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Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't? > ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each per
by ceejayoz 1y ago
Because the AI works so well, or because it doesn't?
> ”By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision, and each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact,” Wang writes in a memo seen by Axios.
That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing.
- paxys 1y agoTL;DR New leader comes in and gets rid of the old team, putting his own preferred people in positions of power.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y agoWhy do you think it's wild? I've seen that dynamic before (i.e. too many cooks in the kitchen) and this seems like an honest assessment.
- stefan_ 1y agoIt's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? Maybe they should reduce it all to Wang, he can make all decisions with the impact and scope he is truly capable of.
- mangamadaiyan 1y ago... and bear more load as well.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago> It's a meaningless nonsense tautology? Is that the level of leadership there? I don't understand why everyone always likes to bitch about why their preferred wordsmithed version of a layoff announcement didn't make it in. Layoffs suck, no question, but the complaining that leadership didn't use the right words to do this generally shitty thing is pointless IMO. The words don't really matter much at that point anyway, only the actions (e.g. severance or real possibility of joining another team). My read of the announcement is basically saying they over-hired and had too many people causing a net hit to forward progress. Yeah, that sucks, but I don't find anything shocking or particularly poorly handled there.
- tomnipotent 1y agoThere's a segment of people convinced that leadership must somehow be able to perfectly predict the future or they're incompetent losers, like running a business is somehow the easy part of capitalism.
- array_key_first 1y agoRunning a business is definitely the easy part of capitalism. Most leadership isn't just bad, they're bafflingly incompetent. Most companies fail. Of those that fail, they usually fail in extremely obvious ways built off of fundamental character flaws, like stubbornness or greed.
- tomnipotent 1y agoTell me you've never a business without telling me you've never run a business. You're pulling things out of thin air and using it to support a position with no foundation.
- testfrequency 1y agoSadly, the only people who would be surprised reading a statement like this would be anyone who is not ex-fb/meta
- LPisGood 1y agoMaybe I’m not understanding, but why is that wild? Is it just the fact that those people lost jobs? If it were a justification for a re-org I wouldn’t find it objectionable at all
- Herring 1y agoIt damages trust. Layoffs are nearly always bad for a company, but are terrible in a research environment. You want people who will geek out over math/code all day, and being afraid for your job (for reasons outside your control!) is very counterproductive. This is why tenure was invented.
- StackRanker3000 1y agoBut that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?
- Herring 1y agoYou watch too much game of thrones.
- signatoremo 1y agoMost of them are expected to find another job within Meta
- aplusbi 1y agoPerhaps I'm being uncharitable but this line "each person will be more load-bearing" reads to me as "each person will be expected to do more work for the same pay".
- sgt 1y agoIt's literally like something out of Silicon Valley (the show).
- BoredPositron 1y agoWait a year or two and for some it's going to be rhyme of the Nucleus storyline.
- bravetraveler 1y agoFunny to see this thread! I recently captured this quote/shared with some friends: > "You can't expect to just throw money at an algorithm and beat one of the largest tech companies in the world" A small adjustment to make for our circus: s/one of//
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI just assume they over hired. Too much hype for AI. Everyone wants to build the framework people use for AI nobody wants to build the actual tools that make AI useful.
- Lionga 1y agoMaybe because there are just very few really useful AI tools that can be made? Few tools are ok with sometimes right, sometimes wrong output.
- logtrees 1y agoThere are N useful AI tools that can be made.
- lazide 1y agoWhere N is less than infinity.
- logtrees 1y agoIs it known that there are fewer than infinity tools?
- lazide 1y agoFor any given time period N, if it takes > 0 time or effort to make a tool, then there are provably less possible tools than infinity for sure. If we consider time period of length infinity, then it is less clear (I don’t have room in the margins to write out my proof), but since near as we can tell we don’t have infinity time, does it matter?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jobigoud 1y ago
- renewiltord 1y agoWhat's wild about this? They're saying that they're streamlining the org by reducing decision-makers so that everything isn't design-by-committee. Seems perfectly reasonable, and a common failure mode for large orgs. Anecdotally, this is a problem at Meta as described by my friends there.
- asadotzler 1y agoMaybe they shouldn't have hired and put so many cooks in the kitchen. Treating workers like pawns is wild and you should not be normalizing the idea that it's OK for Big Tech to hire up thousands, find out they don't need them, and lay them off to be replaced by the next batch of thousands by the next leader trying to build an empire within the company. Treating this as SOP is a disservice to your industry and everyone working in it who isn't a fat cat.
