5 ms·
DevRel at HuggingFace
- dinobones 2y agoIn every company I've worked for, the biggest fans/lovers of meetings/let's "touch base" have always been: The most useless members of our team. And I truly mean that, whether PM/TPM/or even SDM/SDE. The common denominator is they were always absolutely useless, adding no value or no true technical contribution, and their only value add was siloing information and claiming to be in "meetings" to lead some effort forward. Their entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. They intentionally made themselves the only points of contact and did not introduce people cross team because people would probably immediately realize how useless they are. I've seen this multiple times, multiple roles, L5+, earning 100s of thousands of dollars a year at big tech companies. Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document, and none of it will be documented, no AIs will come from it, so you can look "busy" for today and tell your manager you did something. Woohoo collaboration!
- iwontberude 2y agoI, for one, represent this comment.
- frutiger 2y agoHard to say what situations you have experienced because the details are scant, but in my experience usually those people have helped, in one way or another, to ensure that my pay check has the specific number that it does. Simply put: they use the information they gain to justify the utility of individual team members to the overall effort and thus the proportionate compensation.
- dinobones 2y agoNo my friend, the people who ensure the paycheck has the specific number it does are some drones in HR far removed from you. They determine reasonable bands for your role based on industry standards and how the company wants to position itself in the market. Then your individual contribution and performance determines an additional +-10%.
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- frutiger 2y agoDon't know which company you work for but this is unequivocally not true at mine. HR are subservient to Engineering (our CEO started as a senior SWE ~15 years ago). I am also one of those "useless" EMs that barter for the comp packages of my most valuable SWEs.
- Geezus_42 2y agoYour situation seems rare.
- xcrjm 2y agoFrom my experience there's a lot more wiggle room in those pay bands than you'd think. Along with that, at many orgs your EM has to haggle on your behalf with their boss and every other EM that shares their budget ~yearly for your share of a limited pool of incremental dollars. I've specifically requested not to be under certain EMs in the past for that reason.
- jvans 2y ago> Yes, I will waste 45 minutes of my time explaining word for word to you, exactly what is written in this design document And they will misunderstand you, turn around and butcher the explanation to some higher up, indirectly claiming credit for your work as the messenger of its result. If something goes wrong with the project, they'll definitely make sure to emphasize your involvement in the failed initiative, strategically distancing themselves.
- the_panopticon 2y agoThis reminds me of the saying https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/success_has_many_fathers,_failure_is_an_orphan https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/success_has_many_fathers,_fai... that I’ve seen often played out in big companies, too.
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- crowcroft 2y agoI don't think meetings or OKRs are inherently bad, I have worked in organisations where these kinds of things are actually done well. Equally no OKRs and no meetings can be fine as well. Where the problem exists is when the systems and processes business use start to become calcified into the organisation's way of working, and compliance is used to control the work people do. RACI, RASCI, DACI as an example are all fine mental models for thinking about how people or teams should work on a project. But if I'm planning a project and propose a DACI, and then my project ends up getting derailed because some other manager thinks we should use a RACI instead it's probably game over.
- j45 2y agoThe kind of momentum maintaining alignment can provide is unreal. I hope this topic and HuggingFace and other doing it keeps getting more attention and details being shared. Nothings perfect, but it sure seems like it would work well for some people :) Having a team of thoughtful and professional self-directed learners and creators sounds amazing if you can get a space for a team to come together around it. Companies that have to, or choose to compromise on their labour force, either from a competency or salary perspective often have to put more supports in place to keep people longer. Doesn't mean OKRs, etc are the correct solution.
- onion2k 2y agoTheir entire job function could've probably been replaced by a wiki or Google Doc. I'm an Engineering Manager these days and I suspect this is true to an extent for my role. All I seem to do is relay information from one group to another, translate from one jargon to a different jargon, figure out who to talk to in order to get someone to be able to push a button, and, more often than I'd like, sit in meetings and remember things when someone else has forgotten. If my teams and the teams they work with wrote things down in discoverable and organized ways I would be out of a job. However, due to the fact my teams are made up of fallible, disorganized, and very human people, my job seems pretty safe, and I get a great deal of satisfaction from knowing I help a lot of people get a lot more done than if I wasn't around.
- spamizbad 2y agoI'll give you a big reason why this behavior exists: people refuse to write high quality documentation regarding their systems/processes/etc. Or they are willing do it, but do an extremely poor job and are oblivious to its low quality. This will necessitate meetings to "Clear things up". And sometimes your documentation ticks all the boxes, but people get pissy about updating it because it's not in their preferred format and it rots away into irrelevance. When I became an engineering manager I invested a ton of effort into providing solid documentation where people expect it: Swagger docs with real examples for our RESTful services for devs, confluence documentation for wider audiences, various guides and FAQs, and even in-repo ADRs. It probably saves us about 15 labor hours of meetings a week and maximizes my team's hands-on-keyboard time and minimizes interruptions.
