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Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal wit
by 650 7mo ago
Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.
Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
- dmckinno 7mo agoFunny story: I work at Meta and posted a version of this internally in response the bizarre pressure and support for PMs landing prod diffs (the response was very positive FWIW).
- ivantop 7mo agowhich workplace group did you post it to?
- dmckinno 7mo agoI don't remember the exact name, but the one about AI productivity. It should be trivial to find my name from my handle, so just look at my profile.
- medi8r 7mo agoQuick everyone, create decoy repos for them to vibe in. When the feature doesn't appear "oh feature gate system has an incident try tomorrow". Even better make the decoy repo have an insufferable pipeline that always breaks and get them in a loop trying to fix it. An adveserial "red team" LLM can keep it broken! But tantalizingly with different problems so progress is felt.
- purrcat259 7mo agoAn easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota. Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
- badgersnake 7mo agoNah, the rota is large enough that it will likely be somebody else’s problem anyway and the chances are even if it does land on them they just won’t answer the phone. Punishing mistakes with unpaid overtime has never been a good approach to quality. It just teaches management that they can get away with low quality because the engineers will pick up the pieces in their own time.
- gray_-_wolf 7mo ago> unpaid overtime Through European lenses this part seems insane. It is work, so pay me for it :) Every oncall rotation I was part of ever was paid, is the "unpaid" part a US thing, or was I just lucky?
- bravetraveler 7mo agoIn the US it's common to either negotiate 'differential' pay for the responsibility, or as one might see in this thread, get suckered into it for free.
- titanomachy 7mo agoWorking as a SWE at Meta in the US pays 3-5x more than a European tech job (outside of Switzerland). They are paid for it. Paid oncall in US big tech is the exception rather than the norm (notably, Google has paid oncall)
- gzread 7mo agoHow does it work out with cost of living?
- game_the0ry 7mo ago> Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise. Leadership will cherry pick metrics that are easy to game so they can make the next promo, and do say at the expense of company resources. This is a problem in every big corp not just tech.
- mountainriver 7mo agoGood business types can massively improve a tech company. The issue is there aren’t many good ones
- theshrike79 7mo agoWe're solving this with two different tracks for Vibed stuff and Actual Code. Vibed stuff can do whatever it wants, with some basic CI checks and Agent instructions BUT if any of that crosses specific thresholds (writes to dangerous APIs, reads from unvetted sources, is deployed on the public internet), an actual developer MUST review the code - with the associated costs billed to the creator's BU. Works fine, zero projects have been made public yet, but we have a bunch of Vibed internal tools in use that can't be accessed outside our internal network (or VPN) that are actually helping people do their work more efficiently.