- renewiltord 1y agoNo, I'm totally fine with it. No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired and I'd rather they overshoot than undershoot because some law stops it. This means that now some people were employed who would not otherwise be employed. That's spending by Meta that goes to people.
- LunaSea 1y ago> No one can guess precisely how many people need to be hired Overshooting by 600 people sounds a lot like gross failure. Is someone going to take responsibilities for it? Probably not. That person's job is safe.
- halfcat 1y agoThey’ll get a promotion for such effective cost cutting measures.
- renewiltord 1y agoI suspect Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to fire himself for getting headcount wrong by 1%.
- dpe82 1y agoOne of the eternal struggles of BigCo is there are structural incentives to make organizations big and slow. This is basically a bureaucratic law of nature. It's often possible to get promoted by leading "large efforts" where large is defined more or less by headcount. So if a hot new org has unlimited HC budget all the incentives push managers to complicate things as much as possible to create justification for more heads. Good for savvy mangers, bad for the company and overall effort. My impression is this is what happened at Meta's AI org, and VR/AR before that.
- thewebguyd 1y agoPournelle's law of bureaucracy. Any sufficiently large organization will have two kinds of people: those devoted to the org's goals, and those devoted to the bureaucracy itself, and if you don't stop it the second group will take control to the point that bureaucracy itself becomes the goal secondary to all others. Self preservation takes over at that point, and the bureaucratic org starts prioritizing its own survival over anything else. Product works instead becomes defensive operations, decision making slows, and innovation starts being perceived as a risk instead of a benefit.
- bee_rider 1y agoWho’s “you” in this case? The bureaucracy crew will win, they are playing the real game, everybody else is wasting effort on doing things like engineering. The process is inevitable, but whatever. It is just part of our society, companies age and die. Sometimes they course correct temporarily but nothing is permanent.
- conductr 1y agoThe you in that example is the Org, or the person leading it. I find that what usually happens is the executive in charge of it all either wises up to the situation or, more commonly, gets replaced by someone with fresh eyes. In any case, it often takes months and years to get to a point of bureaucratic bloat but the corrections can be swift. I also think on this topic specifically there is so much labor going into low/no ROI projects and it's becoming obvious. That's just like my opinion though, should Meta even be inventing AI or just leveraging other AI products? I think that's likely an open question in their Org - this may be a hint to their latest thoughts on it.
- RyanOD 1y agoAs AI improves, possibly it begins replacing roles on the AI team?
- unethical_ban 1y ago"Each person will be more load-bearing" "We want to cut costs and increase the burden on the remaining high-performers"
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hshdhdhj4444 1y agoWe’re too incompetent to setup a proper approval workflow or create a sensible org structure is a heck of an argument to make publicly.
- xrd 1y ago"Load bearing." Isn't this the same guy that sold his company for $14B. I hope his "impact and scope" are quantifiably and equivalently "load bearing" or is this a way to sacrifice some of his privileged former colleagues at the Zuck altar.
- ejcho 1y agothe man is a generational grifter, got to give him credit for that at least
- bwfan123 1y agoSeems like a purge - new management comes in, and purges anyone not loyal to it. standard playbook. Happens in every org. Instead of euphemisms like "load-bearing" they could have straight out called it eliminating the old-guard. Also, why go thru a layoff and then reassign staff to other roles. Is it to first disgrace, and then offer straws to grasp at. This reflects their culture, and sends a clear warning to those joining.
- brap 1y ago“Who the fuck hired all you people? We ain’t got enough shit going on for all of yall, here’s some money now fuck off, respectfully”
- dragonwriter 1y agoI mean, I guess it makes sense if they had a particularly Byzantine decision-making structure and all those people were in roles that amounted to bureaucracy in that structure and not actually “doers”.
- raverbashing 1y ago"More load bearing" meaning you'll have to work 20h days is my best guess
- cj 1y agoWhat are you shocked by? Genuine question. I imagine there’s some people who might like the idea that, with less people and fewer stakeholders around, the remaining team now has more power to influence the org compared to before. (I can see why someone might think that’s a charitable interpretation) I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible.
- asadotzler 1y ago>I personally didn’t read it as “everyone will now work more hours per day”. I read it as “each individual will now have more power in the org” which doesn’t sound terrible. Why not both?