- iftheshoefitss 2y agoIt’s kind of crazy you’re describing the person that made me leave tech to the last detail The weird part to me is I’ve worked with PhD folk, DARPA hackers, FAANG folk and they were so kind to me even when I said dumb things the person on the other hand was just idk how to describe it made coding just painful idk why though to this day
- lolpanda 2y agoI'm curious here how do they make money? i heard that they have ai consulting service. is that sufficient to run the company? i don't think any researchers i know pay for hugging face.
- jsheard 2y agoMost AI startups are following the Underpants Gnomes business plan: Phase 1 - Launch product which loses money Phase 2 - ??? Phase 3 - Profit! Few have progressed past the first phase yet.
- handzhiev 2y agoHugging Face is already profitable according to Clement https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/1811675386368966682 https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/1811675386368966682
- ArnoVW 2y agoThat is a well known lesson. In any goldrush it is always profitable to sell pickaxes and spades to the miners. The miners themselves generally do less well (except the happy few that strike gold)
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- binarymax 2y agoI’m not entirely sure but I suspect through their ML hosting/inference/training products and services they have working with enterprises. But I’m still baffled how they cover their AWS storage and egress fees :) I remember seeing a post last week-ish from Julien Chaumond that they are profitable.
- lbhdc 2y agoI was curious as well what the business model is. They are selling related services. Looks like data and inference offerings with per seat pricing. https://huggingface.co/pricing https://huggingface.co/pricing
- ZiiS 2y agoStep 1: Be at exactly the optimum point during a massive opportunity. Step 2: Do almost anything you will still grow.
- crowcroft 2y agoMarket forces trump individual performance. Not to say this way of working isn't good, but HuggingFace's success is not a great data point to validate the hypothesis.
- swyx 2y agoit does demonstrate lack of fatal flaws i guess? and startups are all about lasting long enough til PMF is found
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- 0x000xca0xfe 2y agoThere is nothing you cannot ruin with dumb enough management.
- LegitShady 2y agothat comes later
- nextworddev 2y agothis is the most accurate answer unless you are AWS, Azure, or GCP. source: ex-AWS GTM
- blitzar 2y agoStep 1: Buy lottery ticket with correct numbers on it. Step 2: Cash it in and make a lot of money.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoThis suggests the iterated optimum strategy is to just keep chasing new points trying to land that golden moment, though. If you think such points and moments are plentiful enough that you'll find them in your lifetime reliably (I do!).
- throwadobe 2y agoI mean, it's also the fact that they were the first to create a hub for the most massive secular technology trend since the advent of the internet. It's almost like anything short of utter incompetence would have worked here. So as interesting as it is to hear how they did it, it's not necessarily actionable advice or the most efficient, effective, productive approach
- michaelmior 2y agoThis seems like survivorship bias. Kaggle was pretty well-positioned to do what Hugging Face is doing (and in fact, they are trying now somewhat). There's also a lot of others that tried to build a marketplace for AI models and failed.
- throwadobe 2y agoKaggle is trying too many things at the same time. It's confusing. If you confuse, you lose.
- altdataseller 2y agoKaggle always was a place to conpete in data science contests to me. I never associated it with anything else. If they did sell ML models they did a horrible job letting people know about it
- michaelmior 2y agoI don't disagree. My point is that Hugging Face did what others could have done. I don't think it was just luck.
- whiplash451 2y agoI think you’re underplaying HF by a significant margin. There were many opportunities to blunder along the way (and there still are btw).
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- abidlabs 2y agoLucky to be part of this company and seen this strategy work close up. One thing I'll add is this "decentralized" approach applies to all Hugging Face teams, not just the developer advocacy team. Just to give an example, there's no central comms team at Hugging Face, every team (usually the engineers who work on the product or features) does their own comms across the channels they think work best. That means there's lots of experimentation and most of our hires tend to be generalists who are comfortable wearing many hats.
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- mvkel 2y agoWhy is it that whenever a company happens to be successful, and does meetings/goals differently than most (also successful) companies, the success is attributed to the lack of meetings/goals, and not, y'know, the business?
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- api 2y agoBeing the GitHub of AI models is like the thing to be for the last two years when it comes to scaling. I'm surprised it was only 300% not like 2000%. Not trash talking them, just agreeing that there are other factors.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI read your comment as: > Why is it X and not, y'know, X? Is there something central to what a business is besides the way communication happens within it?
- mvkel 2y agoYes. They make things that people will pay for.
- snapcaster 2y agoI think there are a few reasons for this. The primary one is that it's a visible signal, and people make attribution errors almost constantly so it gets fixated on. I think the other reason might be that it's unpopular (and not actionable) to say "this company succeeded because the people there are better than you" or "this company had great product market fit, and the employees efforts really didn't make the difference"
- osanseviero 2y agoHi all! I'm Omar from Hugging Face. Happy to answer any questions you might have about Hugging Face in general, llamas, and open ML!
