a month?). Even if you only get paged once every few months, you still need to worry about getting paged until your shift is over! Even if you don’t worry in the psychological sense, you still have to schedule around it.
- EMM_386 4y ago
  I actually screwed that up, we only have 3 total software engineers. Including myself. We do have other employees who maintain the hardware, on-call DBAs to manage issues, etc. I'm only speaking to the software engineers. And we have lots of hardware and lots of open-source solutions that handle the actual calls. I'm full-stack but lead on the front-end, a complex Angular application to manage everything from huge call centers to small restaurants. We have C# for APIs, cloud Oracle for the database, and a whole slew of other software and services to manage the actual calls. Each of us is specialized in specific parts. Our up-time is tremendous given the amount of code we've written. It's extremely stable. I've been at this 20+ years, as have the other 2. We know enough between us to get this done. I've never been called after normal work hours. We release the updated front-end every week and haven't had any issues. And a lot of changes/improvements go into that ... that's a lot of my job. It's well-architectured, well-tested, fault-tolerant software.
  - throwaway1946 4y ago
    Sorry, but I'm skeptical that you actually run "an entire phone company" in the way that most people understand the term. You mention that you use lots of open-source solutions, and I'm guessing you outsource the build and operation of the network to a real phone company, probably similar to an MVNO. Am I wrong? Meta is very different from that, they build the products that users interact with, but also build things at the bottom of the tech stack. At their scale, this makes business sense to do so, and comparing your headcount with theirs makes no sense. I don't really understand why software engineers keep dunking on each other like this. I get that people want to broadcast how smart they are, but in reality we're just giving the general public a warped sense of how much work is actually involved in building large-scale software systems.
charcircuit 4y ago
With three people there are limits with what you can build and how fast you can build it. At large tech companies there is a gigantic amount of scope. People will make up scope to justify their job, or to justify why they need to grow their teams to accomplish goals. If a company wants to invest into doing everything over prioriting what should be worked on then headcount will explode.
hintymad 4y ago
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them People say this from time to time, but have we ever got evidence from any company? A director or VP gave such mandates, a leaked email that discussed such strategy?
- asdfman123 4y ago
  No one ever seems to explain how the companies are coordinating to suck up talent. Otherwise, there would be a free rider problem. Why not let Google suck it up instead?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 4y ago
> Isn't a lot of this silliness due to them feeling like they needed to "poach" talented developers, so that the competion wouldn't get them? Rumor.
papito 4y ago
A team of 3 star engineers can take on the world. It's a killer setup.

daniel_iversen 4y ago

FWIW they did have sales people trying to sell Workplace by FB but it just didn't go so well. Things like Microsoft Teams is so well entrenched (and "free" with the CIOs' Office 365 subscription) that there wasn't much to come for. Even Slack was (/is?) struggling..

josephd79 4y ago
The bundling bs sucks. The only reason MS has that many people using Teams is because it’s bundled (free) with the M365. It’s hot garbage. I hate all those real time chat apps anyways.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Internally, everything and everyone uses Workplace. There is no email except for rare things. It's basically the same thing used by customers.

loeg 4y ago

> I don't know what anyone else in the non-MPK/-FRE buildings here is doing, but 95% chance it's not engineering. Are you saying there aren't engineers working outside of MPK/FRE (which is wrong) or that they're lazy (which is also wrong)?

1letterunixname 4y ago
Woah, backup and chill. :) Edit: I guess you don't work at Meta because there's "the assume the innocent take" thing. ;) I merely had the audacity to state a fact that the building where I work demonstrably contains few engineers because I sampled titles in the seating app.
aplummer 4y ago
Yeah I laughed at this. Whether or not you like the business model, Quest and AI are in Burlingame and is obviously very hard groundbreaking work.
- loeg 4y ago
  A lot of engineers working hard up in the PNW offices as well.

jxramos 4y ago

> cult-of-toxic-positivity I would love to hear details on a handful of instances of how this manifests. Toxic positivity, I don't know if I am to read that as like burying ones head in the sand, ears plugged singing la la la, ignorance is bliss or what not. What exact behavior would aggregate into a phrase like that? Very fascinating characterization of something interesting I'm sure.

frozenlettuce 4y ago
>>> Toxic positivity is the pressure to only display positive emotions, suppressing any negative emotions, feelings, reactions, or experiences. It invalidates human experience and can lead to trauma, isolation, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. https://www.betterup.com/blog/toxic-positivity https://www.betterup.com/blog/toxic-positivity
gitfan86 4y ago
Acting like EVERYTHING that ANYONE does is AMAZING with zero accountability and retrospection on if that actually made any difference.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Yes, exactly. It's bad for both mental health and productivity because it denies reality (promotes dishonesty) and puts distance between people with phony, exhausting expectations. Being exceptionally good and real is the real thing. ;) Life is so short, so why not be legit?
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  It also gaslights people into believing their negative emotions are their own fault, if everyone else pretends to be positive.

curiousllama 4y ago

Facebook felt culturally incapable of building good enterprise software products. Which is weird for a company that makes 90%+ of its revenue B2B. I’m not sure it’s a bad thing, though. I’ve never seen an engineering-first enterprise software group. The business is just so sales-and-relationship driven. Look at Amazon: you can plot the enshittification of their retail business with the rise of AWS. That’s not coincidence, it’s culture.

