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The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contribut

The world at large seems to hate Zuck but it’s good to hear from people familiar with software engineering and who understand just how significant his contributions to open source and raising salaries have been through Facebook and now Meta.

mschuster91 2y ago
A person (or a company) can be two very different things at the same time. It's undeniable as you say that there have been a lot of high-profile open source innovations coming from Facebook (ReactJS, LLaMA, HHVM, ...), but the price that society at large paid for all of this is not insignificant either, and Meta hasn't meaningfully apologized for the worst of it.
- jwoq9118 2y ago
  Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc. Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.
swatcoder 2y ago
> his contributions to ... raising salaries It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams. Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.
- asadm 2y ago
  I am fine with large pool of greedy people trying their hand at programming. Some of them will stick and find meaning in work. Rest will wade out in downturn. Net positive.
- eru 2y ago
  > It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well. Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers. (And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.) > Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices. Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work? Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    Bubbles are bubbles. They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate. Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts. Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts. Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families. Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that. Like our peers in other engineering disciplines, it's practically our baseline state. What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, which is a different thing and gets developed in a different and more stable market environment.

mschuster91 2y ago

A person (or a company) can be two very different things at the same time. It's undeniable as you say that there have been a lot of high-profile open source innovations coming from Facebook (ReactJS, LLaMA, HHVM, ...), but the price that society at large paid for all of this is not insignificant either, and Meta hasn't meaningfully apologized for the worst of it.

jwoq9118 2y ago
Meta’s open source contributions stand on their own as great regardless of their obviously shady social media management and privacy tactics. The former are feats of software engineering, the later have a lot to do with things far beyond problems like handing data at scale, refreshing feeds fast, ensuring atomic updates to user profiles, etc. Basically I don’t think their privacy nightmare stuff detracts from what the brain trust of engineers over there have been doing in the open source world.

swatcoder 2y ago

> his contributions to ... raising salaries It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That just concentrates the industry in fewer hands and makes it more dependent on fickle cash sources (investors, market expansion) often disconnected from the actual software being produced by their teams. Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices.

asadm 2y ago
I am fine with large pool of greedy people trying their hand at programming. Some of them will stick and find meaning in work. Rest will wade out in downturn. Net positive.
eru 2y ago
> It's fun to be able to retire early or whatever, but driving software engineer salaries out of reach of otherwise profitable, sustainable businesses is not a good thing. That argument could apply to anyone who pays anyone well. Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers. (And by 'treat well', I mean the whole package. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that has the side effect of eg paying veterinary nurses peanuts, because there's always people willing to do those kinds of 'cute' jobs.) > Nor is it great for the yet-to-mature craft that high salaries invited a very large pool of primarly-compensation-motivated people who end up diluting the ability for primarily-craft-motivated people to find and coordinate with each other in pursuit of higher quality work and more robust practices. Huh, how is that 'dilution' supposed to work? Well, and at least those 'evil' money grubbers are out of someone else's hair. They don't just get created from thin air. So if those rimarly-compensation-motivated people are now writing software, then at least investment banking and management consulting are free again for the primarily-craft-motivated people to enjoy!
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Bubbles are bubbles. They can be enjoyed/exploited (early retirment, savvy caching of excess income, etc) by workers but they don't win anybody progress and aren't a thing to celebrate. Workers (and society) have not won progress when only a handful of companies have books that can actually support their inflated pay, and the remainder are ultimately funded by investors hoping to see those same companies slurp them up before the bubble bursts. Workers don't win progress when they're lured into then converting that income into impractical home loans that bind the workers with golden handcuffs and darkly shadow their future when the bubble bursts. Workers win progress when they can practice their trade with respect and freedom and can and secure a stable, secure future for themselves and their families. Software engineers didn't need these bubble-inflated salaries to acheive that. Like our peers in other engineering disciplines, it's practically our baseline state. What fight we do still need to make is on securing non-monetary worker's rights and professional deference, which is a different thing and gets developed in a different and more stable market environment.