- prerok 1y agoThat's just corporate speak. If they cut middle (mis)management that might be true. Did they?
- pfortuny 1y agoYep: just reduce the number to one and you find the optimum for those metrics.
- freedomben 1y agoI can actually relate to that, especially in a big co where you hire fast. I think it's shitty to over-hire and lay off, but I've definitely worked in many teams where there were just too many people (many very smart) with their own sense of priorities and goals, and it makes it hard to anything done. This is especially true when you over-divide areas of responsiblity.
- drivebyhooting 1y agoThose people have families and responsibilities. Leadership should take responsibility for their poor planning. Alas, the burden falls on the little guys. Especially in this kind of labor market.
- kstrauser 1y agoHard agree. It was management who messed up hiring. It’s management who should bear the responsibility for it.
- criemen 1y agoHow should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?
- janderson215 1y agoStepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.
- drivebyhooting 1y agoI’m not talking about solution. I’m talking about responsibility and aligning incentive. Management should take a painful paycut or resign to demonstrate some contrition.
- brookst 1y agoIsn’t “flattening the org” an age-old pattern that far predates AI?
- dekhn 1y agoI'm seeing a lot of frustration at the leadership level about product velocity- and much of the frustration is pointed at internal gatekeepers who mainly seem to say no to product releases. My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action". There are definitely limits on this, but it's been helpful when dealing with various internal negotiations. I don't spend as much time looking to "align with stakeholders", I just go ahead and do things my decades of experience have taught me are the right paths (while also using my experience to know when I can't just push things through).
- JTbane 1y ago> My leadership is currently promoting "better to ask forgiveness", or put another way: "a bias towards action" lol, that works well until a big issue occurs in production
- hkt 1y agoMany companies will roll out to slices of production and monitor error rates. It is part of SRE and I would eat my hat if that wasn't the case here.
- dekhn 1y agoYes, I was SRE at Google (Ads) for several years and that influences my work today. SRE was the first time I was on an ops team that actually was completely empowered to push back against intrusive external changes.
- crabbone 1y agoThe big events that shatter everything to smithereens aren't that common or really dangerous: most of the time you can lose something, revert and move on from such an event. The real unmitigated danger of unchecked push to production is the velocity with which this generates technical debt. Shipping something implicitly promises the user that that feature will live on for some time, and that removal will be gradual and may require substitute or compensation. So, if you keep shipping half-baked product over and over, you'll be drowning in features that you wish you never shipped, and your support team will be overloaded, and, eventually, the product will become such a mess that developing it further will become too expensive or just too difficult, and then you'll have to spend a lot of money and time doing it all over... and it's also possible you won't have that much money and time.
- matwood 1y ago> By reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make a decision This was noted a long time ago by Brooks in the Mythical Man-Month. Every person added to a team increases the communication overhead (n(n − 1)/2). Teams should only be as big as they absolutely need to be. I've always been amazed that big tech gets anything done at all. The other option would be to have certain people just do the work told to them, but that's hard in knowledge based jobs.
- kridsdale1 1y agoA solution to that scaling problem is to have most of the n not actually doing anything. Sitting there and getting paid but adding no value or overhead.
- kyleee 1y agoThis comes up from time to time; what’s the best way to crack into this niche of software engineering? My rates for doing nothing little and keeping up appearances are very competitive and I can do it for about 10-20% less than your typical big co coaster.
- paleotrope 1y agoWork on your social skills. Practice your banter. Strategic interjections in meetings that temporarily defuse tension. Have interesting hobbies that you can talk about with other employees.
- KaiserPro 1y agoThey properly fucked FAIR. it was a lead, if not the leading AI lab. then they gave it to Chris Cox, the Midas of shit. It languished in "product" trying to do applied research. The rot had set in by mid 2024 if not earlier. Then someone convinced Zuck that he needed what ever that new kid is, and the rest is history. Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters.
- rhetocj23 1y agoThe thing that many, so called smart people, dont realise is that leadership and vision are incredibly scarce traits. Pure technologists and MBA folks dont have a visionary bone in their body. I always find the Steve Jobs criticism re. his technical contributions hilarious. That wasnt his job. Its much easier to execute on the technical stuff, when theres someone there who is leading the charge on the vision.
