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What are these fired programmers going to do? Disappear? They’ll build stuff, using the same plus-up AI tooling that enabled their old boss to fire them. So gue

by arscan 2y ago

What are these fired programmers going to do? Disappear? They’ll build stuff, using the same plus-up AI tooling that enabled their old boss to fire them. So guess what, their old boss just traded employees for competitors. Congrats, I guess? Zuck declaring that he plans on dropping programmer head-count substantially, to me indicates that they’ll have a much smaller technological moat in the future, and they won’t be paying off programmers to not build competing products anymore. I’m not sure he should be excited about that.

Aperocky 2y ago
What moat did Meta have today? I'd say there is a moat, but it's not on the tech side. Tiktok flew right through the moat, and only a small part of that is about tech. A lot of development on AI is exciting and meta is a big part of that, but there isn't any real moat there either.
- arminiusreturns 2y ago
  I fear we are about to see refreshed patent trolling conflicts regarding software designs, as it's all in the IP these days, which is the "moat" you are looking for.
- arscan 2y ago
  Presumably it is going to be easier for increasingly smaller and smaller teams to make highly polished, scalable and stable products that will be appealing and addictive and resonate more with their users than whatever Meta can come up with. I suspect that there will be many, many more viable shots taken at Meta’s incumbent positions than have been taken historically because development costs associated with doing so will simply be so much lower. Meta used to need thousands of talented and expensive software engineers. They are saying they don’t anymore. Well, that means their competitors don’t either, which lowers the bar for competition. I get that it wasn’t just the vast army of talented engineers they kept on staff that formed a moat. But it certainly helped, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid so much to have them on staff. Point taken though, Meta has a lot more going for it than a simple technological advantage.

by arscan 2y ago

Aperocky 2y ago

What moat did Meta have today? I'd say there is a moat, but it's not on the tech side. Tiktok flew right through the moat, and only a small part of that is about tech. A lot of development on AI is exciting and meta is a big part of that, but there isn't any real moat there either.

arminiusreturns 2y ago
I fear we are about to see refreshed patent trolling conflicts regarding software designs, as it's all in the IP these days, which is the "moat" you are looking for.
arscan 2y ago
Presumably it is going to be easier for increasingly smaller and smaller teams to make highly polished, scalable and stable products that will be appealing and addictive and resonate more with their users than whatever Meta can come up with. I suspect that there will be many, many more viable shots taken at Meta’s incumbent positions than have been taken historically because development costs associated with doing so will simply be so much lower. Meta used to need thousands of talented and expensive software engineers. They are saying they don’t anymore. Well, that means their competitors don’t either, which lowers the bar for competition. I get that it wasn’t just the vast army of talented engineers they kept on staff that formed a moat. But it certainly helped, otherwise they wouldn’t have paid so much to have them on staff. Point taken though, Meta has a lot more going for it than a simple technological advantage.