gleenn 4y ago
I think people immediately cringe commingling their work and social lives. Personally I think it's a huge over-reach that Meta requires their employees use their personal account as their work one too, but maybe that's not true anymore?
- chihuahua 4y ago
  As far as I can recall, I did not use my personal FB account while working at Meta last year. Some tiny detail of it may have been imported somewhere, but I definitely had a totally different account for Workplace.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Contingent workers, that's possible. FTEs generally require an FB account to start the tech device provisioning process.
    - akawry 4y ago
      i don't think that's true anymore after project meiosis
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  There was recently a big memo about that. I have completely separate work and personal devices. (This was written on a personal device.) The only thing that goes in from personal -> work is music or random home office photos. The only things that go out from work -> personal are public résumé-level performance reviews, tax, and benefits information. Exceptions on work devices include Github and streaming services, but otherwise not much else should be co-mingled. Everything else stays in its own domain. (I don't use personal social media accounts so I'm the wrong target audience. Personal FB and Insta accounts are linked to work, and Github if you have one.)

woodruffw 4y ago

> In my view, you're either a hustler, a hacker, or a manager of such to be essential to a tech business. You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. I think it’s somewhat telling that you didn’t list “engineer” here. Meta isn’t a quirky startup, and hasn’t been for a decade: it’s one of the largest corporations (by market value) on the planet. By all rights, there ought to be a lot of people performing boring, turn-the-crank work that doesn’t immediately surface to you.

jononomo 4y ago
A hacker is an engineer.
- grayhatter 4y ago
  Admittedly they seem to be overlapping circles; but I don't believe they actually are.
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Exactly. A subset of engineers who deliver much and fast.
  - grayhatter 4y ago
    haven't read the hacker manifesto yet?
  - davidgay 4y ago
    Snide putdowns of other groups of people just convince me your opinions are not worth listening to.
  - sollewitt 4y ago
    Much, fast, maintainable: pick two.
  - innagadadavida 4y ago
    Also at Meta. The software stack is a shit show - xplat debugging in Vscode can’t even print the variables properly. This hacker culture is good at shipping shitty stuff and getting your bonus/promo and moving on.

go_discover 4y ago

What does your team do exactly? Are you hiring or is there a hiring freeze for all teams?

1letterunixname 4y ago
Hiring freeze everywhere*. * Supposedly not hiring freeze for senior ICs.

muglug 4y ago

I'm biased (since I work at Slack) but, as a casual user, Workplace seems like an un-loved afterthought. I don't think Meta is well-configured to make consumer-facing products that "surprise and delight", and Workplace's slightly janky interface is a clear symptom.

1letterunixname 4y ago
And I have to use Workplace everyday. :D There's jank that can be fixed. The problem with Slack is it creates an instant, continuous distraction noise barrage worse than email groups. We at least have a cultural norm of not DMing individuals (unless it's a SEV) and seeking info in group posts or maybe group chat.
- muglug 4y ago
  We generally have that cultural norm too — I'm as likely to DM someone as I am to sidle up to them in the office. I never feel like using Slack is stopping me from writing code, but when I'm waiting for a build or what-have-you I can look at channel updates asynchronously.
- piva00 4y ago
  The problem with Workplace is that it looks much like Facebook, the UI/UX is not conducive to reading long-form posts, it's also a feed of posts organised in hard-to-find groups, there's no focus to guide me through a journey to actually enjoy using the product. Interaction with posts is an afterthought, threaded discussions do not exist, it's just a "dump" of information that seems to work for whatever use-case Meta had internally but was never translated to other B2B needs. On the other hand, Slack is a simple communication tool where I can asynchronously coordinate with whatever team I need to get in touch with, it's exactly what I had asked for years at companies I worked for in decades prior to Slack: a well made IRC-like interface. It just works, with all its flaws and performance issues, it's still valuable. Workplace on the other hand is not valuable at all, it could disappear from the company stack of tools and I would never bat an eye. And I work for a global company, much smaller in size than Meta but definitely one that you either heard about or use our products.

zymhan 4y ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/18/meta-layoffs-tech/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/18/meta-la... > “This will be a difficult time as we say goodbye to friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to Meta,” Goler wrote. > The company is expected to lay off what will likely be thousands of highly skilled employees — such as engineers and other technical staffers — who help build the company’s products, according to people familiar with the matter. I wouldn't be so certain

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Elon, stop it with the throwaways.

roland35 4y ago

That's interesting. My team (not MPK) is completely overwhelmed! The entire team is hard working and not much relaxing unfortunately (could use some of that!)

asdfman123 4y ago

I’m not trying to be aggressive, but this is the kind of “just world hypothesis” reasoning you hear from people caught in layoffs. Sometimes the people doing that kind of reasoning are hit next. I’m not saying there’s no waste, but this is classic rationalizing.

naijaboiler 4y ago

>You don't need any strategic hiring coordinating coordinators for higher-education. Actually, you do!

spacebanana7 4y ago

Why doesn't Instagram have a native iPad app? It seems like an immensely profitable project that would take a relatively small amount of resources. iPad users likely have a GDP bigger than France, I don't know a single millionaire who doesn't have one... yet their ability to click ads is very restricted by the mini/stretched screen. How does the culture allow so many non-core projects to get priority over this?

throwaway665654 4y ago

I actually wonder if you're an engineer at Meta because this isn't my experience at all. My whole team (in London) is working hard doing useful engineering work. The evaluation process is such that employees are pressured to deliver. I haven't seen anyone "relaxing". To me, the problem with Meta is the constant focus on impact. There's little incentive to write robust software. Many tools are half-finished, fragile, poorly documented.