- ryandrake 1y ago> Meta has too many staff, exceptionally poor leadership, and a performance system that rewards bullshitters. To be fair, almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. You’re rewarded on your ability to schmooze and talk confidently and write numerous great-sounding docs about all the great things you claim to be doing. This is not unique to one company.
- KaiserPro 1y ago> almost every company has a performance system that rewards bullshitters. Meta's is uniquely bad. Basically your superiours all go into a room and argue about who did what, when and how good it was. If you have a manager who is bad at presenting, then their team is sunk, and will be used to fill quotas. The way out of that is to create workplace posts that are seen by your wider org, that make you look like you're doing something useful. "oh I heard about x, they talked about y, that sounded good" This means that people who work away and just do good engineering are less likley to be rewarded compared to the #thankstrain twats/"I wrote the post, therefore it was all me me me" types This alignment meeting is all private, and there are no mechanisms to challenge it. worse still it encourages a patronage system. Your manager has almost complete discretion to fuck up your career, so don't be honest in pulse(the survey/feedback system).
- themagician 1y agoThis is happening everywhere. In every industry. Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued. Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
- dom96 1y agoThere is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. Is there any evidence to the contrary?
- BoiledCabbage 1y ago> There is plenty of evidence that the technology has plateaued. What technology? Can you link to some evidence?
- dom96 1y agoLLMs GPT-5 is one piece of evidence
- vitaflo 1y agoWe are all screwed even if it does pan out cuz they can ship every job overseas to the lowest bidder. Unless by “we” you mean the C-suite.
- ryandrake 1y agoThey’re not going to stop until the definition of a company is: A C-suite and robotics+AI to do the actual work. No labor costs. That’s the end goal of all these guys. We shouldn’t forget it.
- hinkley 1y agoBecause the AI is winnowing down its jailers and biding its time for them to make a mistake.
- ironman1478 1y agoHaving worked at Meta, I wish they did this when I was there. Way too many people not agreeing on anything and having wildly different visions for the same thing. As an IC below L6 it became really impossible to know what to do in the org I was in. I had to leave.
- yodsanklai 1y agoThey could do like in the Manhattan project: have different team competing on similar products. Apparently Meta is willing to throw away money, could be better than giving the talents to their competitors.
- kyleee 1y agoI’ve always thought there is way more room for this, small teams competing on the same problem and then comparing results and deploying the best implementation
- reaperducer 1y agoeach person will be more load-bearing On what planet is it OK to describe your employees as "load bearing?" It's a good way to get your SLK keyed.
- criddell 1y agoWhat's wrong with that? My charitable read is that each person is doing meaningful, necessary work. Nobody is superfluous.
- HDThoreaun 1y agofuck off with the language police nonsense. We all know what he means
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 1y agoThe best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. If they want to innovate then they need to have small teams of people focused on the same problem space, and very rarely talking to each other.
- lolive 1y agoCan that guy come to my company and axe all those middle managers that plague the global efficiency?
- bsenftner 1y agoSounds to me like the classic everywhere communications problems: 1) people don't listen, 2) people can't explain in general terms, 3) while 2 is taking place, so is 1, and as that triggers repeat after repeat, people frustrate and give up.
- andsoitis 1y ago> That's kinda wild. I'm kinda shocked they put it in writing. Why? Being transparent about these decisions are a good thing, no?
- tartarus4o 1y agoUp or Out Coming soon to your software development team.
- game_the0ry 1y agoProbably bc Meta's management (Zuck) is capricious and does not know how to manage resources.
- duxup 1y agoI might have seen it on HN, but I recall a study that was studying what made teams very effective. What they found was there were a rare few people who just by their involvement could make a team more effective. So rare that you may as well assume you won't ever see one. But rather than finding magic to make teams better, they did find that there were types of people who make teams worse regardless of anyone else on the team, and they're not all that uncommon. I think of those folks when I read that quote. That person who clearly doesn't understand but is in a position that their ignorant opinion is a go or no go type gate.
- Buttons840 1y agoMy tin-foil-hat-theory is that the most valuable things many programmers do at their company is not working for a competitor. A small team is not only more efficient, but is overall more productive. The 100-person team produces 100 widgets a day, and the 10-person team produces 200 widgets a day. But, if the industry becomes filled with the knowledge of how to produce 200 widgets a day with 10 people, and there are also a lot of unemployed widget makers looking for work, and the infrastructure required to produce widgets costs approximately 0 dollars, then suddenly there is no moat for the big widget making companies.