- ZoomerCretin 2y agoCould you talk more about HuggingFace's new benchmark for LLMs? When did it become obvious that the old benchmarks were no longer sufficient:
- swyx 2y ago[author here] we interviewed the maintainer of that leaderboard if you want to hear from her directly! https://www.latent.space/p/benchmarks-201 https://www.latent.space/p/benchmarks-201 tldr: old benchmarks saturated, methodology was liable to a lot of subtle biases. as she mentions on the pod, they're already working on leaderboard v3.
- Hooray_Darakian 2y agoHow large is the staff at hugging face?
- abidlabs 2y agoWe have ~220 total team members across all roles
- brianjking 2y agoI'd love to work at Hugging Face! Happen to be hiring any new dev relations/product/AI engineer type roles? This is such a great piece.
- ibejoeb 2y agoWhat is an OKR? update: dead serious. I searched. It says "objectives and key results." But what does one look like? Is it a document?
- yieldcrv 2y agoastrology charting for MBA’s solely because Google did it at one point
- sa-code 2y agoBless your heart
- halfmatthalfcat 2y agoA buzzword that no one actually takes seriously and means very little in practice but that managers use to justify their jobs.
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y agoThe biggest impact I've seen is that you cannot adjust priorities for an entire quarter.
- synicalx 2y agoI've sat by and watched an entire year elapse while we were forced to dispassionately pursue an OKR we knew was leading us nowhere.
- scubbo 2y agoSorry you received unhelpful sass from other commenters. It stands for "Objective and Key Result" - it's a common "business-speak" initialism that basically translates to "a measurable, data-driven goal".
- romanhn 2y agoI'd say it's more than that. OKRs are a concrete framework that came out of Intel and was popularized by Google. But yes, the focus is on setting objectives backed by measurable results. Can be a document, an app, whatever. One flavor is objectives are set at the top, their KRs are translated into objectives for the next management layer with their own KRs, and so on. It's an iterative process with some combination of top-down and bottoms-up activities. And afterwards, the results are reviewed. There's more to it, but that's the gist.
- parhamn 2y agoInteresting. Independent of the specific strategies, I always think of HuggingFace as squandering potential. They could/should/can be the singular place where you explore _and_ productionize these open/social models. But their offerings are nowhere near as good as Replicate and the others. At least last I checked.
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- Animats 2y agoDevRel is just a transient phase during ramp-up. Once you get market dominance, you squeeze the independent developers by controlling their platform access and pricing, and keep all the high-revenue products for yourself. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.
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- walterbell 2y agoDev(sher)Lock
- tiffanyh 2y ago> "growing from 780k to 2.3m repos on the HF Hub in the past year" Is this what caused the title to be "300%"? a. that's actually ~200% b. isn't growth, as defined by number of repos (which might be free) the wrong metric. It's super is to scale adoption when you're giving something away for free
- mucle6 2y agoI was going to correct you but I was wrong For anyone else that got tripped up... 1x to 3x is 200% growth because you don't get to count the original 1x
- umvi 2y agoIt's kind of confusing because it depends on how you phrase it with percentages. "The number of cores in the PC went up by 50%" means "there are now 1.5x as many cores" However, "the number of cores in the PC is 50% what is was last year" means "there are now .5x as many cores" In this case 200% is fairly unambiguous, but imagine a phrase like "scaling community 50% per year" which could mean different things depending on the direction of the scaling... I think it's more intuitive to use a multiplier: "scaling community 3x bigger per year" makes it easy to visualize an online community tripling in size every year.
- swyx 2y ago[OP here] yeah youre right i've adjusted to 200%, ty
- dheera 2y agoThey said 300%, not growth by 300% IMO I prefer the former ("growth factor") calculation to the "growth by" calculation as it's simpler, it's just [the_percentage]/100 * current_value in the other case it is (the_percentage + 100)/100 * current_value which takes an extra CPU cycle of my brain
- swyx 2y ago[op here] i've just switched it to 200% bc its the smaller number, but i agree that was what i was thinking
- unixhero 2y agoNowhere in the article it is stated what devrel stands for. What is it?
- wonger_ 2y agoDeveloper relations
- JSDevOps 2y agoAnd what is that exactly? Is it just Jen from the IT crowd?
- enlightens 2y agoNo, it's marketing, education, "evangelism", and other outreach focused directly towards developers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist
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- crngefest 2y agoDevRel is collection of strategies and tactics that help companies to work better together with software engineers. Exactly what developer relations teams do and why they do it depends on what their organisation needs.
- JSDevOps 2y agoSo Jen from the IT crowd. Got it.
- synicalx 2y ago> Is it just Jen from the IT crowd? Kind of, that's not a bad analogy really. It's like if Jen knew what CI and observability were (huge over simplification but you get the idea).
- edude03 2y agoIt feels hard to ask this without sounding snarky, but how do you separate growth from making good decision and having a good product from growth (in this case) because AI is hot and HF offers a lot of utility for free?
- swyx 2y agowell for the last point, at least, you have the fact that HF self reports profitability
- 0x1ch 2y agoI know a pretty affluent tech grifter who attended this. I'll pass on this nonsense.
- throwaway290232 2y ago[dead]